Richard Parncutt  Richard Parncutt (born 24 October 1957 in Melbourne) is an Australian-born academic. He has been professor of systematic musicology at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz in Austria since 1998. His research focuses on the psychology of music. Parncutt studied music and physics at the University of Melbourne, and physics at the University of New England, Australia. In 1987, he was awarded a PhD in psychology, physics and music by the University of New England. He was guest researcher or postdoc with Ernst Terhardt (Munich), Johan Sundberg (Stockholm), Annabel Cohen (Halifax, Canada), Al Bregman (Montreal), and John Sloboda (Keele, England). From 1996 to 1998 he held a permanent position as Lecturer in Psychoacoustics at Keele University, UK. Parncutt's research addresses the perception of musical structure (pitch, consonance, harmony, tonality, tension, rhythm, meter, accent), the psychology of music performance (especially piano performance), and the psychological origins of tonality. The psychoacoustic model of harmony proposed by Parncutt in 1989 was adapted from the more general pitch algorithm of Ernst Terhardt, published in 1982. The model assumes that the auditory system treats all acoustic input similarly, whether it is a single tone or a musical chord. That is, the "input" to the model is a spectrum that can be a single complex tone, or any simultaneity such as a chord. The psychoacoustic effects of auditory masking are then taken into account before a "template" of the harmonic series is compared with the input spectrum. In Parncutt's approach, this comparison yields a number of properties of the sound, including tonalness, multiplicity, and salience. Tonalness is the degree to which a sound evokes the sensation of a single pitch. Individual tones, octave dyads, and major chords are quite high in tonalness. Multiplicity the number of tones a listener spontaneously hears in the sound. Intriguingly, for most chords the multiplicity values are less than the actual number of constituent tones – a prediction that has been validated empirically. Pitch salience is the clarity or prominence of a pitch sensation. The root of a major chord in root position has greater pitch salience than other tones in that chord. Empirical research has confirmed the prediction that typical musical chords evoke pitch classes of low salience that are not notated; for example, the A-minor triad ACE evokes F and D.   Parncutt also considers how we perceive successions of sounds, such as chord progressions.