# Is music genetic, or what?



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

A common source of discussion here! Starting tomorrow, you can attend a Duke University on-line course titled, "Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why." This is free, from Coursera.

"The course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework."

Full description and sign-up here. As always, you can just audit if you like.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/music-as-biology?recoOrder=15&utm_medium=email&utm_source=recommendations&utm_campaign=recommendationsEmail%7Erecs_email_2016_05_15_17%3A25


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

Use this link instead...

https://www.coursera.org/learn/music-as-biology


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Thanks Becca! Much better link.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

They seem to be trapped in the popular genetics-environment dichotomy, as though objects had no qualities of their own that can be experienced via sense organs - as though a circle isn't a circle if someone with a messed up brain sees it otherwise, or a rectangle isn't a rectangle if a messed up brain sees it as something else, or indeed, as though a sad piece of music isn't sad when properly perceived, or a beautiful piece of music isn't beautiful when properly perceived.


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## Guest (May 16, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> They seem to be trapped in the popular genetics-environment dichotomy, as though objects had no qualities of their own that can be experienced via sense organs - as though a circle isn't a circle if someone with a messed up brain sees it otherwise, or a rectangle isn't a rectangle if a messed up brain sees it as something else, or indeed, as though a sad piece of music isn't sad when properly perceived, or a beautiful piece of music isn't beautiful when properly perceived.


You took the course already?


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Great music is composed, it may be based on some generic principle but not generic per se.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> You took the course already?


I read the title, and knowing today's university education, one could do worse than read my message and choose not to waste one's time.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

I hope they go into epigenetics too. That'll muddy the waters.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Chordalrock said:


> ...as though a sad piece of music isn't sad when properly perceived, or a beautiful piece of music isn't beautiful when properly perceived.


Properly perceived? There is no such thing. What one listener perceives as dark and horrifying might be glorious and uplifting to another. I don't believe music has intrinsic emotional qualities. These are qualities we're conditioned to associate with certain pieces of music or harmonies.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Music isn't genetic, but vulnerability to it is.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

ArtMusic said:


> Great music is composed, it may be based on some generic principle but not generic per se.


Question: Is music genetic, or generic?


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Strange Magic said:


> Question: Is music genetic, or generic?


Both! But just the lousy stuff is generic.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

starthrower said:


> Properly perceived? There is no such thing. What one listener perceives as dark and horrifying might be glorious and uplifting to another. I don't believe music has intrinsic emotional qualities. These are qualities we're conditioned to associate with certain pieces of music or harmonies.


I think you're partly right but possibly overstating it. How can one be conditioned to perceive a minor triad as 'darker' or than a major triad.
That could only be achieved by association with non-musical or extra-musical things. Since music is entirely abstract and self referring (unless deliberately programmatic) how can the perception be conditioned. 
It's like the chicken and egg paradox. Why would a Baroque composer of instrumental music choose a minor harmony if he wanted to evoke joy? He wouldn't. If that is a result of conditioning, how did he become conditioned?


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

He became conditioned by learning to believe that major chords and keys evoke joy. I receive plenty of joy listening to music in minor keys. In fact I quite loathe most of the so called happy major key baroque and classical era symphonies and concertos.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Thanks, Ken. I signed up for the course (audit) and expect to learn a lot about what is currently known on music perception. I briefly listened/read to parts of the first week's material. There's a lot of technical nomenclature that is likely not so important for understanding much of the course material.


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## Guest (May 16, 2016)

Petwhac said:


> If that is a result of conditioning, how did he become conditioned?


I presume that taking the course, one might find out how he became conditioned...or that he didn't!


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## Guest (May 16, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> I read the title, and *knowing today's university education*, one could do worse than read my message and choose not to waste one's time.


What..._all _of it? That's some compendious knowledge you have.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Petwhac said:


> I think you're partly right but possibly overstating it. How can one be conditioned to perceive a minor triad as 'darker' or than a major triad.
> That could only be achieved by association with non-musical or extra-musical things. Since music is entirely abstract and self referring (unless deliberately programmatic) how can the perception be conditioned.
> It's like the chicken and egg paradox. Why would a Baroque composer of instrumental music choose a minor harmony if he wanted to evoke joy? He wouldn't. If that is a result of conditioning, how did he become conditioned?


It's not a big secret that "the power of cultural conditioning" was always mostly political propaganda that didn't make sense, but something that people were overjoyed to advocate in the aftermath of a world traumatised by the implications of genetic determinism.

The academic world has been moving back to considering genetics as a powerful factor in explaining human behaviour and preferences, which is all fine and good, but this framework has its limits, especially when applied to aesthetics. But hey, it's fashionable now...

Anyway, the real argument isn't about conditioning, it's about whether the human brain mutated into something that perceived music in a certain way, and whether it could have mutated into something that would have perceived a Mozart passage brimming with joy as something sad and plaintive. Possibly the sense of time of different sentient beings could be different to the point that fast pieces would sound slow to some or the other way around, but I don't think that the requirement to adjust the tempo is some big flaw in my proposition (after all, composers used to tell you whether their pieces were fast or slow, so the performer would have adjusted automatically).

Of course, in the absence of direct empirical proof, one can argue about the intrinsicness or lack of, of joy or sadness in music (not whether passages evoke those things, but what they actually sound like). I just see no evidence at all that there's anything peculiar to the organisation of neurons in the human brain which would make at least the strongest forms of musical character depend on human physiology for their effect.


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## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Something seems right about the value of looking at this way for the simple reason that as much theoretical intelligence can be put into music whether it sounds "nice" or whether it sounds horrific. 

What point is someone trying to make by creating really ugly and overly jarring and dissonant music? It's like being lectured to by a professor who is suicidal about the meaning of life. 

I'm listening Tristan Murail's "Gondwana" (Spectralism) right now which isn't jarring but very smooth. It's not about the close intervals or even dissonance it's about the spirit and intention in which it's created.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

regenmusic said:


> What point is someone trying to make by creating really ugly and overly jarring and dissonant music? It's like being lectured to by a professor who is suicidal about the meaning of life.


What's overly jarring and dissonant? Beethoven's Grosse Fuge? Mozart's Symphony No. 40? Mahler's later works? Wagner's Tristan und Isolde? Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony? Stravinsky's Rite of Spring? Varese's Arcana? Debussy's La Mer?


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

starthrower said:


> *He became conditioned by learning to believe that major chords and keys evoke joy*. I receive plenty of joy listening to music in minor keys. In fact I quite loathe most of the so called happy major key baroque and classical era symphonies and concertos.


I think it is more complicated than conditioning alone. If a voice leaps upward by a wide interval it's going to suggest more energy, hence joy, than a note that leaps only a little upward or one that sinks slowly. Major keys have that one interval, the 3rd, that is slightly more energetic than minor keys. This may be conditioning but it's also intuitive relating back to our own human experience of how our bodies work. That _must_ be universal it seems to me, unless other culture's brains are wired up radically differently than those of the Western world.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Weston said:


> I think it is more complicated than conditioning alone. If a voice leaps upward by a wide interval it's going to suggest more energy, hence joy, than a note that leaps only a little upward or one that sinks slowly. Major keys have that one interval, the 3rd, that is slightly more energetic than minor keys. This may be conditioning but it's also intuitive relating back to our own human experience of how our bodies work. That _must_ be universal it seems to me, unless other culture's brains are wired up radically differently than those of the Western world.


He's not even talking about conditioning, but suggestion. There's not any actual musical conditioning going on that you could point to, any actual attempt to make people associate* one type of music with a certain type of event (joyful event, tragic event, etc). No one is conditioning anyone with respect to how we hear music, other than what - accidentally and chaotically - happens when we watch TV or movies with a soundtrack consisting of music, or play video games. (But we don't learn how to hear music by watching movies, any more than Bach learned how to hear music by watching plays.)

As for using suggestion to completely transform the way that music sounds, turning up into down and down into up, good luck with explaining how that works on the level of neurons. But you definitely should try, because right now this theory sounds like it's about on the level of UFO abduction stories in terms of how much science there is to back it up.

*By 'associate' I mean to induce a person's brain to create neural connections between two unrelated things, so that seeing or hearing one thing will lead to the other to come into the mind of this person (e.g. an old movie you saw as a child might make you nostalgic due to the associated memories of childhood). It should be mentioned that such mental associations are very specific, so that really you only associate one single piece of music with one single scene. You don't associate "all minor key music" with that scene. When you hear random minor key music, it doesn't make you think of that scene. In short, I don't even see how you could condition anyone to perceive all plaintive music as "sad" just by making him watch movies.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

starthrower said:


> He became conditioned by learning to believe that major chords and keys evoke joy. I receive plenty of joy listening to music in minor keys. In fact I quite loathe most of the so called happy major key baroque and classical era symphonies and concertos.


The key issue is, do those minor key pieces that give you joy SOUND joyful? Can a piece of music be made to SOUND completely different by associating it with something, such as a movie scene? I think not. Believe me, I've gathered plenty of associative baggage during my life, but not once has a joyful piece started to sound plaintive (or the other way around) due to memories associated with it.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

starthrower said:


> What one listener perceives as dark and horrifying might be glorious and uplifting to another. I don't believe music has intrinsic emotional qualities. These are qualities we're conditioned to associate with certain pieces of music or harmonies.


And with that, all the questions of how music expresses and evokes feeling, and why music has taken similar forms across cultures, and how people from various cultures can identify moods in the music of other cultures, and why different rhythms, harmonies and scales came to be associated with certain expressive domains in the first place, are neatly bypassed.

The idea that all musical expression is entirely the result of conditioning and the idea that major triads were made happy by an act of God have this in common: they ignore biology and they tell us absolutely nothing about music or about ourselves.

Well, ignorance is bliss, I guess. Let's just forget about it, go out for drinks, and sing some lighthearted ditties in the Phrygian mode. Suggestions anyone?


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

Woodduck said:


> And with that, all the questions of how music expresses and evokes feeling, and why music has taken similar forms across cultures, and how people from various cultures can identify moods in the music of other cultures, and why different rhythms, harmonies and scales came to be associated with certain expressive domains in the first place, are neatly bypassed.
> 
> The idea that all musical expression is entirely the result of conditioning and the idea that major triads were made happy by an act of God have this in common: they ignore biology and they tell us absolutely nothing about music or about ourselves.
> 
> Well, ignorance is bliss, I guess. Let's just forget about it, go out for drinks, and sing some lighthearted ditties in the Phrygian mode. Suggestions anyone?


A vague anecdote: I'm under the impression that there's some middle eastern music that sounds somewhat Phrygianish and yet is perceived as quite jolly by those who belong to that musical culture.

Though I'm still of the opinion that it's not a coincidence that major triads are more likely to represent peace and harmony than tone clusters of minor seconds.


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## Guest (May 23, 2016)

starthrower said:


> *Properly perceived? There is no such thing*. What one listener perceives as dark and horrifying might be glorious and uplifting to another. *I don't believe music has intrinsic emotional qualities.* These are qualities we're conditioned to associate with certain pieces of music or harmonies.


I agree with your first point. Music can be "perceived" in many different ways, and there is nothing to say that one perception is proper and another, improper (assuming the honesty of the listener who is telling us what her perception is).

I am less clear about your second point. I think music does have some intrinsic qualities, though attaching the word 'emotional' seems to carry too strong an implication. So I expect the course is likely to show that one type of music can have a fairly consistent effect on listeners' brains, prompted by its intrinsic qualities. But any effect that results in any specific response reported by the listener will, I suspect, vary, and this may be affected by the individual listener's 'conditioning'.

I think it's probably been debated a little here before that what one hears as a dissonance _may _not be heard by another as a dissonance - or at least, may not be _reported _as a dissonance. Whether _most _people report the same response is another matter entirely; it seems to me likely that if most people do, it will be attributable to something intrinsic to the music, not to mass 'conditioning'.

