> Musical perception is, surprisingly, not shared by all humans. s/surprisingly/unsurprisingly/
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Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
11–20 of 92 posts
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#12They 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.
Probably a much trickier study, (involving autopsies?), but it would be informative to compare the distribution of the cochlear hairs among various groups of people. To what degree the arrangement is in logarithmic series [1]
[1] http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/acoustics/ear.htm http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756239208...
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#13Dissonant 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.
You are reacting to an article headline. Your point doesn't really make sense when you look at the actual study. The study found that western ears actively preferred the consonant chords, whereas the indigenous people had no preference. That is an actual empirically-demonstrated difference.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#14Although the article talks about pitch ratios, there's no evidence that the human brain contains any hardware for pitch ratio detection. Consonance of simple ratios is a result of a simpler underlying rule, explained by William Sethares here:
http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html
Note that this only happens with musical instruments featuring overtones based around the harmonic series, which usually means instruments based on vibrating strings or vibrating columns of air. These are by far the most common instruments in Western music, but this is not the case for cultures that heavily use tuned percussion. Tuned percussion can easily have enharmonic timbres, which require different tuning systems for control of consonance and dissonance.
Note that Sethares' theory says nothing about dissonance being good or bad, and this new study says nothing about whether Tsimane people are capable of detecting dissonance or not. As the vast majority of humans can detect consonance and dissonance, including babies (see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222455086_'Infants'... ), I would personally be surprised if they were incapable of perceiving it. I think it's more likely that their culture simply does not value consonance. The same is true of some Western subcultures. Atonal composition is high status with many music academics, and it's genuinely enjoyable to many of them. I've enjoyed listening to atonal compositions myself.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#15This pops up in abstracted painting as well, colours (more specfically the feelings/emotions we ascribe to a particular combunations) are entirely created due our cultural context. The greatest example of this is the colour of death, Black for western contries, White for eastern.
Western fine art is more formulaic in it's creation, due to training using colour wheels (complementary across, traidic and other geometric harmonies) and a analytic notion of these harmonies.Even the pleasing ratios of area are codified (5:1 Yellow:Purple for weight balence) Itten wrote quite a few books on balence/design and became a major influence on modern art. Contrast this with naieve/primal forms created by those without that training.
One size fits all does not work for the arts. It cant be a product that is objectively correct.
Now if someone played a diasonant frequency and time the beat such that it fell in line with the tempo of a composition. That would be a cool way to add structure to a work. No idea on how to do the math here, but how many cent under standard tuning would generate this for an andante tempo?
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#16Most 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…
Indeed I find of their two examples the "consonant harmony" is a bit dull and the "dissonant harmony" sounds like it might be from something more interesting like the Große Fuge, one of my favourites and probably more dissonant than their example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZXjW_s0Qs&feature=youtu.be...
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#17Not really news. Also quarter-tone music sounds weird to western ears and is common around the world.
But "traditional" quarter-tone music typically does not use much harmonics, right?
I think you need to practice to appreciate music - some people get just stressed by listening to a complex Bach fugue, and some get equally stressed when listening to rap music or traditional jazz. Probably because they do not pick up the nuances.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#18It's not just for western music. Hindustani music is more "quantized" around scales than Carnatic music, and many North Indians find it harder to listen to Carnatic music for that reason.
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#19> Musical perception is, surprisingly, not shared by all humans. s/surprisingly/unsurprisingly/
s/surprisingly/un&/
Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music
#20This pops up in abstracted painting as well, colours (more specfically the feelings/emotions we ascribe to a particular combunations) are entirely created due our cultural context. The greatest example of this is the colour of death, Black for western contries, White for eastern. Western fine art is more formulaic in it's creation, due to training using colour wheels (complementary across, traidic and other geometric…
Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death? To me, it has always represented either nothingness, like the void of Space, or opting out of an aesthetic choice - I don't know what color car I want to drive, so I'll just get a black one.