Is there an evolutionary reason that music would sound good? Or is it entirely cultural?
Does music written in key ‘naturally’ sound better than unrelated notes strung together?
And when I say ‘unrelated notes’, I don’t mean to imply a bias toward western music, but I don’t know how else to refer to music not written in a pre-defined key.
I think music in some way does connect with our evolutionary heritage. It is tied into our abilities as pattern recognizing animals, and music is very mathematical. When we recognize a pattern, we interpret it as beauty.
you know, the composers Scriabin and Messiaen
were known to have a certain condition by which they saw colors when they heard sounds.
(scriabin composed a color chart, and also composed some pieces which involved a color organ, which projects certain colors which corresponds to a given pitch.)
… while we’re at it, anyone know what this condition is called???
> Does music written in key ‘naturally’ sound better than unrelated notes strung together?
In the western 12-half-steps, do-ray-me-fah-sol-la-ti-do scale, there’s some math that makes it pleasant:
an octave is an exact doubling (or halving) of the frequency. And those two notes will sound pleasant together.
A fifth is an (almost) exact thirding of the original frequency. This also sounds pleasant matched with the original frequency, but not as pleasant as an octave.
The other notes are filled in, so you can build the western scale by taking some string of fixed tension and length, pluck it and note the note (call it C). Now, cut it to one third it’s length and you’ll have a fifth (that’s G). Now cut that to one-third it’s length, and you’ll have a fifth of the fifth (that’s D). Repeat twelve times, and you’ll (almost) be exactly at C again. I say almost because it ain’t really exact, but close enough.
BTW, the sharp observer of the above will notice that cutting in thirds repeatedly will be like folding a piece of paper in half repeatedly. Pretty soon you’ll be working with a mighty small string. Well, at any point, you can exactly double the length, to achieve an octave above, which for this discussion is the same note.
Hope that wasn’t too muddled.
Synesthesia - I never knew there was a name for it. Wassily Kandinsky said he heard music when he saw colors.
A while back I heard something about musical compositions written in tone scales different from the conventional one. There were scales with 12 notes per octave, and others which sounded weird to my ears. How did composers settle on the notes we perdeive to sound right?
bup asked “Does music written in key ‘naturally’ sound better than unrelated notes strung together?”
Hardcore replied “I think music in some way does connect with our evolutionary heritage. It is tied into our abilities as pattern recognizing animals, and music is very mathematical. When we recognize a pattern, we interpret it as beauty.”
Hardcore I’ve heard something like that before, but it was about reading. People read by recognizing how a word looks. For instance the word “cake” is recognized by the pattern (almost flash memory–well sort of) cake is a word but CKEA is not even though it has the same letters. We recognize the word cake because of familiarity and order.
When was the last time you had to spell out a word to read it. Any person that can read doesnt have to go through the pronunciation of the word, unless its a word they arent familiar with.
Was that in the same thinking you were in, Hardcore?
Sigmund Freud reportedly hated hated hated music. What does that mean?
siva, there are some definate similarities, IMO. Language and reading/writing are certainly tied into our pattern-recognizing abilities, and music is simply another type of language. Speech is in some way musical, with all the voice inflections and tonal changes. It is a small step from this to an actual song.
From Music 1A, ten years ago, so don’t trust it too far…
For some reason everyone wants to divide the span of a doubling of sound frequency (an octave) into 12 parts, and have two half steps and use only 7 steps to get from A to G. That means you have to take 2 “half steps” along the way, and where you put them matters a whole lot. That’s the difference between a major and a minor key, but there are lots of others we never seem to use. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard something written in the others. Anyone here have an impression of the others, or know why we “have” to have 12 notes and seven steps?
Well, I hope people got the point, because obviously I didn’t proofread the above enough. And no, I can’t edit my post, no matter what the faq says. There’s no icon for it. Anyone got a clue about that?
Because “…it’s only a Northern Song.” That’s why. 
“What’s right is only half of what’s wrong
and I want a short-haired girl
Who sometimes wears it twice as long”
George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe
I personally thought that the first “Fantasia” film was about as close to Synethesia as the lay person could get, as far as understanding the sound/color/visuals connections. At least it gave me some kind of handle on the idea of it.
Cartooniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
There is every reason to think that our perception of “good sounding” music is something cultural, rather than something we come by naturally. Several folks have already pointed out the similarity of music and language, in that both use patterns and syntax to join small pieces into larger intelligible structures–but, while music is often referred to as the “universal language” it isn’t really so. It would probably better to call it a universal phenomenon (as far as I know there is not a single culture on earth which does not employ music in some form or another), but it’s content and aesthetic emphases are no more universal than those of spoken languages.
Western music traditionally divides the octave into 12 equal steps, as has already been mentioned, but many other cultures–especially eastern and asian cultures–employ microtonal scales that divide the octave into much smaller intervals. To us this music sounds strangely discordant, but to them it is simply music.
The reason that music “in a key” tends to sound better to us here in the west is because that is the syntax, or musical grammar, that most western music has been written in. The years from roughly 1600 to 1900 are referred to in music history as the “common practice period”, and during that period composers and musicians gradually codified a system of functional harmony. Essentially, this means that within any given key, the notes are organized in relationship to a home note, or tonic. Music moves alternately towards and away from this home note, creating moments of tension and release. The ear naturally latches on to this home note, and so it serves as a reference point for the ear. Common practice harmony itself refers specifically to classical music written in the years mentioned above, but you are likely to find the same basic principles at work in any piece of pop, rock, folk, jazz, or classical music.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that in order for music to sound “good”, the listener must be able to understand some element of its organization. Think of how crazy jazz can get–notes just flyin’ everywhere–but people love it and tend not to mind the frequent use of dissonance and “blue” notes–or those “any note will do” chords at the ends of songs. But, jazz has such a firm rhythmic foundation–so, while you can’t necessarily keep up with all the notes going by, you can at least tap your foot to it and get some intuitive sense of the phrase structure.
“I don’t get any smarter as I get older–Just less stupid”