I don't believe our language is sufficiently exact - or at least, people's use of it - to be able to report the range of emotional responses that a piece might trigger; and there is still the problem that what you and I might report as a 'joyful' reaction evoked by a composition will not necessarily be triggered for another listener. That doesn't mean the music _isn't_ intrinsically joyful, but there is something more complicated going on in the way we all listen to music, have evolved our listening habits, and then describe our responses.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> I agree with your first point. Music can be "perceived" in many different ways, and there is nothing to say that one perception is proper and another, improper (assuming the honesty of the listener who is telling us what her perception is).


What I meant by "properly perceived" was something like "hearing everything as written in the score." For example, if you only focus on the fast right-hand scales in certain pieces without paying any attention to the harmony, you may indeed perceive them as much less dark than they really are, especially if you're not good at hearing implied harmony. In such a case, you'd lack the harmonic context and not be able to contextualise the right hand scales properly, so you might even hear them as rather "jolly" when they're in fact anything but.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Dim7 said:


> A vague anecdote: I'm under the impression that there's some middle eastern music that sounds somewhat Phrygianish and yet is perceived as quite jolly by those who belong to that musical culture.


There are things beyond modes that affect musical character, obviously.

And why isn't anyone who advocates these cultural or genetic models providing us with a hypothesis of how such stuff is supposed to work on the level of the brain? Why so utterly superficial?

For my part, I know how conditioning works on the level of the brain, so I know it neither explains the cultural model nor the genetic model. (It works by neurons creating connections between groups of memories, so that one memory group "lighting up" due to a stimulus will "light up" the other as well. There's nothing about this mechanism that would allow the person to perceive completely differently how a piece of music sounds. Heck, anyone can test it for themselves by attaching a piece of music to a movie scene or picture and seeing if the experience turns a sad piece into a jolly one or the other way around. Obviously, it doesn't.)


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Petwhac said:


> I think you're partly right but possibly overstating it. How can one be conditioned to perceive a minor triad as 'darker' or than a major triad.
> That could only be achieved by association with non-musical or extra-musical things. Since music is entirely abstract and self referring (unless deliberately programmatic) how can the perception be conditioned.
> It's like the chicken and egg paradox. Why would a Baroque composer of instrumental music choose a minor harmony if he wanted to evoke joy? He wouldn't. If that is a result of conditioning, how did he become conditioned?


This is a fascinating and tangled issue. First of all, the idea that music is "entirely abstract and self referring" is indefensible. Throughout its history associations with human life, language, affect, and expression have influenced every aspect of its vocabulary and structure. Why were baroque concerto movements monothematic? The doctrine of affections and the analogy to oratory; the role of the composer was deemed to be like that of an orator, to move the audience to one clear affect per movement. What are the criteria for how material is transformed from first movement to last in unified romantic sonatas? Expressive coherence and psychological naturalness are the primary factors. No, the notion of an entirely abstract and self referential musical art is a non-starter.

The issue I find more interesting is "Why would a Baroque composer of instrumental music choose a minor harmony if he wanted to evoke joy? He wouldn't. If that is a result of conditioning, how did he become conditioned?" I think you are right to challenge starthrower's claim about conditioning:

"I don't believe music has intrinsic emotional qualities. These are qualities we're conditioned to associate with certain pieces of music or harmonies."

The problem I have with starthrower's statement is that the choice he offers between intrinsic qualities and conditioned one does not exhaust the possibilities. This isn't an either or situation, not a simple nature versus nurture issue (or chicken and egg for that matter). The question isn't whether minor chords are intrinsically dark and sad and major chords intrinsically light and cheerful. The question is: If ones goals in composition require differentiating dark from light affect - and they nearly always have, whether in setting the text of a Renaissance madrigal or determining the expressive contour of a sonata movement - if one has to parse scales and triads in these terms, is there an intrinsic reason why minor would be assigned the dark role and major the light role? The minor chord or scale might only have to be marginally more suitable for the dark role than the major for a conventional association to develop. And over the years various explanations of why minor seems more suitable for dark expression have been offered. My favorite is that the disposition of the half steps in the minor mode tends to favor downward pressure, with flat-6th and minor third having a downward tendency, while mi and ti in the major mode are more buoyant and want to ascend. In any case, on this view, the way the sad/happy-minor/major opposition fell out is the result of an interaction of the structural and expressive requirements of composers with the intrinsic qualities of basic units of musical vocabulary. Not either intrinsic or conditioned, but elements of _both_ in a complex historical interaction.


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## Guest (May 23, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> What I meant by "properly perceived" was something like "hearing everything as written in the score." For example, if you only focus on the fast right-hand scales in certain pieces without paying any attention to the harmony, you may indeed perceive them as much less dark than they really are, especially if you're not good at hearing implied harmony. In such a case, you'd lack the harmonic context and not be able to contextualise the right hand scales properly, so you might even hear them as rather "jolly" when they're in fact anything but.


So we might legitimately talk about "perfectly" and "imperfectly" perceived...but then raise the question as to whether perfect listening is possible, depending as it does on several interacting conditions.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> "I don't believe music has intrinsic emotional qualities. These are qualities we're conditioned to associate with certain pieces of music or harmonies."
> 
> The problem I have with starthrower's statement is that the choice he offers between intrinsic qualities and conditioned one does not exhaust the possibilities. This isn't an either or situation, not a simple nature versus nurture issue (or chicken and egg for that matter). The question isn't whether minor chords are intrinsically dark and sad and major chords intrinsically light and cheerful. The question is: If ones goals in composition require differentiating dark from light affect - and they nearly always have, whether in setting the text of a Renaissance madrigal or determining the expressive contour of a sonata movement - if one has to parse scales and triads in these terms, is there a reason why minor would be assigned the dark role and major the light role? The minor chord or scale might only have to be marginally more suitable for the dark role than the major for a conventional association to develop. And over the years various explanations of why minor seems more suitable for dark expression have been offered. My favorite is that the disposition of the half steps in minor mode tends to favor downward pressure, with flat-6th and minor third have a downward tendency, while mi and ti are more buoyant and want to ascend in major mode. In any case, on this view, the way the sad/happy-minor/major opposition fell out is the result of an interaction of the structural and expressive requirements of composers with the intrinsic qualities of basic units of musical vocabulary. Not either or, but _both_ in a complex historical interaction.


This conversation would probably be easier to handle if it were about specific passages and whether they can be made to sound significantly different via conditioning or suggestion, rather than being about what words people use in order to generalise about types of music...


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> I think it's probably been debated a little here before that what one hears as a dissonance _may _not be heard by another as a dissonance - or at least, may not be _reported _as a dissonance. Whether _most _people report the same response is another matter entirely; it seems to me likely that if most people do, it will be attributable to something intrinsic to the music, not to mass 'conditioning'.


In the technical sense, a dissonance doesn't depend on perception at all. It's always going to be a dissonance. The only intervals that are consonant are thirds, fifths, sixths, octaves, and sometimes the fourth, while any other interval is dissonant. Only triads and perfect fifths/octaves are consonant chords, any other kind of chord is dissonant.

Now, what you're really talking about is whether a listener perceives a particular harmony/succession of harmonies as harsh-sounding, which actually doesn't have to include any dissonances at all. A string of cross relations (altered and unaltered versions of the same diatonic note in successive harmonies) will sound harsher to most than a string of seventh chords.


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## Guest (May 23, 2016)

Mahlerian said:


> Now, what you're really talking about is whether a listener perceives a particular harmony/succession of harmonies as harsh-sounding, which actually doesn't have to include any dissonances at all. A string of cross relations (altered and unaltered versions of the same diatonic note in successive harmonies) will sound harsher to most than a string of seventh chords.


Exactly so. My own tolerance of what you call 'harsh-sounding' music is, I'm quite sure, set at a threshold which will differ from others who tolerate more or less. I would expect that differing thresholds are more likely to be accounted for by my 'conditioning' than my genetics, but I'm open to an alternative explanation.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> Exactly so. My own tolerance of what you call 'harsh-sounding' music is, I'm quite sure, set at a threshold which will differ from others who tolerate more or less. I would expect that differing thresholds are more likely to be accounted for by my 'conditioning' than my genetics, but I'm open to an alternative explanation.


Keep in mind that now we're not talking about actual conditioning, which is about associating two memory groups about two entirely different things. We are talking about personal life experience that is purely musical, expectations that music alone has created, etc. As such, it's a rather different topic, but needless to say, no one can hear a lonely fifth as more dissonant than a lonely chord cluster. And again needless to say, this is neither genetic nor cultural, but acoustic and physical, it's about objective qualities of the sounds themselves (though maybe 'dissonant' is the wrong word, as you don't have to perceive either as 'dissonant', i.e. as requiring resolution).


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> Keep in mind that now we're not talking about actual conditioning, which is about associating two memory groups about two entirely different things. We are talking about personal life experience that is purely musical, expectations that music alone has created, etc. As such, it's a rather different topic, but needless to say, no one can hear a lonely fifth as more dissonant than a lonely chord cluster. And again needless to say, this is neither genetic nor cultural, but acoustic and physical, it's about objective qualities of the sounds themselves (though maybe 'dissonant' is the wrong word, as you don't have to perceive either as 'dissonant', i.e. as requiring resolution).


In isolation, yes, everyone will hear a bare fifth as less harsh than a tone cluster (actual tone deafness aside). In context, though, it really depends on a number of factors, including register, timbre, and dynamics, as well as the way the fifth or cluster is approached.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> In isolation, yes, everyone will hear a bare fifth as less harsh than a tone cluster (actual tone deafness aside). In context, though, it really depends on a number of factors, including register, timbre, and dynamics, as well as the way the fifth or cluster is approached.


Absolutely. And I'm not claiming there is no 'cultural conditioning' of a sort going on when a person immerses himself in a musical tradition - he WILL lose biases and gain new ones - but there are limits to what this sort of 'conditioning' (if it can be called that) can achieve, plus it's purely musically based and limited by the objective qualities of sound and music.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

I'm a little slow sometimes, but I think I finally solved the thread:

Since everyone (probably) agrees that (1) a minor second sounds harsher than, say, a fifth due to objective physical qualities of the sounds, is there any reason for thinking that the story is any different in the case of (2) a comparison between a minor third and a major third (with respect to which sounds "darker")? 

In other words, why would you think that (1) is objective but (2) is due to conditioning? - we are, after all, talking about the exact same kind of phenomenon, just replace the word "harsher" with the word "darker".


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## Guest (May 24, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> Keep in mind that now *we*'re not talking about actual conditioning, which is about associating two memory groups about two entirely different things. *We *are talking about personal life experience that is purely musical, expectations that music alone has created, etc. As such, it's a rather different topic, but needless to say, no one can hear a lonely fifth as more dissonant than a lonely chord cluster. And again needless to say, this is neither genetic nor cultural, but acoustic and physical, it's about objective qualities of the sounds themselves (though maybe 'dissonant' is the wrong word, as you don't have to perceive either as 'dissonant', i.e. as requiring resolution).


Keep in mind that what _I _mean by 'conditioning' is the effect on the listener of the totality of their personality and experience - and not just with regard to music. Every time I approach a piece of music, I bring with me everything that I am and have been and that will predispose me to perceive the music one way rather than another, and therefore differently than others might.



Chordalrock said:


> Absolutely. And I'm not claiming there is no 'cultural conditioning' of a sort going on when a person immerses himself in a musical tradition - he WILL lose biases and gain new ones - but there are limits to what this sort of 'conditioning' (if it can be called that) can achieve, *plus it's purely musically based *and limited by the objective qualities of sound and music.


I don't understand this part.



Chordalrock said:


> In other words, why would you think that (1) is objective but (2) is due to conditioning? - we are, after all, talking about the exact same kind of phenomenon, just replace the word "harsher" with the word "darker".


