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Originally Posted by Hoover  I suspect the key difference is that simpler harmonic relationships yield soundwaves whose peaks & nulls correllate more regularly/predictably - iow, they're in phase & have shorter periods -- and this phenomenon (which in musical terms yields a more "consonant" relationship) requires less mental activity to parse. The theory (not mine, btw) being that the less brainpower required to parse a phenomenon, the less likely those phenomenon are to trigger an Orienting Response in the central nervous system. Fewer Orienting Responses = Less Stress. Less Stress = More Relaxation. Ergo, humans are ostensibly physiologically predisposed to prefer lower order ratios because they don't invoke a Fight/Flee response.
Which doesn't explain why many people really sincerely like exceedingly dense, complex, non-consonant (sic) music...
My point was mostly that Frequency is a physical property, but Pitch is a cognitive property. Any correlation between the two has more to do with the evolution of human perception (in response to those physical properties) than it does with inherent qualities of those physical properties. |
Agree & disagree. Harmony is the interplay of simple & complex harmonies, melodies & rhythms. Music is interesting because it goes from consonant to dissonant and back. To Pythagoras the root, fifth, octave was the only consonance. Now we consider pretty much anything within the equal tempered major scale to be consonant.
A lot of the sort of industrial & post-tonal music is a response to the standardization of tone. Just as the visual arts responded to a standardization of color by the paint companies and pantone by creating arbitrarily ordered & mechanical or bizarrely random artwork. It was sort of hard to do atonal music before equal temperament was created because there were no convenient definitions for a minor second interval, for example.
If you really want to get into "is it consonant because of the physics or because of the perception of the physics" you're getting into zen-koan land "if a tree falls in the forest & nobody is around to hear it, did it make a sound?"
Humans find order in chaos - we see face in white noise and invent pattern where there is none. That's great. We make music & enjoy music & nobody else on Earth does (arguable - some species of birds sing complex melodies). So what's the point of arguing if it's the chicken or the egg?
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Originally Posted by Hoover True, but that's not the same thing as saying "The reason we perceive it this way is because it possesses that physical property."
Think of it this way: Why is the sky blue?
One can cite any number of physical properties that the earth's atmosphere possesses that would explain (sic) why it ought to appear blue to a human being with "normal" optical faculties...but that still doesn't explain why those particular physical properties get interpreted by humans as Blue, rather than, say Magenta, or Chartruese, or Antique Cherry Sunburst.
I'm not saying that the correlation between physical properties & perceptual responses is "arbitrary", just that any definition that doesn't recognize how consciousness & cognition must have evolved to allow us to reach that perception is missing a big chunk of the explanation. |
Because humans perceive less than 1 octave of light, we have 3 rods & cones, and light of a certain frequency stimulates some chemicals in our brain that we've been taught to call blue.
But the question isn't "why do we call that set of frequencies of radiation emitted by the sky blue" but rather "why IS it blue?" Not why do we perceive things as blue, but what causes the thing above us to radiate that thing we call blue.
So here, the question isn't "what is music - an ordered physical phenomenon, or our perception of the ordered physical phenomenon" - the question is - "does understanding the physics make you a better musician?" & I don't see how "well it's not just physics, it's our perception of physics" really advances our understanding much, it just gets circular after a while.
