Quote:
Originally Posted by Thunderthumbs73  This is the name of an article in the latest (August 2008) issue of American Scientist magazine. You'll have to visit the newsstand for the full article, but hopefully this abstract will pique (?) your interest:
The Psychoacoustics of Harmony Perception
Centuries after three-part harmony entered Western music, research is starting to clarify why different chords sound tense or resolved, cheerful or melancholy
Norman D. Cook, Takefumi Hayashi
The perception of harmony and dissonance is universal to all cultures. Stable or unstable combinations of tones evoke the very same feelings in people who have never heard "western" music as they do for those of us who grew up on a diet of Mozart, Sondheim or The Beatles. The reason for this common perception, according to Cook, is that the major or minor modality of musical chords is a direct consequence of the complex waveform of these pitch combinations. A recently clarified understanding of the factors that contribute to the sense of harmony makes it possible to describe the relation between acoustics and evoked emotions without using the arcane vocabulary of traditional music theory. |
good that people are studying it, but its nothing new.
i think this explanation is a bit generalized...its true that the lower harmonic series is universally consonant, but beyond that, its all relative. cultures used to hearing 7/4 minor 7ths would find our western 16/9 minor 7ths to be out of tune, even though 7/4 is a lower order harmonic and has a simpler frequency relationship.
the ancient greeks had an opposite perception of major and minor...to them, minor scales were celebratory, and major scales were more contemplative. so in some cases, emotive qualities of intervals are cultural.
i'm not sure what 'tradition music theory' they're speaking of, but its relatively easy to see in frequency relationships how consonant or dissonant something is. i think it was helmholtz who first graphed it out, but in a general sense intervals are most dissonant as they approach the root and and the middle of the octave (tritone). i think anyone could guess that a 3/2 (fifth) is more consonant than a 15/8 (major 7th), even if they didn't know what pitches those numbers represented. theres actually no mathematical way to determine the 'relative dissonance' of an interval (because dissonance is a concept created by the mind), but in general, intervals that look dissonance are.
not meaning to flame your post. but yea.