'Harsher' is intended to describe a quality of the sounds and their relationship. 'Darker' is intended to convey a mood that the sounds might evoke. Whether a listener hears something as 'harsh' might depend on their familiarity with similar kinds of music. Whether they report what they hear as 'dark' might depend on the extent to which they are a pessimist/optimist, extra/introvert, amenable to humour etc; and the extent to which any particular piece prompts personal associations with meaningful emotions.

I would argue that if you've spent your life listening only to work such as the opening and final mvmts of Beethoven's Pastoral, you're more likely to find Bartok's Concerto for Strings, Percussion and Celesta 'dark'. But that's assuming that I'm not overlooking the 'proper' perception of these tow pieces in the first place.

I find Dvorak's New World Symphony almost unbearable to listen to because of its personal associations...unless it's actually because it really is the most miserable symphony ever written, and I've not realised that it is intrinsically so!


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## Adam Weber (Apr 9, 2015)

Anyone else besides me actually taking the course...?


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> Keep in mind that what _I _mean by 'conditioning' is the effect on the listener of the totality of their personality and experience


Which just sounds like a meaningless buzz-word, since you've not bothered to - or have been unable to - go into it indepth and explain the exact mechanisms of how that sort of thing is supposed to work. It's easy to say "Oh, everything affects the way I perceive music", but do you actually know what you are talking about when you say that?



MacLeod said:


> 'Darker' is intended to convey a mood that the sounds might evoke.


Nonsense. I mean, perhaps that's how YOU use the term, but in the context of this discussion, when I say that a piece of music sounds dark, I mean that it SOUNDS dark, which is exactly analogous to me saying it SOUNDS dissonant or consonant. Similarly, when I say it SOUNDS beautiful, I mean just that. As I said in the beginning, to a great extent, beauty is a objective quality of a piece of music, and depends on things analogous to harshness and darkness. I predict that in the future musical beauty can be analysed as easily and objectively as the amount of dissonance of an interval.

That's all folks. I've said my thing, probably too insistently and too repeatedly already. Hopefully I'm not the only person whose mind I managed to blow with this - in retrospect - remarkably obvious truth stuff.


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## Guest (May 24, 2016)

@ Chordalrock. It's tempting to reply to "Nonsense" with the same, but as you've just decided to have your say and check out, I'll not bother.

If anyone else wants to know that I do know what I'm talking about, I'll happily elaborate.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Dim7 said:


> A vague anecdote: I'm under the impression that there's some middle eastern music that sounds somewhat Phrygianish and yet is perceived as quite jolly by those who belong to that musical culture.
> 
> Though I'm still of the opinion that it's not a coincidence that major triads are more likely to represent peace and harmony than tone clusters of minor seconds.


This provokes consideration of the nature of musical expression - specifically, on our tendency to oversimplify both the character of emotions and the way in which music embodies and evokes them.

Emotions are not discreet things. "Happiness" and "sadness" (for example) are not simple, static conditions, but more or less crude identifiers for a range of subtle, fluid, and interpenetrating states. And musical entities such as triads are not signifiers for discreet, clearly - and artificially - bounded portions of the emotional spectrum. Given the complexity of emotion itself, it shouldn't be surprising that the different expressive domains associated with, say, major and minor triads and tonalities are not fixed and mutually exclusive.

We don't have to throw up our hands, when confronted with the diversity of expression found in the whole range of music, and resort to explanations from simple conditioning or association in order to account for the fact that one piece in a supposedly "happy" major key sounds "contented" while another sounds "melancholy," or that the very same piece sounds contented on Friday but melancholy on Monday. Maybe Friday is sunny and Monday is rainy, or maybe Friday is rainy but we're anticipating the weekend with pleasure while Monday is sunny but we have to return to the office and discuss with the boss we loathe why we should have had that raise we were denied. But I would say that Friday and Monday are only transient influences on a process of perception more powerfully governed by intrinsically musical factors, and that that piece of music actually expresses neither contentment nor melancholy, but is simply capable, by nature of its acoustical and rhythmic properties, of triggering a range of physiologically mediated responses that constitute elements of both of those generic emotional categories. And I'd suggest that cultural conditioning is only a more widespread and less transient form of Friday and Monday.

The way we interpret any specific element in the music - a rhythmic pulse, a melodic gesture, a chord or progression - is as much, or more, a matter of musical context as of our own personal context of experience. Musical context begins, prior to any style or particular work, with the basic elements of music and our perception of them _in relation to one another_. The difference between major and minor, _once we are conscious of that difference_, is bound to give rise to differences in the way we feel and use them (as EdwardBast has pointed out). I would approach that difference first through simple acoustics. The major triad contains the major third, the fourth overtone of the harmonic series, audibly present in the sounding of a deep tone, and because of its very audibility experienced as consonant and stable. The minor triad, on the other hand, contains a minor third, a tone not audible as an overtone when a tone is sounded. It not only clashes (is dissonant) with the fundamental tone's audible fourth partial, but strongly suggests its potential to function as the root of its own (implied) major triad - the relative major - due to the interval of a major third created with the tone above it (the relative major's own fourth partial). This combination of factors makes the minor triad not only more dissonant than the major, but accounts for the naturalness and ease with which a minor tonality can move into its relative major. Thus, in the context of Western, harmonic music, in which the major triad is heard as consonant and stable, the minor triad is relatively dissonant and unstable.

It's not hard to see, from these factors alone - factors which are very basic to the perception of harmony - why the major tonality should have become associated with "normal," stable emotional qualities, and minor with vaguer, more mysterious and malleable states constituting departures from the stable norm. Because emotion is itself so complex and malleable, the range and subtlety of the expressive possibilities inherent in these two apparently simple acoustical entities go far beyond any simple opposition of "happy" and "sad" or "positive" and "negative." And it's not at all strange that a piece in a minor key might make a given listener "happier" than a piece in major, by appealing to subjective states which are subtler and, to that listener, more interesting and meaningful. The major triad expresses a kind of "baseline" state, in relation to which other harmonies are interesting and emotionally potent deviations, and the lowering of the third to a tone which is not in the range of audible partials, and which clashes with the very audible fourth partial, is not surprisingly a tool of great expressive potency.

How this all works in the brain is neuroscience and beyond my comprehension, but the fact that perceptual phenomena - the raw materials of music and of visual art as well - have "cross-domain" parallels and powers of symbolization and evocation seems to me indisputable. Given a specific musical context, it's amazing, to me at least, how specific musical expression can be. I think it was Mendelssohn who said that music expresses feelings, not too vague to put into words, but too definite. In one sense that's exactly wrong, but in the sense that words are crude devices for categorizing feelings, I think it's right.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> @ Chordalrock. It's tempting to reply to "Nonsense" with the same, but as you've just decided to have your say and check out, I'll not bother.
> 
> If anyone else wants to know that I do know what I'm talking about, I'll happily elaborate.


Your theory is that everything affects the way you perceive music except the music itself. Apparently, the music is the only thing that cannot influence the way you hear it. Seriously, that doesn't sound like grotesque balderdash to you? It would fit right in as part of some gruesome parody of Medieval human attempts at understanding reality. In my humble opinion, that is.


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## Guest (May 24, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> Seriously, that doesn't sound like grotesque balderdash to you? It would fit right in as part of some gruesome parody of Medieval human attempts at understanding reality. In my humble opinion, that is.


Oh joy. I just so _love _how you invite folks into a conversation. :kiss:


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

MacLeod said:


> Exactly so. My own tolerance of what you call 'harsh-sounding' music is, I'm quite sure, set at a threshold which will differ from others who tolerate more or less. I would expect that differing thresholds are more likely to be accounted for by my 'conditioning' than my genetics, but I'm open to an alternative explanation.


There is a thread that references a study on dissonance. The paper describes the general view that dissonance is a function of beating of different frequencies - the more beating, the greater should be the perceived dissonance. The paper discussed how that view does not appear to match the data.

The study discusses one experiment where participants hear chords and rate how dissonant they sound. The participants are then "trained" to better recognize the chords. After training the participants rated chords as less dissonant as they became more familiar with them. Note that the chords were not heard with respect to any other musical sounds.

One conclusion was that "these data are consistent with the theory that dissonance is a negative affect related to a mismatch between pitch information arriving at the auditory cortex from recognition mechanisms and periodicity processing in the brainstem and mid brain. This mismatch would lead to disruption of perceptual and cognitive processing of pitch and increased stimulus ambiguity causing negative affect."

Basically, when we hear chords with unexpected sounds, those chords sound more dissonant due to the mismatch between what we "hear" and what we expect. Learning can decrease this mismatch. So if you include this type of learning as conditioning, then conditioning can make significant differences in how we perceive chords (and presumably music).


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Strange Magic said:


> Question: Is music genetic, or generic?


Music in much less genetic in the sense that it is something a composer is born into composing his style. Much of it is maturity and development of his own idiom over his artistic experience.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

mmsbls said:


> There is a thread that references a study on dissonance. The paper describes the general view that dissonance is a function of beating of different frequencies - the more beating, the greater should be the perceived dissonance. The paper discussed how that view does not appear to match the data.
> 
> The study discusses one experiment where participants hear chords and rate how dissonant they sound. The participants are then "trained" to better recognize the chords. After training the participants rated chords as less dissonant as they became more familiar with them. Note that the chords were not heard with respect to any other musical sounds.
> 
> ...


I, at least, haven't been disputing this. I think experienced listeners are generally well aware that more exposure to music that is more dissonant will make it seem more agreeable, to the point in fact that it's possible to begin to enjoy it for what it is / was meant to be.

Unpleasant perceptions arising from lack of familiarity is what I call bias. The existence of listener bias doesn't change the fact that the music has objective qualities. An unbiased listener will hear a chord cluster as a chord cluster, not as a major triad. In fact, no amount of "conditioning" will make a listener hear a chord cluster as a major triad, or the other way around. Etc etc etc.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

mmsbls said:


> There is a thread that references a study on dissonance. The paper describes the general view that dissonance is a function of beating of different frequencies - the more beating, the greater should be the perceived dissonance. The paper discussed how that view does not appear to match the data.
> 
> The study discusses one experiment where participants hear chords and rate how dissonant they sound. The participants are then "trained" to better recognize the chords. After training the participants rated chords as less dissonant as they became more familiar with them. Note that the chords were not heard with respect to any other musical sounds.
> 
> ...


This means only that there is more than one definition of dissonance. "Dissonant," to a musically knowledgeable person, is not a synonym for "unpleasant." It refers either to the acoustical phenomenon as described in the first paragraph of your post (the degree of acoustic dissonance being objective and the effect of dissonance being relative to context) or to the need of a harmony for resolution. Dissonance (in both senses) is necessary to make music expressive and interesting, and it doesn't generally seem unpleasant if it succeeds in that, unless one simply dislikes the music. Certainly individual tolerance for density of acoustic dissonance will differ. But the way un-knowledgeable people use words like "dissonant" or "atonal" - to describe music that "sounds bad" to them - isn't very important.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Woodduck said:


> This means only that there is more than one definition of dissonance. "Dissonant," to a musically knowledgeable person, is not a synonym for "unpleasant." It refers either to the acoustical phenomenon as described in the first paragraph of your post (the degree of acoustic dissonance being objective and the effect of dissonance being relative to context) or to the need of a harmony for resolution. Dissonance (in both senses) is necessary to make music expressive and interesting, and it doesn't generally seem unpleasant if it succeeds in that, unless one simply dislikes the music. Certainly individual tolerance for density of acoustic dissonance will differ. But the way un-knowledgeable people use words like "dissonant" or "atonal" - to describe music that "sounds bad" to them - isn't very important.


Yes, there are different definitions of dissonance. The definition used in that paper was "an experience that may be related to perceived roughness, harshness, unpleasantness, or difficulty in listening to the sound." I think that's how it was explained to the participants. The paper dealt with isolated chords and not music so the dissonance - resolution aspect was absent.


