# It is not the instruments that I find appealing, it is the music itself?



## Vivaldi (Aug 26, 2012)

This isn't written exactly as I'd like it to be written but it at least tries to express my thinking to the question posed in the title. What I mean is that it could be any piece of equipment capable of producing differential sound - varying notes of the scale. It is the relationship between such notes over time, as opposed to the instruments themselves, which I enjoy listening to. Although a violin may play a particular melodic sequence in a more aesthetically pleasing way than say, a trumpet, I would argue that the instruments are buffers and nothing more. BUT... Why do I enjoy some musical intervals more than others i.e. the circle of fifths? Why does an octave have 12 tones (equal temperament) and not 5 or 13 - is this a fundamental rule of nature? What is the purest form of sound and what device is capable of producing it - the human voice - or interaction of matter within the medium in which we live - i.e. a waterfall, rocks fallings, thunder - ties with Vivaldi's Four Seasons for musical 'purity' perhaps. Outside of this planet sound waves cannot propagate for space is vacuum. Our atmosphere allows for sound but had the various constituent components that comprise our atmosphere formed in a way that produced a different atmosphere to the one we have today, then would we perceive sound differently? This discussion converges on all kinds of 'golden ratio' theories of divine proportion that some academics believe are seamlessly encoded into the fabric of nature. So with this in mind, if you are to answer my questions, then I expect more mathematical reasoning rather than purely musical reasoning or a synergy of both reasonings.

Could anyone offer insight into my albeit vague and poorly written questions? 

Cheers.


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## shangoyal (Sep 22, 2013)

I think the frequencies themselves engage with our brain waves or something. Just my guess. It's the resonance that the particular frequencies produce in our mind. But it's useless, this approach to understanding music. You will not find any satisfying scientific reasons in the end, and if you are generous, you will even forget the need to explain it all. My conjecture is that music is a world of its own, with its own workings and dynamics, and we are supposed to engage with it in two major ways - composing and listening. Anything else is just a wrong way of approaching music. IMHO.


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## Guest (Oct 23, 2013)

I have a question. Why have you separated out the instruments from "music itself"?

The purest sound is a sine wave and the machine that makes it is called an oscillator. Not a sound many people find appealing.

And nothing to do with circle of fifths or golden ratio theories. In addition, the sine wave is an artificial sound, so nothing to do with the fabric of nature, either.

Sort out all the elements in your post that are incongruous, decide which of those incompatible elements you want to talk about, jettison the rest, and then get back to us.


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## shangoyal (Sep 22, 2013)

some guy,

I wonder what you do. Sometimes I wonder what you look like, and frankly I can only think you look like a library, or a museum. You are just so monolithic, and impenetrable. Your statements are stalemates, all of them.


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## Guest (Oct 23, 2013)

shangoyal,

Get a new hobby, maybe?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Vivaldi said:


> BUT... Why do I enjoy some musical intervals more than others i.e. the circle of fifths?


By intervals, you mean root progressions, right? The sound of stacked fifths gets dissonant pretty quickly.



Vivaldi said:


> Why does an octave have 12 tones (equal temperament) and not 5 or 13 - is this a fundamental rule of nature?


As millionrainbows might say, it's all about the overtone series. The strongest overtone (after the octave) is the perfect fifth. Duplicate that 12 times and you have (if tempered fifths are used) the chromatic scale. More or less equal temperaments involving 5 or 6 notes exist in some other cultures.



Vivaldi said:


> What is the purest form of sound and what device is capable of producing it - the human voice - or interaction of matter within the medium in which we live - i.e. a waterfall, rocks fallings, thunder and lightening - ties with Vivaldi's Four Seasons for musical 'purity' perhaps.


I agree with some guy. A sine wave is the most "blank" sound I can think of.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

It's down to vibrating strings as Pythagoras noticed. An octave is achieved by doubling the frequency. If you multiply the frequency by 3 and divide by 2 you get a fifth. Not so much overtones as frequencies. If you look at a cycle of fifths, you get 11 intervals before you repeat - so 12 tones. This gives you the Pythagorean Scale.

There are a number of problems including the Pythagorean comma and the wolf interval.

