A dream-evocative feature in music can be accounted for by the pitch-height auditory effect and a basic dreaming archetype

Abstract

In several famous musical compositions a maintained melodic shift to higher pitches has been overtly exploited to represent the dreaming experience. This kind of shift also plays the artistic role of dream evocation in musical compositions that, although not overtly, are however implicitly related to dreaming. This psychoesthetic effect can be accounted for by two psychological phenomena that at first sight do not seem to be related to each other: the perception of higher pitches as being located in higher space, and the archetypical idea, amply highlighted by anthropological research, of dreaming as the wandering of the soul over celestial territories. This paper describes the rationale underlying the connection between these phenomena. The implications are then discussed in terms of the general relationship between music and dreaming, the connection between the dreaming experience and the artistic experience, the continuity theory between dreaming and waking life, and the role of dreaming in the cognitive science of religion.Musi