The Gestalt movement in psychology began early in the twentieth century; its founders were the German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. A Gestalt is essentially an organized whole whose parts belong together, as opposed to being simply juxtaposed or randomly distributed. As Wertheimer put it, "What happens to a part of the whole is determined by intrinsic laws inherent in this whole." The Gestalt theorists believed this principle to be of wide application and to be relevant to the psychology of perception in particular.

History

As early as 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels had pointed out that to appreciate a melody we need to be aware not of single tones in isolation but of a succession of tones

Figure 1

which combine in a particular way. If notes of the same pitch as those of the original melody are presented in a different temporal order...