Music of the species

[The Pezman]

http://scienceblogs.com/neurotopia/2010/01/the_music_of_the_species.php

Music is something we can all pretty much take for granted these days, but it's nice every once in a while to really stop and think about it. I'd been wondering why music evolved so readily around the major scale and twelve-tone system, and this article does a good job of answering that. It even goes one step further and contemplates why we as a species respond to music so instinctively. Just a cool thing I thought I'd share.

[Moseph]

Here's a direct link to the paper that the blog post summarizes. My comments refer specifically to the paper and not the blog post.

The overall conformance of a scale to a harmonic series was then determined by calculating the mean percentage similarity of the dyads in the scale in question (Figure 3). Using the mean as an index of similarity between a scale and a harmonic series implies that all possible dyads in the scale are equally relevant. Although in contemporary Western music any two notes in a scale can, in principle, be used together in melody or harmony, in traditional Western voice-leading and in other musical systems (e.g., classical Indian) particular tone combinations are avoided or prohibited [22]–[24], [25], [26]. Nonetheless, there is no universal rule that describes which intervals might be more important in a scale than others; thus we treated all intervals equally.

So they acknowledge that their methodology is inaccurate for Western music, and probably for non-Western music, and then they go ahead and use the methodology anyway? Seriously? The problem with a one-size-fits-all approach is that it doesn't accurately represent how the sales were/are used within their cultures, so it doesn't tell us how congruent with the harmonic series the culture's actual body of music is. If you want to find a culture's musical congruency to the harmonic series, look at actual representative pieces of music from those cultures and use those actual pieces of music to generate your intervals. If you want to then draw conclusions about scales based on the pieces that use those scale, go ahead, but intervals within a scale are not equally used. You cannot treat them as equally used. I don't care if dealing with this is difficult. Not dealing with it means that your results will be inaccurate, and you won't know how inaccurate.

Probably the most useful thing (in terms of Western music) that we can get out of this is that the intervals possible in the Western diatonic collection (i.e. all of the modes collectively) are relatively congruent with the overtone series. And even that doesn't tell us anything that we didn't already know. Music theorists have been obsessed for centuries with mathematically simple intervals -- which is to say, intervals that are congruent with the harmonic series. I won't even get into the fact that early Western modes aren't really even the same things as the modes they looked at in the study.

I don't know how well the study deals with non-Western musics since I'm not as familiar with them, but I expect similar issues to be present with them.

Where's Gario? I'd be interested in what he thinks of the study.

[Moguta]

That blog post is an interesting stab at the subject. For a detailed overview of musical perception research, I'd recommend the book "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" by Daniel J. Levitin. (Just skip past the first parts if you're already familiar with musical terminology.)

[Geoffrey Taucer]

That blog post is an interesting stab at the subject. For a detailed overview of musical perception research, I'd recommend the book "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" by Daniel J. Levitin. (Just skip past the first parts if you're already familiar with musical terminology.)

Seconding this recommendation -- it's an excellent book.