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.
During his time at the University of Missouri, he opened an experimental lab for Psychology and taught a variety of courses.
He married one of his students, Stella Sexton, on February 13, 1904, and had five children, Sophie, Harold, Catherine, Dorothy and Otto.
[4] 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.
[4] Later in life Meyer taught courses about aesthetics as they had captured his attention during his undergraduate days.
Meyer published important monographs, textbooks and journal articles in both music and psychology.
[5] In his book, fitting into the silent words, he talks about this stenograph system which he has created based on phonetics.
[5] Meyer started developing his work during the year 1894 at the University of Berlin when he became a pupil to Carl Stumpf.
During his time as a pupil, he was described as having a technical ingenuity that assisted Meyer in developing instruments to research music theory.
[6] From this theory, he developed a hypothesis about "the anatomical and physiological properties of the ear" where the assumption was that "the inner ear is a hydraulic system, that the effective cochlear oscillations occur in the basilar membrane, that this membrane is inelastic, and that its motions passively follow the motions of the stapes".
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.
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.
[7][10] 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.