Multidimensional Analysis of the Lambdoma Keyboard Experiments

To what extent does musical harmony evoke emotive response and on what harmonic basis do similar responses cluster? This is a longstanding question of interest to scientists and psychologists as recalled by Helmholtzs inquiries on perception of tone in his book "On the Sensations of Tone." This paper reports on a unique experiment involving over 60 human subjects that addresses this important and longstanding question. The unique experimental protocol consists of random sampling of 60 subjects from diverse backgrounds of individuals from a workshop in the mid West, a workshop in the far West, and a gathering on the East Coast. The electronic instrument used was the unique Harmonic Lambdoma Keyboard for eliciting and tabulating subject responses to tone and interval. The three responses were choice of tonic, preferred intervals, and choice of word expressing emotive response. Each subject's response was encoded into a 40 multidimensional response space, and multidimensional scaling techniques were used to perform dimensionality reduction for exploring patterns and clusters of subject response.