(Thought I'd get my 23.46 cents in)


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## Guest (Oct 24, 2013)

Taggart said:


> It's down to vibrating strings as Pythagoras noticed.


Tell that to the wind players. Or the percussion!


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

shangoyal said:


> some guy,
> 
> I wonder what you do. Sometimes I wonder what you look like, and frankly I can only think you look like a library, or a museum. You are just so monolithic, and impenetrable. Your statements are stalemates, all of them.


Some are just obsessed with how others react to music, while others are not even concerned. Pure and simple. Some might be diagnosed with certain social disorders, others get along with folks just fine.


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## shangoyal (Sep 22, 2013)

ArtMusic said:


> Some are just obsessed with how others react to music, while others are not even concerned. Pure and simple. Some might be diagnosed with certain social disorders, others get along with folks just fine.


Thank you, sir. :tiphat:


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

some guy said:


> Tell that to the wind players. Or the percussion!


No need to tell the percussionists, Pythagoras started by listening to them hammering things out. Then he went home and did things in a civilised manner using strings. Pythagoras was never one to blow his own trumpet - his diet avoided all beans.

Actually the hammer story is a myth also disproved here. The relationships that Pythagoras discovered only apply to strings and not to hammer weights.



some guy said:


> The purest sound is a sine wave and the machine that makes it is called an oscillator. Not a sound many people find appealing.
> 
> And nothing to do with circle of fifths or golden ratio theories. In addition, the sine wave is an artificial sound, so nothing to do with the fabric of nature, either.


An oscillator is a machine existing in nature, made by man and part of the natural order. Its products - a sine wave are therefore natural as well. Oh, and how do you know it's a sine wave and not a cosine wave shifted slightly?










If you want to play among the waves and look at the effect, try this java applet.


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## Guest (Oct 24, 2013)

Taggart said:


> a machine existing in nature


Interesting idea.

I'm glad to know that you think that tape recorders and synthesizers and the music that Merzbow and others make with them are all part of the natural order.

There's been some debate about that over the years.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

some guy said:


> I'm glad to know that you think that tape recorders and synthesizers and the music that Merzbow and others make with them are all part of the natural order.


As Terence put it : Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.


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## Guest (Oct 24, 2013)

True enough, but I don't see its relevance to this conversation, which was, I thought, a question about what is or is not "natural," a common notion being that one can divide reality up into natural and man-made. I'm not arguing for or against that notion. But it is a notion. And it has been held for a long time by a lot of different thinkers. And has been quite useful as well.

I think that to anyone who knows about this notion (i.e., everyone), the blithe (and perhaps airy) assertion that machines exist in nature is bound to be a bit startling.

I don't see how the assertion that nothing human is alien to another human* is relevant to whether or not the world can be divided into natural and artificial.

*also a questionable notion, as per practically every thread on TC, par exemple.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

As Louis Armstrong said - "All music is folk music, I ain't never heard no horse sing a song". So I don't think that the distinction between natural and artificial is either relevant or meaningful. Pythagoras set strings vibrating to investigate music. If you use an oscillator to display a sine wave, that's a more elaborate way of doing the same thing. A tuning fork will also create a sound - presumably a nice pure sine wave. But a sound is *not *a sine wave it is a pressure wave. The sinusoidal pattern merely reflects the areas of compression and rarefaction in the air reaching our ears. The sinusoidal pattern allows e.g. Fourier analysis to extract the overtones or to do more intricate signal processing, but it is only an analogy.

My statement is relevant in that when it comes to music - all music is man made.

PS Apologies for nicking @MillionRainbow's soap box. :wave: He would do this so much better.


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## StevenOBrien (Jun 27, 2011)




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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Taggart said:


> As Louis Armstrong said - "All music is folk music, I ain't never heard no horse sing a song". So I don't think that the distinction between natural and artificial is either relevant or meaningful. Pythagoras set strings vibrating to investigate music. If you use an oscillator to display a sine wave, that's a more elaborate way of doing the same thing. A tuning fork will also create a sound - presumably a nice pure sine wave. But a sound is *not *a sine wave it is a pressure wave. The sinusoidal pattern merely reflects the areas of compression and rarefaction in the air reaching our ears. The sinusoidal pattern allows e.g. Fourier analysis to extract the overtones or to do more intricate signal processing, but it is only an analogy.
> 
> My statement is relevant in that when it comes to music - all music is man made.


