Dissonant tones sound fine to people not raised on Western music • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by gardano » Sun, Jul 17, 2016, 11:52 AM UTC

pYQAJ6Zm wrote: post #77

gardano wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am not a musician and, after listening to the piece, I was left with a question. To me, that part does sound playfully dissonant, yet it’s enjoyable. But I wonder, is this dissonance just a product of its key being foreign to the piece, as you say, or is there any chord in use that would be considered dissonant by music theory?

It's got more to do with the tuning system.

Think of it as '6 degrees of separation'. The further away I am away from the starting point, the more alien the tuning would be, and therefore the more startling the sound.

During this period in music, the ideal was to make the 'home base' key to be as perfectly in tune as possible (making adjustments of course).

Michelangelo Rossi is playing with this, and is pushing the boundaries of those assumptions. William Byrd did much the same in England at pretty much the same time.

It makes me wonder if the hyper-specialised quarter-tone composers of our day might have had a better time of it if we had never adopted equal temperament as the standard…

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

#82

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jul 17, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

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…

>cultures sufficiently isolated from Western music

This doesn't translate to "they don't have harmony". Tons of those cultures do have harmony AND it's different than the traditional western harmony.

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

#83

Post by beefman » Sun, Jul 17, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

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…

There is definitive evidence the brain contains multiple mechanisms for pitch ratio detection.[1] Spectral theories of dissonance like Sethares', meanwhile, fail to explain some very basic phenomena.[2]

It should also be noted that people have reported trouble reproducing Sethares' dissonance curves which Sethares has, to my knowledge (we've corresponded on the subject for almost 20 years), never addressed.[3]

Lastly, there are serious problems with the ethnomusicology in Sethares' book. The scales derived from timbres, e.g. of Indonesian instruments, are designed to match the dissonance curve of the timbre only in a single mode. Intervals not measured from the chosen tonic will in general not be present as minima in the corresponding dissonance curve (except in the case of highly symmetrical scales like the diatonic scale).

[1] e.g. http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/jn.00271.2001

[2] Spectral models are all based on pairwise interactions between partials and therefore predict roughly equal dissonance scores for harmonic and subharmonic chords (including the major and minor triads). But subharmonic chords are dramatically more dissonant, as you can hear for yourself

http://lumma.org/music/theory/demo/majmin/

(files beginning "o" are harmonic; "u" subharmonic)

This is a consequence of chords larger than dyads being almost completely ignored for the entire history of psychoacoustics. A strangely analogous situation may exist in economics, where the theory of comparative advantage is thought to be settled by most economists despite that there is no consensus on how to extend it beyond Ricardo's 2-country, 2-goods model of 1817.

[3] Briefly, the shape of the dissonance curves is unrealistically sensitive to the relative amplitudes of the input partials.

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

#84

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jul 17, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #20

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…

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.

>Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death?

How is it any different "near Seattle"? All over the US and Europe people have been using black to signify death for centuries. From the usual depiction of death as a black robe wearing skeleton with a skythe, to the black color of hearses, to the black clothing traditionally associated with funerals and mourning, down to black clothes worn by Death Metal and Goth fans.

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

#85

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jul 17, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #52

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try this: what color is death to you?

Ghosts are usually white.

That's because they started picturing them back in the day as wearing the same white linen thing (shroud) they used to wrap dead bodies in before burying them.

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

#86

Post by furyofantares » Sun, Jul 17, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #84

stephengillie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death? How is it any different "near Seattle"? All over the US and Europe people have been using black to signify death for centuries. From the usual depiction of death as a black robe wearing skeleton with a skythe, to the black color of hearses, to the black clothing traditionally associated with funerals and mourning, down to black clothes worn by…

I actually think the hearse and funeral/mourning clothes count as opting out of aesthetic choice - minimizing the self by foregoing self-expression

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

#87

Post by DanBC » Sun, Jul 17, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

furyofantares wrote: post #86

coldtea wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having grown up near Seattle, how does the color black represent death? How is it any different "near Seattle"? All over the US and Europe people have been using black to signify death for centuries. From the usual depiction of death as a black robe wearing skeleton with a skythe, to the black color of hearses, to the black clothing traditionally associated with funerals and mourning, down to black clothes worn by…

I actually think the hearse and funeral/mourning clothes count as opting out of aesthetic choice - minimizing the self by foregoing self-expression

Have you seen what funeral directors wear? Sometimes it's like a panto costume, with weird ribboned hats and waistcoats and tails and just a mishmash of different stuff.

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

#88

Post by mariodiana » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 2:10 AM UTC

gardano wrote: post #75

mrob wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your comment makes me think of playing catch. Do we really calculate parabolas in our brain when choosing how to catch a ball?

What I've read is that the brain learns what the sight picture of a ball coming right to you should look like. When we run to catch a ball, what we're trying to do is line up with that sight picture.

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

#89

Post by solidsnack9000 » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 3:48 AM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #58

EliRivers wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man who runs a funeral business books his hearse in to have the paintwork redone. What colour is it? Woman gets dressed to go to a funeral. What colour dress does she pick out? In large parts of the west, these questions have one answer.

Yet "black tie event" does not imply death, instead it implies a fancy party. In auto racing, a black flag is a penalty, but it's not fatal. The American Express Black card is a symbol of vast wealth, not mortality.

It's not that black implies death. Rather: what color goes well with death? In the west that color is black.

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

#90

Post by ajuc » Mon, Jul 18, 2016, 8:14 AM UTC

mariodiana wrote: post #88

gardano wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment makes me think of playing catch. Do we really calculate parabolas in our brain when choosing how to catch a ball?

What I've read is that the brain learns what the sight picture of a ball coming right to you should look like. When we run to catch a ball, what we're trying to do is line up with that sight picture.

Do you have some sources maybe? I find it very interesting, because it doesn't agree with my experiences.

I've never played baseball, but lots of basketball and soccer, and I get this "virtual trajectory of ball" overlay, so that I can adjust my body position, jump at the right time if needed.

Also often you look at ball, memorize where it will fall, then run to get there without looking at the ball. It can take seconds if it's a long ball in soccer, so it can't possibly be just adjusting to the sight picture.