Miscellany
Essential Tones Of Music Rooted In Human Speech
"The use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech, according to researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience."
Jazz Compared to Web 2.0 (for any geeks/programmers out there)
Another report from the Vision Festival: Part one, Part two
A review of Fred Anderson's CD release at the Velvet Lounge, which was the night after the show I saw at Stop Smiling Headquarters
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That neurobiological research into pitch and tuning is interesting, especially the tie in between the physical apparatus of human vocal sound production and the "rightness" of just intonation. I guess I'm somewhat thrown by the end of the article versus the earlier statements that the "12 tones of the chromatic scale" sound "right." (this seems in conflict with the statements about just intonation). I also resist the idea that the conventions that arise around music are rooted in the inevitability of the body, because it feels overly determined to me. I have always found pitch relationships "right" after enough acclimation, so that the cognitive plasticity of my experience seems much broader than a particular system or set of ratios. Correlation doesn't equal causation, and is it any wonder that the basic tonalities of human speech would have *some* relationship with musical systems? The mysteries tend to get occluded in these kinds of studies....
PB
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Submitted by peter breslin on Sun, 07/01/2007 - 11:42am.Hi Peter - I definitely believe that there is something physiological about the nature of sound. I studied with Easley Blackwood for a short period of time, and one his specialties was different divisions of the octave, which he'd then compose for.on synthesizers. 23 notes is actually a pretty close approximation to 12 notes, believe it or not - he would actually calculate the overall 'consonance' of a pitch set. In any case, my point is that he played us some music in some octave divisions that actually made me feel physically ill due to the way the music affected my inner ear and balance. It was pretty intense. That said, the 5 note pentatonic scale is ubiquitous throughout the world, and it's the most consonant of all, followed by the 12 note scale. Perhaps there is a natural inclination towards consonance...
-Dan
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Submitted by Daniel Melnick on Sun, 07/01/2007 - 1:07pm.Hi Dan- Oddly, by Western standards, the minor pentatonic which I find very satisfying/moving/oddly majestic or comforting is constituted by "flavoring" intervals (and in most cultures, microtones) that are heard as dissonant. Don Cherry and some of the Ornette pieces are difficult for people at first because of those tones that sound to our ears either sharp or flat, just slightly. So I wonder if this is a natural appreciation for sound covered over by acculturation or a "learned taste," sort of like kim chee or gin martinis. If I remember correctly, the perfect 4th was considered a dissonance in the early evolution of harmony...parallel 5ths which I find compelling were strictly forbidden, etc. The perfect logic of close intervals such as the minor and major seconds can at first sound harsh. The major 7th sounded independently of the major 3rd and perfect 5th is a wickedly dissonant interval, but with the other pitches added it softens considerably. So I guess all I'm saying is that the neurology and physiology of sound seems more complex and plastic than the study seemed to suggest. It's like when a science article has the headline "Obesity Gene Discovered" and buried in the final paragraph is one of the research scientists saying something like "This is preliminary, the genetic factors are enormously complex, there's still years of research to do," etc.
PB
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Submitted by peter breslin on Tue, 07/03/2007 - 10:09am.Hi Peter - thanks for your reply and helping me clarify a few matters of consonance/dissonance. Apparently I've forgotten more than I've retained, no surprise there - that or I'm imposing my own tastes on reality, once again, no surprise. There's also some fascinating stuff about tuning systems and how they affected compositions - that is, whether a piano was tuned to have perfect 3rd or perfect 5ths, versus the just intonation we have now.
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Submitted by Daniel Melnick on Thu, 07/05/2007 - 8:46pm.I agree that the methodology of the study isn't described very well in the article, but it's definitely an interesting question. There are several studies about the biology of color vision that seem sympathetic with the premise that our wiring has a strong influence on very low level aesthetics -- aesthetics probably isn't even the word, because as noted, one can develop tastes for things that are not immediately pleasant or directly rewarding.
I was wondering as much about whether our auditory system has any natural factors which might have shaped our speech, kind of the complement to the focus of the cited study. From what little I know about auditory functioning, I might guess not -- I don't think there are structures like rods and cones which decompose the elements of heard sounds as much as our eyes decompose sights.
I had a harder time getting down with that Web 2.0 and Jazz post, even though I'm a guy who loves jazz metaphors... but I still appreciate your pointer to it...
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Submitted by Joe G on Thu, 07/05/2007 - 12:14am.Hi Joe, thanks for stopping by and writing. Indeed, the Web 2.0/jazz article is a bit half-baked, but I thought it was worth a link. I skipped linking to a jazz/ecology post with a much more tenuous premise....
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Submitted by Daniel Melnick on Thu, 07/05/2007 - 8:48pm.Hi Dan- Iove tenuous premises, so maybe in a slow week you could link to jazz/ecology anyhow...it also occurs to me that debates about the "rightness" of intervals have been ongoing since Pythagoras, including a passage in Plato's Republic about music and the soul, and the moral dangers of "bad" music. Fear of sound would be an interesting thing to trace through various epochs and cultures. The Devil's Interval (tritone) was, after all, the characteristic trademark of a lot of that horrible music that came after Swing, called be-bop. (Not to mention all of the various forms of Metal). There's also an interval the ancients called The Wolf; I'll have to look that one up, as I forget the ratio, but it was the height of ugliness, apparently. More mundanely, when I first heard Booker Little's harmonizations in 9ths I was definitely put off, but the voicings have grown on me and now sound silky smooth.
PB
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Submitted by peter breslin on Fri, 07/06/2007 - 10:15am.Quick note on The Wolf: there's a very clear and thorough article explaining the interval up at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_interval
PB
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Submitted by peter breslin on Sat, 07/07/2007 - 12:35pm.