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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

#41

Post by tprice7 »

gardano wrote: post #24
Sylos wrote: post #22

I would be interested in their reaction to two notes being played which are just slightly out of tune. Because it definitely seems like something which can be trained - professional musicians often have a pain-like reaction to it, while your Average Joe just notices that it sounds bad. But at the same time, your Average Joe still notices that it sounds bad, and yeah, just like with dissonances, it's hard to imagine s…

Take a gander at an actual 17th century composer playing with that idea in a most audacious way [0]. The section of the piece I'm referring to begins around 3:26. The idea seems to be, keys that are foreign to the piece should sound dissonant. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbrrMtWICs4

That's an interesting idea and piece, thanks for sharing.

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

#43

Post by fiatjaf » 

   With cross-cultural tasks, there is always a risk that 
   participants don’t have the right idea about what they 
   should be doing. To control for this, the researchers also 
   played participants vocal noises and found that all groups 
   preferred laughter rather than gasps.
What? It is a much different thing noticing differences between melodies and differences between laughs and gasps.

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

#44

Post by fiatjaf »

Or we could interpret it into saying that cultures with less developed musical culture, like this Tsimane, do not notice very well the subtleties of the songs, and may well find any strange noise "good", just like the young people in our culture (it doesn't matter that the strange noises young people hear are always tonal, they are used here just as an example).

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

#45

Post by fiatjaf »

fiatjaf wrote: post #44

Or we could interpret it into saying that cultures with less developed musical culture, like this Tsimane, do not notice very well the subtleties of the songs, and may well find any strange noise "good", just like the young people in our culture (it doesn't matter that the strange noises young people hear are always tonal, they are used here just as an example).

    gathering data from 64 Tisane people, as well as 50 urban Bolivians, 25 US non-musicians, and 23 US musicians
    
    different group of 49 Tsimane people and 47 musically trained people in the US
Where are the trained tsimane musicians?

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

#46

Post by wcoenen »

Too bad that the article doesn't even attempt to explain what is going on mathematically. Dissonance is closely related to beating[1], the phenomenon where the sum of two slightly different frequencies results in an oscillation at a low frequency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28acoustics%29

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

#47

Post by twelvechairs »

mrob wrote: post #14

Although 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 instrum…

> 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,

My reading of your link is that it doesnt argue against pitch ratios being fundamental - what it does do is say that ratios are not only happening in chords but also in the sound of a single note, in different ways for different instruments.

This is very interesting work though and to me at least much more interesting than the headline post here which just points out the blindingly obvious (people raised in different musical cultures hear things differently)

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

#48

Post by gluelogic »

weinzierl wrote: post #37

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 i…

I agree with your your feelings about the article.

I am a musician and I have been interested in music theory since I was a teenager, so I have almost always read writing about this topic. In my experience, it seems like, generally, the people who write about and study musicology are very reluctant to take the position that the music of some cultures can be more primitive than others, but to me it seems to explain a lot of the apparently paradoxical aspects of what we regard as consonance and dissonance.

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

#49

Post by mrob »

twelvechairs wrote: post #47
mrob wrote: post #14

Although 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 instrum…

> 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, My reading of your link is that it doesnt argue against pitch ratios being fundamental - what it does do is say that ratios are not only happening in chords but also in the sound of a single note, in different ways for different instruments. This is very interesting…

The most fundamental aspect of dissonance is the empirically measured Plomp and Levelt curve. This is approximated as: d(x)=e^(-3.5x)-e^(-5.75x), where x is the difference in frequency between two pure sine tones. (see http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf)

If we decompose sounds into sine waves, and sum the values on the Plomp and Levelt curve for all the pairs of sines, weighted by amplitude, then for the specific case of timbres based around the harmonic series, the minima for the dissonance curve happen to fall at simple ratios. This does not mean the brain is actually counting cycles! It's only a coincidence, and for other timbres the minima fall at different places.

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

#50

Post by gluelogic »

The idea that a culture can arbitrary accept "dissonant tones" as long as they have not been conditioned otherwise suggests that I can button-mash a keyboard and maybe they would find it pleasurable.

Perhaps consonance and dissonance are concepts that are largely defined by musical circumstances. If that's the case, then it doesn't make sense to approach the problem with a sort of western definition of dissonance.

In other words, I think it's safe to assume every culture has an idea of what is tasteful and what is not in their music. The way I see it, if you take that position, then you can also assume the culture has their own definitions of what is consonant and what is dissonant. These may or may not coincide with the western theory of common practice period harmony.

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