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## Guest (May 25, 2016)

mmsbls said:


> Basically, when we hear chords with unexpected sounds, those chords sound more dissonant due to the mismatch between what we "hear" and what we expect. Learning can decrease this mismatch. So if you include this type of learning as conditioning, then conditioning can make significant differences in how we perceive chords (and presumably music).


Thank you. (or 'QED' as some might say).

Having skim read that thread again, I can see that members greater than I could still not resolve their dissonance over 'dissonance' and 'perception'.

I'm reminded of having an itch and needing to scratch (seeking resolution after a dissonance). Do I get used to itching - even though it's still there - or does the itch actually disappear?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> Thank you. (or 'QED' as some might say).
> 
> Having skim read that thread again, I can see that members greater than I could still not resolve their dissonance over 'dissonance' and 'perception'.
> 
> I'm reminded of having an itch and needing to scratch (seeking resolution after a dissonance). Do I get used to itching - even though it's still there - or does the itch actually disappear?


If you listen to jazz, Debussy, or just about any 20th century music, it already has to some extent. You just don't notice dissonances such as seventh or ninth chords as dissonant.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, and archetypes, is based on vast time-spans of experience which caused physical changes (and thus similarities) in the human brain. Thus, because we are human, we share a repository of experiences based on being human. These would include music. These universal commonalities are manifest physically as well.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Sonance, or dissonance/consonance, is not a "quality" which is constant. It is a relationship to "1", best described a a ratio. It is a graduating scale, ranging from most dissonant to the ultimate consonance, "1", or unison. Proceeding away from 1 into more dissonance, we get 2/1 (octave), 2/3 (fifth), 3/4 (fourth), 4/5 (major third), 5/6, 6/7, 7/8, 8/9, etc.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, and archetypes, is based on vast time-spans of experience which caused physical changes (and thus similarities) in the human brain. Thus, because we are human, we share a repository of experiences based on being human. These would include music. These universal commonalities are manifest physically as well.


What we share is a type of brain that seems to be stunningly good at accurately rendering, in our consciousness, the musical intervals, pretty much in such a manner that they sound like what you would expect them to sound like if you analysed the physical qualities of those intervals. Whoa! A harmonious interval really does sound harmonious! A discordant interval really does sound discordant! A screeching timbre in terms of math actually sounds screeching to the ear, and a soft velvety timbre such as the oboe actually sounds soft and velvety! That doesn't blow anybody else's mind, just mine?

It seems that our hearing is as superbly evolved as our vision, that we can become as good at accurately perceiving sculptures in sound as our eyes are at seeing sculptures of stone. There's some associative baggage that at times reinforces the effectiveness of a piece of music or spoils it, but at the end of the day an experienced listener pretty much hears reality itself when listening to music. How cool is that?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Chordalrock said:


> What we share is a type of brain that seems to be stunningly good at accurately rendering, in our consciousness, the musical intervals, pretty much in such a manner that they sound like what you would expect them to sound like if you analysed the physical qualities of those intervals. Whoa! A harmonious interval really does sound harmonious! A discordant interval really does sound discordant! A screeching timbre in terms of math actually sounds screeching to the ear, and a soft velvety timbre such as the oboe actually sounds soft and velvety! That doesn't blow anybody else's mind, just mine?
> 
> It seems that our hearing is as superbly evolved as our vision, that we can become as good at accurately perceiving sculptures in sound as our eyes are at seeing sculptures of stone. There's some associative baggage that at times reinforces the effectiveness of a piece of music or spoils it, but at the end of the day an experienced listener pretty much hears reality itself when listening to music. How cool is that?


I'm afraid you've committed the same fallacy here as someone commits when he's grateful that God made the trees green because green is such a restful color.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> I'm afraid you've committed the same fallacy here as someone commits when he's grateful that God made the trees green because green is such a restful color.


Maybe, but then again maybe not. Why is it OK to fall into error head-first in the other direction, but not take a risk in my direction? I find that curious, curious indeed.

In any case, I doubt I've committed an error worth mentioning, as far as goes my description of our aural acumen. Actual visual color is one thing, aural color is another, very different thing, so you are wrong to attempt to discredit my comment about one by pointing out aspects of the other.

And even in visual color black is black for a good reason, and white is white for a good reason, and our perception of shades is close to reality, even if not as good as that of some other species for some colors.

Visual color is not that important anyway. If you watch a black-and-white movie, you're more or less seeing stuff as it actually is, and it's about as good as a movie in color. The association pollution, which you could call bias, can mostly be an accurate reflection of some sort of reality as well, i.e. you recognise that a shape represents a human, and voila! it indeed represents an actual human (an actor to be precise).

If anything, I was being too generous to our visual perception in comparing it with the perfection of our hearing, which doesn't seem to have the same kind of subjectivity that's going on with visual colors.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Chordalrock said:


> Maybe, but then again maybe not. Why is it OK to fall into error head-first in the other direction, but not take a risk in my direction? I find that curious, curious indeed.
> 
> In any case, I doubt I've committed an error worth mentioning, as far as goes my description of our aural acumen. Actual visual color is one thing, aural color is another, very different thing, so you are wrong to attempt to discredit my comment about one by pointing out aspects of the other.
> 
> ...


I think you missed my point, but perhaps I misinterpreted your statements that our brain _"seems to be stunningly good at accurately rendering...the musical intervals, pretty much in such a manner that they sound like what you would expect them to sound like if you analysed the physical qualities of those intervals" _and _"a discordant interval really does sound discordant! A screeching timbre in terms of math actually sounds screeching to the ear, and a soft velvety timbre such as the oboe actually sounds soft and velvety! That doesn't blow anybody else's mind, just mine? "
_
How could the brain do other than produce for us certain definite perceptual qualities of sound when stimulated by certain physical properties and actions of a sounding body? Why is this remarkable? It's simply what perception is. And once we've identified the correspondences between physical stimuli and our percepts, we should not be surprised to find that things sound the way the physical specifications indicate that they're supposed to sound. I don't see what's mind-blowing about it. But I wonder whether there's an untenable assumption underlying your surprise: that our perceptions of sound do not merely have predictable relationships to their corresponding stimuli, but actually somehow _resemble_ them. Saying that "a screeching timbre in terms of math actually sounds screeching to the ear" seems to make this assumption, imputing perceptual qualities to the objects of perception - which is basically what that fellow is doing when he calls green a restful color and is pleased that the world isn't purple.

Green is restful because the human organism has evolved to experience it as the normal color of the vegetative world - and the oboe sounds the way it does because the human organism has evolved to hear sounds of a certain mix of overtones as the sound of an oboe. Tweak the overtone structure a little, and you have an oboe d'amore or a cor anglais.

What am I missing here?


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## Guest (May 26, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> a soft velvety timbre such as the oboe actually sounds soft and velvety!


Not to my ears it doesn't. I'm sure that whoever created the oboe did so because they liked the sound it produced, and they too might have used such words as 'soft' and 'velvety' to explain the pleasure they got from it; and the reason they found it 'soft and velvety' was because of what an acoustic scientist could tell us was happening in the interaction between the vibrating air, the wood and the apparatus in the ears which first perceives the tones. But it's what happens as the sounds hit the brain and are 'received' by your conscious analysis, with all its (what you call) biases, that it might be described as 'soft and velvety'. It is not a universal description for all listeners. It may not even be a universal perception, and in any case, what is happening acoustically is only part of the business of the appreciation of music.

What I don't understand about music is why it took me nearly a dozen listens to 'get' what is going on in, for example, the largo in Sibelius' 4th Symphony. Sibelius obviously knew what he was doing when he constructed the movement to constantly tease the listener with a seed of a melody that is repeated and half-repeated in different variations _and _that the climax of the piece works because of the relationship between the tones that make up the harmonies (different for each variation of the melody) and between the variations themselves. I simply haven't the capability to explain either musically or acoustically what is happening, but I do know that whatever is going on, I 'get it' now. The moving and satisfying climax works - has a measurable effect on my emotions - but only because I've listened to it enough times to assimilate and recognise, to follow and anticipate. It's hardly surprising that the audience for classical is so small - only those with much greater processing power could 'get it' from only one listen to a symphony.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> What am I missing here?


You're missing the other half of my rhetoric, i.e. intervals, and focusing only on timbre.

I don't think you would say those things about the perception of intervals, i.e. you wouldn't claim that there is something arbitrary about the fact that we hear mathematical consonants as aurally consonant, and that we hear mathematically discordant sounds as aurally discordant.

But suddenly when I start talking about timbre, you begin to ASSUME that there isn't an equally or almost equally tight-knit relationship between the physics and the perceptions.

Consciousness is a strange thing, and it's fashionable to assume that the nature of its contents is a world unto itself, but I think that the more you look at it, the more you realise it is doing a pretty good job of revealing the thing-in-itself. I don't think that an intelligent species can hear music fundamentally differently than how we hear it, because I don't think that the way we hear music depends all that much on anything beyond the music itself, at least when the tempo is normalised.

So far, I haven't seen any fact-based thought-experiments or examples demonstrating that I might be wrong, while there are a few reasons for believing I might well be right (perception of intervals, universality of sad/joyful perception, high consensus on what is great Common Practice Period music among the experts and what isn't). You are merely assuming these can be explained via biology and conditioning. It's not indepth knowledge about these topics that I need to take seriously.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> an untenable assumption: that our perceptions of sound do not merely have predictable relationships to their corresponding stimuli, but actually somehow _resemble_ them.
> 
> Saying that "a screeching timbre in terms of math actually sounds screeching to the ear" seems to make this assumption, imputing perceptual qualities to the objects of perception


I realised I needed to clarify, so:

Yes, I am saying there is resemblance between the object and the perception. There is resemblance between a round shape and its perception as a round shape. There is resemblance between a ball and its perception as a ball. But suddenly, when we move from vision to the realm of hearing, I'm supposed to believe that there's no longer resemblance between the object and the perception?

Sorry, I think that the sound waves caused by discordant sounds do resemble our perceptions of them: the way they cause the air and the ear drum to vibrate is in accordance with the nature of the sound source, i.e. its vibrations, and this vibration is meticulously interpreted by the consciousness, roughly in the only way in which it can be interpreted by a keen, highly functional mind.

The resemblance is less obvious and more abstract than that of a circle and its perception as a circle, but it's there. A person screaming terribly really does sound like a person screaming terribly - the over-taxing of the vocal cords, their panicky vibrations, the nature of the event is faithfully reproduced by the consciousness. There is most certainly resemblance there.


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## Guest (May 27, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> this vibration is meticulously interpreted by the consciousness, roughly in the only way in which it can be interpreted by a keen, highly functional mind.


Clearly two highly functional minds vibrating in sympathy on this one. This lowly non-functional mind seems incapable of following the thread you two are currently unwinding.

I might have to go listen to some music to unwind myself.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> Clearly two highly functional minds vibrating in sympathy on this one. This lowly non-functional mind seems incapable of following the thread you two are currently unwinding.
> 
> I might have to go listen to some music to unwind myself.


I mean, there's maybe not any physiological reason why drilling into concrete shouldn't sound like a Mozart piano sonata to someone, but for that to happen, the brain would have to be well and truly messed up.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> I mean, there's maybe not any physiological reason why drilling into concrete shouldn't sound like a Mozart piano sonata to someone, but for that to happen, the brain would have to be well and truly messed up.


Actually, it's a rare condition but not something that indicates any other kind of mental problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia

That said, this has nothing to do with what the discussion was about, which is perception of dissonance as unpleasant or otherwise.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> That said, this has nothing to do with what the discussion was about, which is perception of dissonance as unpleasant or otherwise.


Actually, the discussion that's taking place here started long before the brief interlude about what you're talking about, and is about whether and how much music has objective qualities that affect the way in which it is, or should be, perceived.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> Actually, the discussion that's taking place here started long before the brief interlude about what you're talking about, and is about whether and how much music has objective qualities that affect the way in which it is perceived.


