[96] The varying influence on
work with the ergograph of different musical intervals and different keys
has been carefully studied by Fere with many interesting results. There
was a very considerable degree of constancy in the results. Discords were
depressing; most, but not all, major keys were stimulating; and most, but
not all, minor keys depressing. In states of fatigue, however, the minor
keys were more stimulating than the major, an interesting result in
harmony with that stimulating influence of various painful emotions in
states of organic fatigue which we have elsewhere encountered when
investigating sadism.[97] "Our musical culture," Fere remarks, "only
renders more perceptible to us the unconscious relationships which exist
between musical art and our organisms. Those whom we consider more endowed
in this respect have a deeper penetration of the phenomena accomplished
within them; they feel more profoundly the marvelous reactions between the
organism and the principles of musical art, they experience more strongly
that art is within them."[98] Both the higher and the lower muscular
processes, the voluntary and the involuntary, are stimulated by music.
Darlington and Talbot, in Titchener's laboratory at Cornell University,
found that the estimation of relative weights was aided by music.
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