The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures.

Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XuAaf | Excerpts:

According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’—a pleasant-sounding combination of notes—is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these ‘integer ratios’ are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music ‘dissonant,’ unpleasant sounding.

But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.

First: “We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.”

Second:

“Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of their shape and physics, are what we would call ‘inharmonic.’”

“Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don’t need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy.”

  • billhicksghost@beehaw.org
    0·
    8 months ago

    “We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.”

    Math, Music & Movement: The Missy Elliot SupaDupa Law™

    Humans think they’re pretty cool. If there is a language of the universe, it’s Mathematics and we’re pretty good at math. A very smart Jesuit I knew once said this ability to do complex math might be evidence for God, since there’s no evolutionary reason for humans to be able to do geometry, differential equations, physics, etc. Or is there?

    I can’t dance well either, I’m no good at sports & billiards ain’t my thing. But I’m not falling down all the time, am I? I can still play such games good enough. And I can still catch a suddenly falling object, my brain calculating in micro seconds which arm to use, which body shift, where to grab and when to close my hand, even compensating for the object’s structure to avoid say, a sharp point. That’s all math, faster than any written equation that explains a neutron star.

    Walking, typing, dancing, hitting a ball are all possible because the body-mind connection is doing complex, unwritten calculations all the time & at the speed of electricity (?). Without external knowledge systems, like books and libraries, the smartest humans noticed and developed understanding of the movement patterns of the Moon, Sun & Stars, building Stonehenge, etc. At night an African looooong ago started noticing a star at a different place each night, using some distinct mountain range’s silhouette to do so. They didn’t develop a concept of a calendar due to the demands of fixed agriculture, but developed a mental library of data processing that coordinated such situations along with the patterns of wild plants, weather, animal migration, etc. All without paper.

    I think these capabilities aren’t a connection to a God, but proof we can all “speak” the language of the universe without being taught it directly. As a baby we are developing our coordination, that math, or we’d never survive as a species.

    Music, of course, is patterns, but wilder; with the young today constantly developing new patterns that are often challenging at first listen and annoying to the old who are set in their ways, their minds dead from following dead patterns like commuting to work with Classic Rock, hating their kid’s music and sticking with the same thing they loved as a teenager which their parents hated.

    We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.

    And that preference is invigorating! Missy Elliot is one of the most creative pop stars of the last few decades. As she got older she got more seemingly dissonant and uneven. Her later music stops and jerks at odd moments, the patterns are anything but familiar - at first. But there’s method to both the music & live body movement that makes Parents & Republicans mad. And it’s glorious and alive:

    https://youtu.be/hHcyJPTTn9w?si=Min1xqnlwMECd-NX

    My brain is much more flexible than many my age, because, I calculate, they’re stuck in old loops, commuting to work with the same narrow range of cassic Rock music they loved as a teen, courtesy of Morning Zoo DJ’s doing the same basic thing 5 days a week.

    I see patterns many my age do not (in part because such observations rightly imply failure & guilt, like Iraq is my Generations’ Vietnam and there are no excuses this time). I believe part of this is I keep up with the music, seeking out the newest beats that often are the most criticized by brain’s slowly dying. There’s nothing wrong with a good pop song -everybody loves Katy Perry, but jazz and hip hop are constantly challenging the listeners with new disturbances and challenges that are still grounded in that math our mind makes, only it’s new formulas that exist in sound and movement only, no paper required

    “Free your mind and your ass will follow” sang En Vogue. But maybe it’s the other way around.

    Get your freak on, you’re all math geniuses and you don’t even know it.

    https://youtu.be/FPoKiGQzbSQ?si=RQJOLRjASR5Kt2mj

    (?) = maybe I’m off or a better term exists.

  • JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee
    0·
    8 months ago

    I think perfect music starts to approach the uncanny valley just like a perfect human face does. Where it’s just missing some piece that you can’t quite figure out. Also distortion/saturation makes music sound better, pretty much always.

    • memfree@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Sooo… more Jimi Hendrix, less Sousa Marching Band, eh? What about stuff like Kraftwerk? Their stuff is intentionally ‘robotic’ so I’m wondering if you find it either boring or disagreeable – or if instead it becomes pleasing for achieving its goal. I am in the last camp for that, but I have to be in the mood.

      Regardless, I think most musicians intuitively know audiences prefer variation (or just have that preference themselves). I mean, for decades now drum machines/software has had a “human drummer” option to make beats come in slightly off-beat (but don’t tell that to the characters in “Whiplash”).

      • JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee
        0·
        8 months ago

        Those aren’t perfect though, there’s still distortion and unsteadyness. As an audio engineer, even when an instrument is super clean, I add a little saturation to make it come to life. And yes much electronic music is perfect rhythm wise, but they often mess with more complexity to make it feel off or lean into the uncanny nature of it’s perfection.

        Just because it’s in the uncanny valley doesn’t make it bad.

      • TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.orgM
        0·
        8 months ago

        One of the things that I think is probably about Kraftwerk and other electronic music is that often their synths are very slightly detuned so that intervals aren’t perfect and sounds that aren’t perfectly consonant. This gives it a “crunchier”, more complex sound that is more pleasing than sounds that are perfectly in tune/in phase with each other.