Of course it does; we can point to duration, pitch, the harmonies used, whether or not it's structured using functional tonality, and so forth. But the discussion is about specific kinds of objective qualities that are not as easy to quantify, and the perception of which shows small but meaningful differences.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> Of course it does; we can point to duration, pitch, the harmonies used, whether or not it's structured using functional tonality, and so forth. But the discussion is about specific kinds of objective qualities that are not as easy to quantify, and the perception of which shows small but meaningful differences.


I'm pretty sure I know what the discussion is about, since I'm the one who started it on page 1, fourth message in the thread:



> They seem to be trapped in the popular genetics-environment dichotomy, as though objects had no qualities of their own that can be experienced via sense organs - as though a circle isn't a circle if someone with a messed up brain sees it otherwise, or a rectangle isn't a rectangle if a messed up brain sees it as something else, or indeed, as though a sad piece of music isn't sad when properly perceived, or a beautiful piece of music isn't beautiful when properly perceived.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> I'm pretty sure I know what the discussion is about, since I'm the one who started it on page 1, fourth message in the thread:
> 
> 
> > They seem to be trapped in the popular genetics-environment dichotomy, as though objects had no qualities of their own that can be experienced via sense organs - as though a circle isn't a circle if someone with a messed up brain sees it otherwise, or a rectangle isn't a rectangle if a messed up brain sees it as something else, or indeed, as though a sad piece of music isn't sad when properly perceived, or a beautiful piece of music isn't beautiful when properly perceived.


Okay, of course there are obviously objective qualities, like circularity or rectangularity, but emotional and perceptual reactions like feeling that music is sad or beautiful are not obviously quantifiable, and you're oversimplifying the issue by implying they are.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> Okay, of course there are obviously objective qualities, like circularity or rectangularity, but emotional and perceptual reactions like feeling that music is sad or beautiful are not obviously quantifiable, and you're oversimplifying the issue by implying they are.


But I'm not "feeling" that a piece of music is in a minor key and has qualities that could be called plaintive - I'm hearing it, I'm perceiving it. It's not about how I feel about the piece, it's about what it sounds like. Some people seem confused on this issue, but I'm not one of them.

And it is quantifiable: a passage in a minor key has a different kind of scale than a passage in a major key. It's not like people are confusing passages in major with passages in minor. They sound different, and the reasons why they sound different can be explained in scientific terms, and have little to do with genetics or "conditioning".


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> But I'm not "feeling" that a piece of music is in a minor key and has qualities that could be called plaintive - I'm hearing it, I'm perceiving it. It's not about how I feel about the piece, it's about what it sounds like. Some people seem confused on this issue, but I'm not one of them.


Yes, you are perceiving it, and there is not a direct one-to-one correlation between perception and the object perceived. There is a relationship, certainly, but it's through a number of filters, including those of past experience and expectations.

Ask this question: "is this the kind of thing that I could be perceiving this even if it were not objectively in the object?" If the answer is "possibly" or "yes," you should at least be more circumspect about pronouncing that it is there.

To me, the key of B minor connotes a kind of darkly dramatic aura that is perhaps more theatrical than tragic or despairing, but I only have to look at Tchaikovsky's Pathetique to realize that not everyone will always perceive the key in that way.



Chordalrock said:


> And it is quantifiable: a passage in a minor key has a different kind of scale than a passage in a major key. It's not like people are confusing passages in major with passages in minor. They sound different, and the reasons why they sound different can be explained in scientific terms, and have little to do with genetics or "conditioning".


Those things don't correlate with sad or beautiful. We recently had a topic on music in minor keys that sounds happy, and I would imagine many do not find things that they dislike or are indifferent to sad.

Furthermore, lots of people DO confuse whether something is in the major or the minor mode. Especially in more chromatic music, it can be quite easy to confuse one for the other.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

Mahlerian said:


> To me, the key of B minor connotes a kind of darkly dramatic aura that is perhaps more theatrical than tragic or despairing, but I only have to look at Tchaikovsky's Pathetique to realize that not everyone will always perceive the key in that way.


Do you have perfect pitch?


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> Yes, you are perceiving it, and there is not a direct one-to-one correlation between perception and the object perceived. There is a relationship, certainly, but it's through a number of filters, including those of past experience and expectations.
> 
> Ask this question: "is this the kind of thing that I could be perceiving this even if it were not objectively in the object?" If the answer is "possibly" or "yes," you should at least be more circumspect about pronouncing that it is there.
> 
> To me, the key of B minor connotes a kind of darkly dramatic aura that is perhaps more theatrical than tragic or despairing, but I only have to look at Tchaikovsky's Pathetique to realize that not everyone will always perceive the key in that way.


I'm well aware of the existence of mental associations that people accumulate via experience. I'm the only person on this thread who has attempted to explain how that stuff works on the level of the brain, though I didn't do a good job so here's another effort:

When you experience two things occurring at once, such as a sound and a picture, the stimuli are implanted into memory as though they were one and the same thing, so they become part of the same memory, so that when seeing that image triggers the memory, the memory of the sound will come to your mind as well, and the other way around. Now, that's the extent of how "conditioning" works. There's nothing at all about that mechanism that would allow one's sense of what a passage in minor sounds like be fundamentally changed, i.e. you can't, via conditioning, make a passage in major sound like a passage in minor. You can associate a sad event with a passage in major, but the passage will still sound like a passage in major, it won't SOUND sad, it is merely ASSOCIATED with sad (unless it already had plaintive qualities before the association took place).

So since associations can't explain the fundamentals of how we perceive music, all that remains is either explaining it via genetics or objective qualities of music itself.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Dim7 said:


> Do you have perfect pitch?


No. I have very good pitch memory and relative pitch, but if you ask me what the key of a passage is, I might get it wrong at first (though of course I can check by ear and using an instrument). I am occasionally exactly right, because I am referring back to my memory of other pieces in that key and the way they sounded to me, but this is not the same as having perfect pitch.

I can find something in the correct key on the keyboard if I know it well enough, even if I haven't heard it in weeks, months, or years, but again, not always, because relative pitch can override pitch memory.

An example: I was looking for an association with the major sixth interval, and suddenly I realized that I was hearing the reconciliation scene from The Marriage of Figaro. I went over to the keyboard, pressed a D followed by a B, in the key of G major, and checking in the score, realized that I was remembering it exactly correctly.

(I can also hum a G without reference by remembering the first note of Beethoven's Fifth, and even the next few notes by going from there.)


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

P.S. Associations are fragile and temporary - without constant reinforcement, they aren't things that persistent life-long habits of perception can be built on.

For example, I used to associate Beethoven's Fur Elise with a TV commercial. But when I started to play that piece on the piano, as well as listen to it as played by Brendel, I soon started hearing it in a much more pure fashion, and the commercial never came to my mind any longer: new memories had erased the old association.

This is why I think extra-musical associations play a very minor role in my music listening: I simply spend too much time with pure music, and not much at all with music associated with something else. The more I listen to a piece of music on its own, the purer my experience with it (not necessary better, but freer from extra-musical associations).


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

P.P.S. I realised that some musical phrases in major were perhaps ambiguous enough in terms of character that they might be perceived as either happy and calm or somewhat plaintive, depending on how they are framed or interpreted by the listener. Kind of like those visual double-images that look like one thing when looked at in a certain way, and then look like a different thing when looked at in a different way.

Of course, the existence of ambiguity in music, as in images, isn't proof that that ambiguity is ubiquitous or even notable in our everyday listening. Just like most images are visually unambiguous, it seems that most music is strongly delineated in terms of character, so that there's very little ambiguity left there.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

*some thoughts......*

Leaving aside associations with the extra-musical, it is somewhat of a mystery to me that purely instrumental music can summon very powerful yet hard to accurately verbalise emotions in me and I expect, most music lovers.

I think it is wrong to talk about major and minor _keys_ when it is more about major and minor _harmonies_ and the interdependence (in tonal music anyway) of consonance and dissonance, which are relative terms.

The perception of what a musical passage, phrase or harmony 'expresses' is all to do with context. By which I mean the musical context, within the sound world of the piece or the tradition or the language.

And there is more to it than just the major/minor thing. Dynamics, tempo and even voicing and voice leading play a large role in how a passage or phrase is perceived. A loud and fast passage will never sound 'sad' or 'plaintive' even if it is made up of mostly minor harmonies. And as anyone who knows late Beethoven will tell you, passages made of largely major harmonies that are slow and quiet can seem very 'serious' 'profound' and even somewhat 'tragic' too.

Dissonance is relative to it's context and softly muted tenderly played strings can sound quite 'soothing' and 'wistful' even when playing what would be considered dissonant or harsh harmonies if performed on fortissimo brass.

Music is so abstract that I think it is probably impossible to really pin down what it does to whom and how, in any systematic way.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Petwhac said:


> Leaving aside associations with the extra-musical, it is somewhat of a mystery to me that purely instrumental music can summon very powerful yet hard to accurately verbalise emotions in me and I expect, most music lovers.


Indeed, yet it can do so without needing extra-musical associations. It seems that we, somehow, for some reason, react strongly to objects that are intensely beautiful, and musical objects can be intensely beautiful in and of themselves.



Petwhac said:


> I think it is wrong to talk about major and minor _keys_ when it is more about major and minor _harmonies_ and the interdependence (in tonal music anyway) of consonance and dissonance, which are relative terms.


I'm not sure harmonies do much without being part of a harmonic progression. It's hard for me to even identify whether some two-note "chord" is a minor or major third when they occur, let's say, as part of succession of minor and major thirds. But when the minor third is that of the tonic, and we have tonal context, well then, now it's pretty clear that the piece is in minor, and that it sounds very different from a piece in major.



Petwhac said:


> Music is so abstract that I think it is probably impossible to really pin down what it does to whom and how, in any systematic way.


Abstract in the sense that it is self-contained. When you look at a picture, you are reminded of something, and indeed you can't understand what you see without being reminded of something. Pictures have meaning, and that meaning is unravelled with the help of memory: certain shapes mean a face, and you understand this meaning by remembering that shapes such as that are a face. Music has no meaning, so you don't need to remember in order to understand, you only need to hear, and what you are hearing is the music itself, not your memories about what it might mean.


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## mstar (Aug 14, 2013)

Petwhac said:


> I hope they go into epigenetics too. That'll muddy the waters.


Honestly, I'd bet epigenetics has a lot more to do with it than genetics.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Chordalrock said:


> You're missing the other half of my rhetoric, i.e. intervals, and focusing only on timbre.
> 
> I don't think you would say those things about the perception of intervals, i.e. *you wouldn't claim that there is something arbitrary about the fact that we hear mathematical consonants as aurally consonant, and that we hear mathematically discordant sounds as aurally discordant.
> *
> ...


I have not claimed that there is anything arbitrary about anything.

I have not assumed that there isn't a tight-knit relationship between the physics of sound and the perception of it. Certainly there is.

What I _have_ said is that your assertion of some sort of "resemblance" between object and perception is epistemologically untenable. You say in your next post:

_"There is resemblance between a round shape and its perception as a round shape. There is resemblance between a ball and its perception as a ball. But suddenly, when we move from vision to the realm of hearing, I'm supposed to believe that there's no longer resemblance between the object and the perception?

"Sorry, I think that the sound waves caused by discordant sounds do resemble our perceptions of them: the way they cause the air and the ear drum to vibrate is in accordance with the nature of the sound source, i.e. its vibrations, and this vibration is meticulously interpreted by the consciousness, roughly in the only way in which it can be interpreted by a keen, highly functional mind."_

In order to say that one thing "resembles" another, we have first to perceive them both and note what they have in common. But you are comparing things perceived, not with other perceived things, but with _percepts themselves_. You are not comparing sounds with sounds; you are comparing sounds - which happen in the ear and brain - with the things that cause us to experience those sounds, and assuming there must be some sort of "resemblance." But such "resemblance" is fanciful, and actually inconceivable. Objects do not "resemble" perceptions. Things and perceptions of things are totally different, imcommensurable phenomena. It is one thing to say that a sound is harsh, and that certain vibrations of certain bodies _cause_ the sort of sounds we call harsh. There is no argument there. It is quite another thing to say that waves set up by a vibrating body are, themselves, "harsh." There is no such thing as a harsh vibration; that concept pertains to sound as a perception, not to vibrations of objects transmitted through air. We can speak of harsh dissonances, but harshness does not exist until we experience it. Needless to say, not every person - not every organism, in fact - will experience a given dissonance in the same way. Some animals seem to find the harsh noises they make to be the sweetest music. But their perceptions no more "resemble" the physical source than ours do.

