Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
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Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#2They should test how well if Tsimane people are able to differentiate between consonant harmony and dissonant harmony.
It's weird that if you go all the trouble travel into far away places to test things, but you don't test for that.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#3Dissonant tones also sound fine to people raised on Western music, which contains dissonant tones.
"Dissonant" is not a synonym for "not fine".
Culture doesn't fix the fact that if you play a perfect perfect fifth (exactly 2:3 frequency mix) the blend is very homogeneous, whereas if the ratio is off, you hear "beats" in it. Those beats are not produced by your upbringing.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#4"Musical perception is, surprisingly, not shared by all humans".
Uh, surprising to who?
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#5Not really news.
Also quarter-tone music sounds weird to western ears and is common around the world.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#6> Musical perception is, surprisingly, not shared by all humans.
s/surprisingly/unsurprisingly/
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#7Not really news. Also quarter-tone music sounds weird to western ears and is common around the world.
Except apparently to the West, otherwise Westerners would be culturally conditioned to not find it weird.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#8Most of these chords aren't truly dissonant. They're very rare in pre-romantic classical music, but in jazz/pop theory they're considered basic triads with added colour notes, not weird exotic sounds from musical hell.
Most people will have grown up hearing sequences that use mostly 7ths and/or 9ths, and won't think of them as exotic or strange at all.
The ones that are dissonant - like the Dom 7#11, and some of the clusters - fall later down the preference list, just as you'd expect them to.
The simplest dissonant chords are the basic augmented and diminished triads, and the authors didn't include them in the tests - which is a bizarre and curious omission.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#9Not really news. Also quarter-tone music sounds weird to western ears and is common around the world.
I don't know if it's the only study of its kind, but I think the point of studying anything is not always the novelty factor of it, but rather making what we "already knew" more explicit and concrete. At least in math when a "known-to-be-true" conjecture is proven, we don't say it isn't news :) Maybe it's different in science and music.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#10There was a dicsussion and interview with studys author (srongly named as Johsn in the arstechnica aticle) recently on BBC radio 4's Inside cience. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07jqr1y 15:10