Max Friedrich Meyer

Max Friedrich Meyer (June 14, 1873 – March 14, 1967) was the first psychology professor who worked on psychoacoustics and taught at the University of Missouri. He was the founder of the theory of cochlear function, and was also an advocate for behaviourism as he argued in his book "The Psychology of the Other". During his time at the University of Missouri, he opened an experimental lab for Psychology and taught a variety of courses. His lab focused on behavioural zeitgeist and the studies of nervous system and behaviour. Meyer eventually moved to Miami and lived there from 1932 until the late 1950s. Afterwards, he moved to Virginia to stay with his daughter until his death in 1967.

Early life

Max Friedrich Meyer was born in Germany in the city of Danzig on June 14, 1873. He was the son of a goldsmith and went to school in Germany. In 1892, he went to the University of Berlin where he enrolled in theology, but he studied other subjects. He became a professor of experimental psychology and focused on the psychology of music. He married one of his students, Stella Sexton, on February 13, 1904, and had five children, Sophie, Harold, Catherine, Dorothy and Otto. Max Meyer divorced her in 1936.

After his first year he switched to philosophy and met Hermann Ebbinghaus, and through that he met his mentor, Carl Stumpf. Stumpf and Meyer were interested in similar concepts relating to the psychology of music. At the University of Berlin, he worked under Carl Stumpf on psycho-acoustics for a couple of years and completed his PhD where he came up with his new theory of audition which questioned the current theories at the time. Meyer became a research associate under Stumpf after he finished his PhD in 1896. Due to a difference of opinion between Stumpf and Meyer, Meyer moved to the University of London where he worked under James Sully, and then moved to America and worked at Clark University, where he assisted G. Stanley Hall. Meyer was developing his work on cochlear function in hearing during this time. He was then finally appointed as a faculty member in 1900 at the University of Missouri.

Career Meyer was the first-ever psychology professor hired by the University of Missouri. His books are still in print and can be obtained through Amazon.

Behaviourism Meyer was an early advocate of behaviourism in America. In his book, The Psychology of the Other, he argues that psychology should focus on behaviour instead of the mind. Meyer did not deny the existence of consciousness like the other behaviourists at that time, he was simply against the utilization of introspection as a scientific tool. At first, audial speech sounds are a reflex in the young. They hear a sound and react by shaping a comparable sound. During his years studying under Stumpf, he developed his theory of cochlear function. His main source of data was "introspective observations of difference tones, of the relative intensities of tones in a compound tone, and of the differences in relative intensity of tones sounded simultaneously and separately".

Meyer then travelled to America and spend time at Clark University and later the University of Missouri. Here he published a series of articles, one of them about an experiment he conducted back in Berlin which favoured the view that memory of absolute pitch can be improved with practice. This time was also very important as he published his first edition of his theory of music. In this first edition, he critiqued his predecessor Stumpf, as well as Hermann von Helmholtz, saying how he felt that their focus of the diatonic scale prevented them from developing a scientific, empirical theory of music. He also constructed a scale "represented by the infinite series of all composites of the powers of 2, 3, 5, and 7", which he believed was sufficient to study music theory.

In 1903, Meyer conducted a study related to "the aesthetic effects of final tones, the intonation of musical intervals, and quartertone music". The findings of the study found that quartertone music in European music became more pleasant with increased familiarity (as long as it followed the "general laws of European music"). Since some quartertones were also present in Oriental music, he used these findings to support the theory that the psychological laws of music are the same all over the world, even though a good amount of this study relied on his own interpretation of certain results.