Percepts are percepts, not things we perceive, and we cannot step outside our perceptions to "compare" them with whatever they are perceptions of (those "things-in-themselves").


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> I have not claimed that there is anything arbitrary about anything.
> 
> I have not assumed that there isn't a tight-knit relationship between the physics of sound and the perception of it. Certainly there is.
> 
> ...


It's not necessary to compare a sensation with a sensation, because it's not necessary to perceive an object via the sense organs in order to know something relevant about it. Point in case: we know about the math and physics behind consonant sounds or sound objects - we don't have to hear those sound objects in order to know something about them.

Indeed, we don't have to perceive those objects in order to predict what they will sound like: the math relating to them seems itself harmonious - surely you know that it can be apt to call a mathematical thing harmonious? And in this case, the harmony in the math is replicated in the harmony of the perceptions.

So there is resemblance between the object, as revealed by math, and between the perception of that object, as revealed by our minds.


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## Guest (May 28, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> I'm pretty sure I know what the discussion is about, since I'm the one who started it on page 1, fourth message in the thread:


I'm pretty sure you don't, since this "discussion" was actually started by the OP and has various threads to it - some of them between people where each knows what the other is talking about and some where the talk is at cross-purposes. You might not have noticed, but it's a habit in internet forums that they're normally neither monologues (though some like to treat them as if they are), nor are they duologues between two like minds in simple harmony, or two opposing minds (though both these things sometimes happen).

In fact, if they were a garment, there can be so many poorly woven threads that while you're trying to weave a blanket, I'm trying to make a scarf, Mahlerian a shirt and Petwhac is forging a wrought-iron gate.



> we know about the math and physics behind consonant sounds or sound objects - we don't have to hear those sound objects in order to know something about them.


But we have to hear those sounds to decide what they mean to us - how we will 'receive' them once they've been physically perceived by our listening apparatus. Of course you are right that the maths and the physics mean that the music has objective _physical _qualities - but I didn't think anyone here was arguing otherwise.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> But we have to hear those sounds to decide what they mean to us


The interval of a fifth doesn't "mean" anything. There is nothing associated with it. It's not a word. It is a consonant sound, and that is the extent of its nature. We can know this nature either by studying its physics or by hearing the sound.

Similarly, the minor triad with a descending minor scale running over it note by note doesn't mean anything. We can study the math involved and suspect it will sound darker than a similar passage in major. And we can hear the passage and confirm that it sounds darker. The term 'dark' is a descriptive term applied after the fact, not something that has been learned to associate with the stimulus beforehand.



MacLeod said:


> Of course you are right that the maths and the physics mean that the music has objective _physical _qualities - but I didn't think anyone here was arguing otherwise.


Right, you just failed to see the implications and full meaning of that.


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## Guest (May 28, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> The interval of a fifth doesn't "mean" anything. There is nothing associated with it. It's not a word. It is a consonant sound, and that is the extent of its nature. We can know this nature either by studying its physics or by hearing the sound.


If it's in a composed piece of music, of course it does. The whole point of this topic is surely to do with what music means to us, and how we derive the meanings from it.



Chordalrock said:


> Right, you just failed to see the implications and full meaning of *that*.


What? That there are "objective physical qualities in music"? That "no-one was arguing otherwise"? That "you are right"?

Assuming the first, what are the "implications and full meaning" that I failed to see?


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Chordalrock said:


> The interval of a fifth doesn't "mean" anything. There is nothing associated with it. It's not a word. It is a consonant sound, and that is the extent of its nature. We can know this nature either by studying its physics or by hearing the sound.





MacLeod said:


> If it's in a composed piece of music, of course it does. The whole point of this topic is surely to do with what music means to us, and how we derive the meanings from it.


A piece of music sounds in a certain way - it doesn't describe, i.e. mean.

If words like dark, violent, beautiful - when applied to music - referred to things outside the music, then you would be correct that we associate the music with something and derive meaning from this association.

BUT the words refer to the music itself. You learn what "plaintive music" means by associating that word with plaintive pieces of music. So you see? - those words are redundant and awkward. We know the words through the music, not the music through the words. So no, there's no meaning to music, just the sound of music.


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## Guest (May 28, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> A piece of music sounds in a certain way - it doesn't describe, i.e. mean.
> 
> If words like dark, violent, beautiful - when applied to music - referred to things outside the music, then you would be correct that we associate the music with something and derive meaning from this association.
> 
> BUT the words refer to the music itself. You learn what "plaintive music" means by associating that word with plaintive pieces of music. So you see? - those words are redundant and awkward. We know the words through the music, not the music through the words. So no, there's no meaning to music, just the sound of music.


It "means" - ie, has significance. I didn't "mean" as in 'describes' (I would have said 'describes'!).

Every piece I listen to has some kind of significance - though I don't mean 'important'. If I'll listening to a completely new piece to which I can bring no already-attached or already-associated meanings, I'm still making some kind of sense of what I'm hearing. Whatever the actual physical properties of the music, my intellectual and emotional and my spiritual capabilities are stimulated, interacting to search, sort, compare, contrast, absorb...whatever I do when I'm exploring new music and trying to comprehend it. By the end of the exploration (first listen) I will have made some kind of sense of it, created a map of it, attached some meaning to it, made some temporary decisions about it.

And unless I'm listening in some kind of detached state, I will bring to that entire process of exploration all the baggage of my life, who I am, what I've done, what music I've listened to over the years.

You can keep your objective physical properties of the score that we don't need to listen to. I'm having a much more enjoyable time living!


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> It "means" - ie, has significance. I didn't "mean" as in 'describes' (I would have said 'describes'!).
> 
> Every piece I listen to has some kind of significance - though I don't mean 'important'. If I'll listening to a completely new piece to which I can bring no already-attached or already-associated meanings, I'm still making some kind of sense of what I'm hearing. Whatever the actual physical properties of the music, my intellectual and emotional and my spiritual capabilities are stimulated, interacting to search, sort, compare, contrast, absorb...whatever I do when I'm exploring new music and trying to comprehend it. By the end of the exploration (first listen) I will have made some kind of sense of it, created a map of it, attached some meaning to it, made some temporary decisions about it.
> 
> ...


That sort of thing happens to some extent with everyone I'm sure - and may I borrow you in saying: no one here has claimed otherwise. What I've claimed is that those processes aren't the dominant factor in creating our listening experiences - or at least the listening experiences of voracious listeners who aren't only listening to a couple of childhood favorites for their nostalgia value or some such. For the voracious and open-minded listeners among us, the music itself, coupled with our listening skills, is the dominant factor - by far - in determining the nature of our listening experiences and related perceptions.

Thank goodness too. I much rather listen to music than my boring memories. And if I want to look at scenery instead of hearing a Sibelius symphony, I will simply look at scenery, or maybe do both at once, again no need for vague musty memories - I'll take the real thing. Maybe I'll change my mind once I've gathered a few more decades under my belt and begun the process of zombification, but right now I prefer my music vibrant, pure, objective, and without mould.


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## Guest (May 28, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> That sort of thing happens to some extent with everyone I'm sure - and may I borrow you in saying: no one here has claimed otherwise. What I've claimed is that *those processes aren't the dominant factor* in creating our listening experiences - or at least the listening experiences of voracious listeners who aren't only listening to a couple of childhood favorites for their nostalgia value or some such.


Let me re-borrow - I didn't think anyone was saying that 'those processes' are the _dominant _factor. But you attribute something to the business of 'associations' that is far too unsubtle. I can't speak for anyone else here, but I don't have a music collection sorted into happy and sad childhood memories, though undoubtedly some pieces can have that effect. I do assert that every time I listen to a piece of music, I will subconsciously bring the totality of my listening history to the experience, and that I believe this conditions my reception of the music.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> Let me re-borrow - I didn't think anyone was saying that 'those processes' are the _dominant _factor. But you attribute something to the business of 'associations' that is far too unsubtle. I can't speak for anyone else here, but I don't have a music collection sorted into happy and sad childhood memories, though undoubtedly some pieces can have that effect. I do assert that every time I listen to a piece of music, I will subconsciously bring the totality of my listening history to the experience, and that I believe this conditions my reception of the music.


People were claiming that extra-musical associations have conditioned people into hearing music as sad or joyful or beautiful or whatever. I don't think I've been too unsubtle in dismantling that argument, it's just that there's nothing subtle about the way the brain works in those terms.

Anyway, I think that complex webs of barely conscious associations can indeed reinforce the already existing character and effect of a piece of music, and can perhaps even make an ambiguous passage sound like a certain kind of thing, BUT for the most part they don't affect the way that the music sounds (plaintive, beautiful, violent, whatever). People have actually claimed that they do, so I've been merely responding to those claims by trying to make it clear that associations aren't responsible for what something sounds like except in borderline cases or to a small extent.

Now if you want to argue that our purely musical listening experience has sometimes profound effects on our ability to appreciate a piece of music - no arguments from me there. But again, I don't think a skilful and experienced listener will experience any fundamental changes in the way they hear music after a certain point, actually I don't think anyone will at any point, no matter what they listen to and how much, other than in the case of unpleasantness of dissonance that was discussed earlier (or foreign pitches, such as micro-tonality). Just no evidence of any other kind of fundamental changes happening at all, except as a result of someone HEARING something better, e.g. hearing the harmony and not just the melody, or hearing the implied harmony, and realising that the music is actually this or that.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

Has anyone here read this? I have a copy somewhere and read it a long time ago. Interesting, but I'm not sure how convincing I'd find it now, so many years later. Seems relevant to this discussion though.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=92Zg1lO4tCEC&source=gbs_navlinks_s


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## Guest (May 28, 2016)

Chordalrock said:


> People were claiming that *extra-musical associations *have conditioned people into hearing music as sad or joyful or beautiful or whatever.I don't think I've been too unsubtle in dismantling that argument, it's just that there's nothing subtle about the way the brain works in those terms.


I don't think they were - can you reference someone who was?


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> What we share is a type of brain that seems to be stunningly good at accurately rendering, in our consciousness, the musical intervals, pretty much in such a manner that they sound like what you would expect them to sound like if you analysed the physical qualities of those intervals. Whoa! A harmonious interval really does sound harmonious! A discordant interval really does sound discordant! A screeching timbre in terms of math actually sounds screeching to the ear, and a soft velvety timbre such as the oboe actually sounds soft and velvety! That doesn't blow anybody else's mind, just mine?
> 
> It seems that our hearing is as superbly evolved as our vision, that we can become as good at accurately perceiving sculptures in sound as our eyes are at seeing sculptures of stone. There's some associative baggage that at times reinforces the effectiveness of a piece of music or spoils it, but at the end of the day an experienced listener pretty much hears reality itself when listening to music. How cool is that?


Well, the eardrum is a vibrating membrane, similar to a pool of water, so simple ripples are easier on the surface, while dissonant waves which oppose each other will stir things up. It makes perfect sense.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> That sort of thing happens to some extent with everyone I'm sure - and may I borrow you in saying: no one here has claimed otherwise. What I've claimed is that those processes aren't the dominant factor in creating our listening experiences - or at least the listening experiences of voracious listeners who aren't only listening to a couple of childhood favorites for their nostalgia value or some such. For the voracious and open-minded listeners among us, the music itself, coupled with our listening skills, is the dominant factor - by far - in determining the nature of our listening experiences and related perceptions.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion

We don't know the exact origins of our perceptions. You can't just say "I don't feel that this matters, therefore it doesn't."


