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Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

arstechnica.com

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Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

#31

Post by theoh »

SuperPaintMan wrote: post #15

This 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…

You're conflating colour symbolism with colour harmonies. They are two completely different phenomena.

I don't know any visual artist who would claim that colour harmonies from the art of another culture are incomprehensible/jarring. Actually I would expect to get the opposite answer.

Popular colour combos for interior decoration, though, are naturally going to vary culturally, but (I claim) within a pretty universal system of colour contrasts perceived the same way by everyone. If there's a literature out there on "weird" colour harmonies that don't work for those acculturated in certain cultures, I'd love to see it.

Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

#32

Post by ciconia »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #8

Most 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…

> They're very rare in pre-romantic classical music...

Not true. Some styles of classical music employ dissonance in a prominent way - from late 14th century Ars Subtilior, through the pre-baroque stylus fantasticus and the bold chromaticism of Gesualdo, Frescobaldi, de Macke and others, and to the late baroque with Bach, Vivaldi, Zelenka, Rebel and others.

Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

#33

Post by plorg »

They used to teach this as an open enrollment course in college (at least mine, which was not atypical of the larger liberal arts college scene). It was called "music of non-western cultures", and pretty much everyone who took it came out with the opinion that this non-western music was pretty interesting and cool.

I mean, c'mon. Anyone who has been exposed to the concept of non-western music will know that the 12-tone scale is not a universal construction.

Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

#34

Post by dahart »

> Tsimane music also doesn’t make use of harmony: only one series of notes is played at a time, so the relationships between notes don’t matter in their musical tradition.

This makes me wonder if the Tsimane don't hear dissonant harmony, but just two different melodies, like two different people talking at once rather than a chord.

Maybe in a way this is similar but opposite to how it takes a little bit of listening before you can hear Tuvan throat singing clearly - at first it sounds like one note, but after a while you get better at hearing the overtones they're modulating.

Personally, I find that some chords that sound dissonant when played alone and out of context turn around completely and sound gorgeous and intriguing when played as part of a piece.

Minor 6 chords are amazing in the right context, and diminished and augmented scales too. Some of my favorite Bach pieces are the ones that hit a measure or two of fully diminished key.

Is it possible that part of the surprise here is that we've overstated dissonance as something negative, and led ourselves to expect something "dissonant" to be more cacophonous than it really is? I do prefer describing music more in terms of tension and resolution than consonance and dissonance. And tension is a critical part for the resolution to have it's full effect and power, it provides the contrast, and it often comes with as much or more subtlety and beauty, as far as I can tell.

Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

#35

Post by jakub_h »

plorg wrote: post #33

They used to teach this as an open enrollment course in college (at least mine, which was not atypical of the larger liberal arts college scene). It was called "music of non-western cultures", and pretty much everyone who took it came out with the opinion that this non-western music was pretty interesting and cool. I mean, c'mon. Anyone who has been exposed to the concept of non-western music will know that the 12-to…

Well, let's not read much into it. The headline says that dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music. It doesn't say that dissonant tones don't sound fine to people raised on Western music. ;)

Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

#37

Post by weinzierl »

Quote from the arstechnica article:

> This suggests that preference for consonance over dissonance isn’t baked into universal human auditory processing, but is rather something we develop by being exposed to certain kinds of frequency relationships in the music that we hear.

No, that is not a conclusion that can be drawn from the experiment and not the conclusion the paper draws.

Quote from the paper:

> The results indicate that consonance preferences can be absent in cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music [...]

From what I understand the experiment shows that there are peoples that have not developed harmony until now. They make music, but they only play notes in a sequence never simultaneously. This is not surprising, western music developed real harmony only in the modern era, music of the middle ages was mostly melodic.

That they have no harmony does not mean that preference for consonance over dissonance isn’t baked into universal human auditory processing because if they would develop harmony they might end up with the same preferences we have because we share the same human auditory processing.

Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

#38

Post by geff82 »

Being married to an Iranian, I hear a lot of persian music. Especially the traditional one sounds really "dissonant" to my western ear and it took me years to accustom. Of course for my wife and all of her family persian tunes sound perfectly harmonious.

Re: Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music

#40

Post by nabla9 »

theophrastus wrote: post #12
nabla9 wrote: post #2

They 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...

???

First you give them few labeled examples of consonant ad harmony then dissonant harmony and then ask them to label next examples.

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