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# Perceiving Boundaries in Unfamiliar Turkish Makam Music: Evidence for Gestalt Universals?

## Details

**Authors** Mungan, Esra and Yazıcı, Z. Funda and Kaya, Mustafa (Uğur)

**Year** 2017

**Publisher** Music Perception

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Music Theory

**Secondary disciplines** Psychology, Cognitive Science

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2017.34.3.267) 
10.1525/mp.2017.34.3.267

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To test whether listeners segment unfamiliar music according to universal Gestalt principles or according to culturally learned knowledge.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

Makam-trained musicians, nonmusicians, and Western listeners (counts not obtained), plus two expert segmenters.

### How they did it (methods)

Participants marked segment boundaries online while listening to 19th-century Turkish makam tunes rendered as MIDI in a qanun timbre with microtonal structure retained. Their segmentations were compared across groups and with expert segmentations in hits and false alarms.

### What they found (results)

Segmentations agreed considerably within and across groups and with the experts. Makam-trained musicians matched the experts significantly more often than the other groups. All groups were driven mainly by local surface features, which the authors read as favoring universal perceptual principles over enculturation.

## Commentary

### In short

Listeners from three backgrounds marked where phrases begin and end in unfamiliar Turkish music and largely agreed, relying mainly on local cues in the sound.

### Response

The task is the drawing of boundaries in a continuous stream, so distinctions carry the finding. Differences in training between listener groups, and their agreement despite those differences, bear on perspectives. Hierarchical grouping is not reported in the portions read, so systems is not claimed, and the fit to perspectives is partial because the main result is agreement across vantage points.

**Patterns it shows** D, P

Shows the structure is there

**Added** 2026-10-26

**How to cite this** Mungan, Esra and Yazıcı, Z. Funda and Kaya, Mustafa (Uğur) (2017). Perceiving Boundaries in Unfamiliar Turkish Makam Music: Evidence for Gestalt Universals?. Music Perception.