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> I think you missed my point, but perhaps I misinterpreted your statements that our brain _"seems to be stunningly good at accurately rendering...the musical intervals, pretty much in such a manner that they sound like what you would expect them to sound like if you analysed the physical qualities of those intervals" _and _"a discordant interval really does sound discordant! A screeching timbre in terms of math actually sounds screeching to the ear, and a soft velvety timbre such as the oboe actually sounds soft and velvety! That doesn't blow anybody else's mind, just mine? "
> _
> How could the brain do other than produce for us certain definite perceptual qualities of sound when stimulated by certain physical properties and actions of a sounding body? Why is this remarkable? It's simply what perception is. And once we've identified the correspondences between physical stimuli and our percepts, we should not be surprised to find that things sound the way the physical specifications indicate that they're supposed to sound. I don't see what's mind-blowing about it. But I wonder whether there's an untenable assumption underlying your surprise: that our perceptions of sound do not merely have predictable relationships to their corresponding stimuli, but actually somehow _resemble_ them. Saying that "a screeching timbre in terms of math actually sounds screeching to the ear" seems to make this assumption, imputing perceptual qualities to the objects of perception - which is basically what that fellow is doing when he calls green a restful color and is pleased that the world isn't purple.
> 
> ...


Well, if you understand the similarity of the eardrum and other vibrating membranes, it would put an end to all the endless speculation about consonance and dissonance and "how our brains get accustomed to blah, blah..."


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> The interval of a fifth doesn't "mean" anything. There is nothing associated with it. It's not a word. It is a consonant sound, and that is the extent of its nature. We can know this nature either by studying its physics or by hearing the sound.
> 
> Similarly, the minor triad with a descending minor scale running over it note by note doesn't mean anything. We can study the math involved and suspect it will sound darker than a similar passage in major. And we can hear the passage and confirm that it sounds darker. The term 'dark' is a descriptive term applied after the fact, not something that has been learned to associate with the stimulus beforehand.


The octave means something: it's called "pitch equivalence." A G is a G to us, no matter what octave it's in. Explain that as being meaningless.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Chordalrock said:


> It's not necessary to compare a sensation with a sensation, because it's not necessary to perceive an object via the sense organs in order to know something relevant about it. Point in case: we know about the math and physics behind consonant sounds or sound objects - we don't have to hear those sound objects in order to know something about them.
> 
> Indeed, we don't have to perceive those objects in order to predict what they will sound like: *the math relating to them seems itself harmonious *- surely you know that it can be apt to call a mathematical thing harmonious? And in this case, the harmony in the math is *replicated* in the harmony of the perceptions.
> 
> *So there is resemblance between the object, as revealed by math, and between the perception of that object, as revealed by our minds.*


I'm not sure that my disagreement with you is more with what you are trying to say or with the way in which you're saying it. My sense is that some conceptual clarification is needed.

*A correlation, arising from a causal relationship, is not a resemblance, much less a replication.* I can concede a _correlation_ (not a "resemblance") between musical sounds (perceptions) and their physical causes and mathematical descriptions, but only with respect to certain objectively definable qualities. For example, the interval of a perfect fifth is considered acoustically more consonant than that of a minor third, because the tones and overtones involved in the sound we hear are more "harmonious" in the former interval, which is to say that there are more coincidences between them (the ratio of the frequencies contained in the former is 3:2; in the latter, 6:5). It would be reasonable in this case to speak of a "harmony" of frequencies corresponding to the "harmony" of a heard interval.

"Harmony," however, is a term with more than objective, structural or mathematical, implications. It has connotations of value: of factors working together and belonging together to positive or pleasing effect. Here context enters the picture: what seems positive or pleasing in one musical context may not seem so in another. Minor thirds may, contrary to mathematics, seem beautifully consonant ("harmonious"), and perfect fifths may seem odd and intrusive, when the musical context makes them so; a sequence of minor thirds running in parallel may, because of their ability to suggest pleasing tonal relationships, strike us as more "harmonious" than a similar sequence of perfect fifths. But it's not only the artistic use of sounds that alters the extent to which they are heard as "harmonious," but the disposition of the individual listener. Again, harmoniousness becomes a matter of valuation, not merely of mathematics.

So much for "harmonious." When we come to some other words you've used to describe sounds - sad, plaintive, dark, soft, velvety - we are on much shakier epistemological ground. When you say that an oboe sounds "velvety" and that, to your amazement, the mathematics or physics of its vibrations are "velvety" too, you are making, not a descriptive, objective statement, but an _analogy_ - a double analogy, in fact, not only between external reality and internal perception, but between two internal perceptions (aural and tactile). You are talking not science but poetry. Vibrations in air cannot be velvety, and neither can ratios of frequencies - but neither can sounds! Saying that they _are_ so veers even farther from comprehensibility in consideration of the fact that oboes may not sound velvety in every musical context, or to everyone who hears them.

Vibrations in the air are not sounds, and it is nonsense to posit actual "resemblances" between acoustical phenomena and their perceptual results. The perceptual results of physical stimuli in the sensoria of various species - and even various people - differ greatly. Birds and insects see colors we don't see when looking at the same objects, and we know that humans differ in their color sensitivity; the light waves which produce a bright red for one viewer may not do so for another. If viewers cannot perceive the same color when looking at an object, what sense would it make to describe the light waves themselves in terms we apply to colors - "rich," "warm," etc.? The waves are merely shorter or longer. Richness and warmth are the experiences - actually, the imaginings - of a perceiver, not qualities of the physical spectrum.

If a color generated in your eye and brain by a specific length of wave seems rich or warm to you, that is an experience of yours which some may share, but others may not. Similarly, I don't question that the sound of an oboe, as you hear it, suggests the texture of velvet, as you feel velvet when you touch it. If all you've been saying is that there are specific physical phenomena which give rise to those perceptions for you, that other people are _likely_ to have similar perceptions given the nature of the human ear and brain, and that given certain mathematical descriptions we can predict, based on experience, certain kinds of sounds, I don't see why you need to posit a doctrine of "resemblances." It is, as I've said, epistemologically unsound - or, at best, linguistically so. And it is definitely unsound to suggest, as does your first post in this thread, that a listener who doesn't find an oboe "velvety" isn't "properly perceiving" the "velvetiness" of its harmonic ratios.

There are objective and subjective aspects of musical perception. Sounds as such (sounds as perceptions) are not, objectively, "sad, plaintive, dark, soft," or "velvety"; and sounds as molecules in motion ("sounds" not even existing as sounds) are certainly none of those things. Employing language which seems to project your _subjective_ perceptions back onto _objective_ physical phenomena does not help us answer the really interesting questions of how sound - how music - evokes feeling, and why there are broad areas of agreement in the musical responses of different people. We don't find minor keys being used by Bach and Tchaikovsky to convey sadness because a frequency ratio of 6:5 is "sad"; a Dvorak Slavonic dance in minor is not sad at all, yet the "Goin' Home" melody of his "New World" symphony, very much in the major, may be felt as profoundly sad - or it may not - and this cannot be explained solely or primarily with reference to the acoustical properties of sound. I don't believe there are specific emotional qualities inherent in sounds (and certainly not in sound waves), but that, given the similarities between human brains, there are substantial areas of agreement in the categories of feeling which sounds, in particular musical arrangements, will evoke.

Again, I wonder if it is with your verbalization, more than with your beliefs about music, that I'm arguing. Maybe you can figure that out and let me know!


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> Well, the eardrum is a vibrating membrane, similar to a pool of water, so simple ripples are easier on the surface, while dissonant waves which oppose each other will stir things up. It makes perfect sense.


This reminded me of an experiment I had wanted to perform but had forgotten about:

Play a succession of minor seconds, but so that each ear receives only one of the two notes. Obviously, you need headphones for this, as well as a software that lets you do this properly (Sibelius, for example, doesn't).

If you do this via speakers rather than headphones, the air itself will vibrate in a dissonant manner, but with headphones you can bypass the air, and see if the semitone will still be perceived as a dissonance.

I've tested this now. Do you want to predict what happens? If so, don't look at the titles of my recordings below or listen to them yet, nor read my comments below.

SPOILERS SPOILERS

Recordings are here:

SPOILERS SPOILERS


__
https://soundcloud.com/chordalrock%2Fsemitone-dissonance


__
https://soundcloud.com/chordalrock%2Fsemitone-no-dissonance

Very interesting. The mind doesn't perceive the minor second as a dissonance when the ear drums aren't made to vibrate in a dissonant manner, i.e. when one of the notes is only heard by the left ear and the other by the right ear.

(EDIT: Ah, the files have been correctly produced. I panicked for no reason there for a while.)


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Both files sound equally dissonant to me, whether in headphones or through speakers.


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## Arsakes (Feb 20, 2012)

I don't try to side and associate with the people of political correctness, social justice warriors and "everything is relative" elites that go full retard and anti-scientific, but after you go beyond the phase of genetics that controls growth and affects emotions, there is a realm of pure intellectual experiments that surpass genetics and is our free will and decision making territory.

Musical taste in emotional aspect can be considered affected by Genetics, but in composing and thinking in higher aspects of music it's in intellectual phase IMO.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> Both files sound equally dissonant to me, whether in headphones or through speakers.


I absolutely agree! There is, however, something qualitatively different about the two experiences - and I find the split channel dissonance annoying in some additional subjective way I can't define.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

EdwardBast said:


> I absolutely agree! There is, however, something qualitatively different about the two experiences - and I find the split channel dissonance annoying in some additional subjective way I can't define.


Yeah, it's oddly unnerving, like it's broken somehow.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> Both files sound equally dissonant to me, whether in headphones or through speakers.


Huh? Do you hear the quickly pulsating harshness in both recordings? Maybe your headphones leak? Because the recording marked "no dissonance" just sounds a little out of tune, no actual pulsating clash of intervals.


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## tortkis (Jul 13, 2013)

Chordalrock said:


> Huh? Do you hear the quickly pulsating harshness in both recordings? Maybe your headphones leak? Because the recording marked "no dissonance" just sounds a little out of tune, no actual pulsating clash of intervals.


This is interesting. I also hear "dissonance" in both recordings, even with headphones, though in different ways.

David B. Doty says in _The Just Intonation Primer_ that "periodicity pitch is present even when the two components are presented dichotically to the two ears by means of headphones" and that "[t]he question of how periodicity pitch is perceived has not as yet been conclusively answered." (The periodicity pitch is f1/n where the ratio of two frequencies f2/f1 is m/n and f1 is lower than f2.)


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

tortkis said:


> "periodicity pitch is present even when the two components are presented dichotically to the two ears by means of headphones"


Not for me it isn't. Weird.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> Huh? Do you hear the quickly pulsating harshness in both recordings? Maybe your headphones leak? Because the recording marked "no dissonance" just sounds a little out of tune, no actual pulsating clash of intervals.


The clash is in the perception of the two pitches formed into a single sound in the mind. You seem to be defining dissonance completely differently from the way it is normally conceived.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> The clash is in the perception of the two pitches formed into a single sound in the mind. You seem to be defining dissonance completely differently from the way it is normally conceived.


Well, I don't hear the clash, and I hear the two samples as extremely different. After I had posted them, I listened to them again and I started thinking I had accidentally used the same pitch for both channels in the second sample, because it sounded so much like there was just one note there at a time. I don't think we're just having a semantic disagreement here.