Yeh didn't Pythagoras work out there are octaves? So was that something that he invented or what he naturally found happened within the sound he was creating? Or what he defined what he heard, or described it as? I don't know if that makes it a discovery of something out there like science or not. Music does need, some control and technology to bring out the ordered kind of sounds we think of. But from that relative disorder can be created order. I don't know if it can be compared to the visual sense and how we create order from something like colour. Ultimately it's how our brain processes the information, and this differs from animal to animal.


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## Guest (Oct 24, 2013)

Does the thread title remind anyone else of an early Laurie Andersen song?


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Pythagoras was heavily into rational numbers - either integers or simple ratios. When they found that the square root of 2 could not be expressed in this way, they kept shtum. The guy who let the cat out of the bag is supposed to have been killed as a divine punishment. The trick about the octave is that is connected to powers of 2 - half the length of a string and you double the frequency. So it's always there waiting to be discovered. If you take a piece of string and look at the 2/3 ratio you get a perfect fifth in relation to the original note. Again that's waiting to be discovered. This is all down to the natural properties of vibrating strings. The next trick is to realise that you can fit a stack of fifths into an octave to get a 12 tone scale - again just some simple arithmetic.

Unlike colour, it's *there*, you can explain these relationships to a deaf person because it's all basic physics. Trouble with colour is that we don't have a good working vocabulary unless you go mad and use something like pantone colours and that's stuff like Pantone 15-5217 rather than Blue Turquoise - because what you see as Blue Turquoise may be somebody else's Turquoise. That's the advantage of musical theory.


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## Guest (Oct 25, 2013)

Taggart said:


> This is all down to the natural properties of vibrating strings.


Now, you can pretty much assign "natural" any old meaning you want. But it's only courteous to use the word consistently from one post to the next. Otherwise, we will do you the discourtesy of thinking you're cheating.



Taggart said:


> Unlike colour, it's *there*, you can explain these relationships to a deaf person because it's all basic physics. Trouble with colour is that we don't have a good working vocabulary....


Not sure this is actually true. Colour is vibrations, too. And there's perception by receiving apparatus, too. And the differences between receiving apparatuses will make colours and sounds, both, _appear_ different, no matter what the physical descriptions say.

And once you've explained the relationships to a deaf person, what does that person have? They still can't hear any _music._

At least you haven't joined the Church of Lenny, yet, with all that pre-ordained stuff. A Jewish Calvinist? That's just scary.

(I wonder if he realized that repeating "pre-ordained" over and over again doesn't make it any more or less true than just saying it once?)

Anyway, speaking of Lenny, and the pre-ordained, universal truth of "tonality," it's time to look at some dates. Pythagoras, or whoever it really was, did his string theory in the sixth century B.C. Tonality was not developed, did not develop out of the modal system, until the seventeenth century, _A.D._

That's quite a long span for a pre-ordained, universal truth to just sit around twiddling its thumbs and sipping ouzo until it got off its lazy heiny and actually did something useful.

And "universal" is a bit of a stretch to apply to one, small section of the world. Sure, it's _our_ section, but still. (I hope to be contradicted on the "our" part, too, by the way.)


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## SimonNZ (Jul 12, 2012)

some guy said:


> Does the thread title remind anyone else of an early Laurie Andersen song?


No...and I'm a pretty big Laurie fan. Which song?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

some guy said:


> Anyway, speaking of Lenny, and the pre-ordained, universal truth of "tonality," it's time to look at some dates. Pythagoras, or whoever it really was, did his string theory in the sixth century B.C. Tonality was not developed, did not develop out of the modal system, until the seventeenth century, _A.D._


To be fair to Bernstein, he does say in his lecture on 20th century music that the term atonality is a misnomer.