By the way, the way I hear it is pretty much as I predicted I would, and as a person should from the point of view of theory. There is nothing that should clash, because there is no vibrating membrane that can't handle the two pitches vibrating at once without creating clashes. There is just your mind perceiving two pitches that are close to each other. You should either hear them as two separate pitches but without a clash, or as a single pitchless sound like traffic noise, or the way I initially did: as a slightly out of tune seeming single pitch.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Chordalrock said:


> Well, I don't hear the clash, and I hear the two samples as extremely different. After I had posted them, I listened to them again and I started thinking I had accidentally used the same pitch for both channels in the second sample, because it sounded so much like there was just one note there at a time. I don't think we're just having a semantic disagreement here.


Unless ones corpus colosum has been surgically or otherwise functionally severed, I can't imagine how one would not perceive the dissonance in both cases.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> Unless ones corpus colosum has been surgically or otherwise functionally severed, I can't imagine how one would not perceive the dissonance in both cases.


What makes you think that one should perceive the split channel sample as a pulsating clash when there is no membrane vibrating in such a manner? In other words, is there any actual reason for your doubt that you can articulate?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

The two pitches are both still present, and still dissonant. The difference I hear is that in the second example the sharp attacks, the "transients" at the beginning of the strokes of the keys, are suppressed, and particularly on the lower note. It almost makes the lower pitch seem like a "deviation," or an out-of-tune "undertone," of the upper. Does anyone else hear it this way? I can only speculate on what this demonstrates. Since this is not a normal way of hearing sound - normally both ears perceive all sounds, even if unequally - it seems that the brain is unable to handle the information in the usual way. I'm wondering if this is an indication of hemispheric inequality of function, like right- or left-handedness, with the brain having to choose one of the pitches as dominant.

Another thought: neither timpanic membrane is experiencing both pitches. Therefore each vibrates in a less complex way - which ought to be physically easier - making the initial impact of the sound less. How this results in the dominance of the upper note I can't guess.

It would be interesting to try this with other intervals.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> The two pitches are both still present, and still dissonant. The difference I hear is that in the second example the sharp attacks, the "transients" at the beginning of the strokes of the keys, are suppressed, and particularly on the lower note. It almost make the lower pitch seem like a "deviation," or an out-of-tune "undertone," of the upper. Does anyone else hear it this way? I can only speculate on what this demonstrates. Since this is not a normal way of hearing sound - normally both ears perceive all sounds, even if unequally - it seems that the brain is unable to handle the information in the usual way. I'm wondering if this is an indication of hemispheric inequality of function, like right- or left-handedness, with the brain having to choose one of the pitches as dominant.
> 
> Another thought: neither timpanic membrane is experiencing both pitches. Therefore each vibrates more easily, making the initial impact of the sound less. How this results in the dominance of the upper note I can't guess.
> 
> It would be interesting to try this with other intervals.


This post certainly makes more sense and is closer to my experience than the other reactions. Thanks for posting.

I could do some other intervals later today.

I was actually thinking of composing a whole piece that is either two-voiced polyphony or four-voiced polyphony, with half of the voices only heard by one ear and the other half by the other, and I wouldn't pay attention when composing to whether the halves are dissonant or not, so they'd often be theoretically dissonant but maybe not heard that way by me.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Chordalrock said:


> I was actually thinking of composing a whole piece that is either two-voiced polyphony or four-voiced polyphony, with half of the voices only heard by one ear and the other half by the other, and I wouldn't pay attention when composing to whether the halves are dissonant or not, so they'd often be theoretically dissonant but maybe not heard that way by me.


A piece meant to be heard alternately through two modes of hearing? Sounds interesting but difficult.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> A piece meant to be heard alternately through two modes of hearing? Sounds interesting but difficult.


I hadn't thought of alternating between weird mode and normal stereo; maybe I'll do some repeats of short passages in normal stereo. Or else two versions of the entire piece. It'll take a few days at least....


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Well, if anyone cares, here are two tracks containing two different Gombert passages played at the same time, with the first track having mono playback basically and making the dissonances sound very dissonant. The other track isolates each passage to the left or right ear and basically sounds like there's no dissonance there, like you're just listening to one piece from one ear and another from the other.


__
https://soundcloud.com/chordalrock%2Ftwo-gomberts-together


__
https://soundcloud.com/chordalrock%2Ftwo-gomberts-split

But the real question is, which is more enjoyable? And is either a work of art?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Chordalrock said:


> What makes you think that one should perceive the split channel sample as a pulsating clash when there is no membrane vibrating in such a manner? In other words, is there any actual reason for your doubt that you can articulate?


I wrote nothing about a pulsating clash. You are the one reducing dissonance to a pulsating clash due to the motion of a single vibrating membrane. Given the data you are getting from listeners, clearly that is not an adequate explanation of dissonance! Perhaps the perceptual effect occurs, in part, somewhere upstream, say in the way the mind reacts to the mismatch of data coming from two basilar membranes? Or perhaps it arises somewhere in the processing of perceptual data even beyond what happens in the cochlea? You are the one with the apparently dubious theory, so it is incumbent upon you to find a basis for dissonance that accounts for the data.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Chordalrock said:


> Well, if anyone cares, here are two tracks containing two different Gombert passages played at the same time, with the first track having mono playback basically and making the dissonances sound very dissonant. The other track isolates each passage to the left or right ear and basically sounds like there's no dissonance there, like you're just listening to one piece from one ear and another from the other.
> 
> 
> __
> ...


Are you sure you didn't mislabel the two tracks? I found the second one somewhat more dissonant than the first.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Another thought: neither timpanic membrane is experiencing both pitches. Therefore each vibrates in a less complex way - which ought to be physically easier - making the initial impact of the sound less. How this results in the dominance of the upper note I can't guess.


I don't experience less impact of the initial sound, nor do I hear a dominance of the upper note.


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

Chordalrock said:


> Well, if anyone cares, here are two tracks containing two different Gombert passages played at the same time, with the first track having mono playback basically and making the dissonances sound very dissonant. The other track isolates each passage to the left or right ear and basically sounds like there's no dissonance there, like you're just listening to one piece from one ear and another from the other.
> 
> 
> __
> ...


Equally low on the enjoyable scale and fairly artless IMO!


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Petwhac said:


> Equally low on the enjoyable scale and fairly artless IMO!


Perhaps so. Any avant-garde music fans want to comment too?


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

I definitely hear a difference between the semitone (dissonance) and semitone (no dissonance) recordings. I still hear what I would call some dissonance in both, but the sense is significantly stronger in the first. The second seems clearer with less ringing. The Gomberts seem less distinct in terms of dissonance. The dominant effect for me is that the Gomberts together sounds as though it's heard in the center of my head while the Gomberts split sound like I'm hearing each in either the left or right ear. The together recording seems slightly more muddled and less distinct.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

mmsbls said:


> I definitely hear a difference between the semitone (dissonance) and semitone (no dissonance) recordings. I still hear what I would call some dissonance in both, but the sense is significantly stronger in the first. The second seems clearer with less ringing. The Gomberts seem less distinct in terms of dissonance. The dominant effect for me is that the Gomberts together sounds as though it's heard in the center of my head while the Gomberts split sound like I'm hearing each in either the left or right ear. The together recording seems slightly more muddled and less distinct.


Thank you.

So far, three people have heard more clash or dissonance in the first sample (me, Woodduck, mmsbl). An additional one person has heard them "differently" but hasn't specified beyond that. And two people (EdwardBast and Mahlerian) hear them as being indistinguishable, or at least claim to hear them so.



EdwardBast said:


> Given the data you are getting from listeners


What data would that be?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Chordalrock said:


> So far, three people have heard more clash or dissonance in the first sample (me, Woodduck, mmsbl). An additional one person has heard them "differently" but hasn't specified beyond that. And two people (EdwardBast and Mahlerian) hear them as being indistinguishable, or at least claim to hear them so.


Neither of us said they were indistinguishable, we said that they sounded equally dissonant. A minor second is still a minor second, even if the sources of the sounds are separate from each other.

I can hear what you're talking about with the lessened vibrations, but it sounds weird, not pleasant, and it doesn't make a dissonance into a consonance.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> I can hear what you're talking about with the lessened vibrations,


Finally! Just a little detail you neglected to mention because it was far more important to educate me about semantics. Jeez!


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Chordalrock said:


> Thank you.
> 
> So far, three people have heard more clash or dissonance in the first sample (me, Woodduck, mmsbl). An additional one person has heard them "differently" but hasn't specified beyond that. And two people (EdwardBast and Mahlerian) hear them as being indistinguishable, or at least claim to hear them so.
> 
> *What data would that be?*


You apparently didn't count Tortkis, who also heard both samples as dissonant, which pretty much makes it an even split. That data!


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> You apparently didn't count Tortkis, who also heard both samples as dissonant, which pretty much makes it an even split. That data!


He's the one who heard it "differently but didn't specify in what manner".

And the final count is: five people - including you, according to your latest communication efforts - heard the clash in the first sample and didn't hear it in the second sample or heard it far less in the second sample.

I don't mind knowing about your reactions, but if you don't want to provoke bemusement you might want to drop the ax you're trying to grind.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I'm gettin' the sneakin' feelin' that different people actually hear things differently - sorta like they don't see colors identically, or don't feel pain with the same intensity, or are left- or right-handed, or left- or right-brained, or...?



So maybe your dog hears things the way they are "in themselves," and oboes aren't velvety after all?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

As for the Gombert tracks, I don't know how to compare them as to "dissonance," because when I hear them monaurally my brain seizes on whatever harmonies seem most tonally coherent and either pulls the rest into some semblance of relationship or just relegates it to a sort of atmospheric "haze" (a bit like some passages in Ives), whereas in the split-channel version the two pieces compete with each other and create a mental tug of war which is much more disturbing (a bit like some other passages in Ives!). If "dissonance" is equated with unpleasantness (obviously not a musical definition), I find the split-channel version more dissonant.

Again, if different brains do process sound differently, the relative importance they attach to the actual dimensions of dissonance - the factors that make music seem "dissonant" - may vary among listeners. Certainly people vary in their _enjoyment_ of dissonance in music - in its type, amount, and usage - just as they vary in their preferences for colors - their hue, intensity, and juxtaposition - in visual art or interior decor.


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## tortkis (Jul 13, 2013)

Chordalrock said:


> He's the one who heard it "differently but didn't specify in what manner".
> 
> And the final count is: five people - including you, according to your latest communication efforts - heard the clash in the first sample and didn't hear it in the second sample or heard it far less in the second sample.


On headphones, the not-separated one sounds harsher, and the separated one sounds smoother but weirder, both of which I described as "dissonance".

I suspect we all hear these samples in a similar way more or less, and we just express what we perceived in different ways ... using different definitions for the term "dissonance".


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Chordalrock said:


> And the final count is: five people - including you, according to your latest communication efforts - heard the clash in the first sample and didn't hear it in the second sample or heard it far less in the second sample.


Where did you get this? I heard dissonance in the second example and always said so. You are going to insist I hear it like you when I don't?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> As for the Gombert tracks, I don't know how to compare them as to "dissonance," because when I hear them monaurally my brain seizes on whatever harmonies seem most tonally coherent and either pulls the rest into some semblance of relationship or just relegates it to a sort of atmospheric "haze" (a bit like some passages in Ives), whereas in the split-channel version the two pieces compete with each other and create a mental tug of war which is much more disturbing (a bit like some other passages in Ives!). If "dissonance" is equated with unpleasantness (obviously not a musical definition), I find the split-channel version more dissonant.
> 
> Again, if different brains do process sound differently, the relative importance they attach to the actual dimensions of dissonance - the factors that make music seem "dissonant" - may vary among listeners. Certainly people vary in their _enjoyment_ of dissonance in music - in its type, amount, and usage - just as they vary in their preferences for colors - their hue, intensity, and juxtaposition - in visual art or interior decor.


Your description of what happens with the Gombert is close to what I experience. The monaural version mostly sounds like a not unpleasant pan-diatonic wash. The split version sounds dissonant from beginning to end. This was, in fact, the most striking and unexpected part of the two experiments to me. I wouldn't have predicted it and was expecting to experience what Chordalrock predicted.


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