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## StevenOBrien (Jun 27, 2011)

some guy said:


> Anyway, speaking of Lenny, and the pre-ordained, universal truth of "tonality," it's time to look at some dates. Pythagoras, or whoever it really was, did his string theory in the sixth century B.C. Tonality was not developed, did not develop out of the modal system, until the seventeenth century, _A.D._
> 
> That's quite a long span for a pre-ordained, universal truth to just sit around twiddling its thumbs and sipping ouzo until it got off its lazy heiny and actually did something useful.
> 
> And "universal" is a bit of a stretch to apply to one, small section of the world. Sure, it's _our_ section, but still. (I hope to be contradicted on the "our" part, too, by the way.)


You're mixing up tonality with harmonics.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

StevenOBrien said:


> You're mixing up tonality with harmonics.


Couldn't have put it better myself!


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## Guest (Oct 25, 2013)

StevenOBrien said:


> You're mixing up tonality with harmonics.


Hahaha, I think if you look closely, you will see that it's not _me_ who is doing that mixing up. In fact, that mixing is just exactly what I was objecting to.


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## Guest (Oct 25, 2013)

SimonNZ said:


> No...and I'm a pretty big Laurie fan. Which song?


"It's not the bullet that kills you. (It's the hole.)"


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## SimonNZ (Jul 12, 2012)

Fascinating. Thanks. Though it seems that until youtube came along my only chance of hearing this non-album, non-cd limited single would have been to be in New York art scene in the late 70's (when I would have been 8 or 9).


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## Guest (Oct 25, 2013)

Or in central California in the early (mid?) eighties.

I heard Laurie do this and "New York Social Life" at the Cabrillo Music Festival. I don't remember which year this was. Whenever Cage was first composer-in-residence there.

What a great little festival that was!


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## StevenOBrien (Jun 27, 2011)

some guy said:


> Hahaha, I think if you look closely, you will see that it's not _me_ who is doing that mixing up. In fact, that mixing is just exactly what I was objecting to.







Sorry to embarrass you, but I can't have you misrepresenting what Lenny is saying


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## starry (Jun 2, 2009)

Taggart said:


> Pythagoras was heavily into rational numbers - either integers or simple ratios. When they found that the square root of 2 could not be expressed in this way, they kept shtum. The guy who let the cat out of the bag is supposed to have been killed as a divine punishment. The trick about the octave is that is connected to powers of 2 - half the length of a string and you double the frequency. So it's always there waiting to be discovered. If you take a piece of string and look at the 2/3 ratio you get a perfect fifth in relation to the original note. Again that's waiting to be discovered. This is all down to the natural properties of vibrating strings. The next trick is to realise that you can fit a stack of fifths into an octave to get a 12 tone scale - again just some simple arithmetic.


But is it just strings? Can something similar be done with wind instruments (distance between holes in instrument) and percussive (length or size of material hit). If these are related then there would be a universal scientific idea relating to the material and the frequency (?) of vibration.


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## mstar (Aug 14, 2013)

starry said:


> But is it just strings? Can something similar be done with wind instruments (distance between holes in instrument) and percussive (length or size of material hit). If these are related then there would be a universal scientific idea relating to the material and the frequency (?) of vibration.


No. What is done with strings cannot be musically pleasing in the same way that it is, if at all, in wind instruments.
To answer the OP, it is a combination of music and the instruments which are pleasing, and may be seen as a different ratio for different people. For example, I would say 2.7:1 when it comes to Tchaikovsky, 3.5:1 for Rachmaninov, 1.45:1 when it comes to Brahms.


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

starry said:


> But is it just strings? Can something similar be done with wind instruments (distance between holes in instrument) and percussive (length or size of material hit). If these are related then there would be a universal scientific idea relating to the material and the frequency (?) of vibration.


There's an excessively evil wiki article on tuning forks which gives details of the relationship between materials and frequency but it's not a nice simple 2:1 for an octave and 3:2 for a fifth. Wiki bottles out on wind instruments simply because there are too many variables. A wind instrument is basically a column of air which is made to vibrate by blowing. So one determinant is the length of the column, others include whether the column is open or closed, the nature of the closure, and, of course, how you blow. There's a nice physics site here.


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