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Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

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Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#81

Post by ArekDymalski »

antonyt wrote: post #5
atoav wrote: post #3

A good overview on the topic. My general issue with things like these is the simple fact, that as a lifelong musician I find the "less worse" harmonic combinations (to quote the abstract) often very boring. Aside from great composers like Bach et al I find the harmonic relationship of the notes played one of the least interesting aspects of the music, and expression, timbre, rhythm, phrasing much more important and n…

Do you have any examples of "a single note for minutes and get it to sound amazing"? I'm finding this difficult to imagine. A lead voice doing this while some accompaniment is changing chords underneath makes sense to me, but then you're back to harmonic relationships.

A lot of modern metal is mostly one note played rhythmically. And it is can sound awesome, however timbre is obviously part of this awesomeness.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#82

Post by qlte »

mike_hock wrote: post #68
klik99 wrote: post #23

I read through a lot of this article and it does a good job explaining the ratios and math behind harmonics and how that makes chords, but ideas like lower ratios are more pleasant and minor chords feel like something is missing (from the article "I do not hear the Harmonic Series itself -- something is missing") is just wrong - if it was right, then the happiest music would be entirely octaves. Though it's built on…

I don't buy that minor being "sad" is all nurture and no nature. No matter what tempo or rhythm you put on it or what instruments you use to play it, it may not sound sad, it may sound dramatic and powerful instead, but it never sounds upbeat and happy the way major does (or at least can ).

I’m not seeing how that’s inconsistent with it being culturally derived?

Your brain is still just pattern matching “minor = sad” based on thousands of hours of examples from the western canon consumed throughout your life regardless of how you dress it up with rhythmic variations.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#83

Post by qlte »

prewett wrote: post #77
mike_hock wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that minor being "sad" is all nurture and no nature. No matter what tempo or rhythm you put on it or what instruments you use to play it, it may not sound sad, it may sound dramatic and powerful instead, but it never sounds upbeat and happy the way major does (or at least can ).

Listening to "Fiddler on the Roof" and klezmer music unsettled to me the idea that major is happier than minor. I still think minor tends to sound "sad", but those wedding songs and the Russian dance in FotR are clearly upbeat and celebratory. (Literally upbeat; the Russian dance is more upward-beat, as it gets faster and faster!)

Yes, the klezmer “default” is minor and upbeat.

It’s my favorite example for the “minor != universally sad across cultures” thing since it’s not so “out there” for the Western ear that people would struggle to even hear minor/major/“music” in it at all.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#84

Post by dswilkerson »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #80

I don't think I want a scientific theory of music. That would take the fun out of it. I like music that matches my tastes while still managing to surprise me. What else do I need to know about music? And what about the discovery that happens when you make your own music? If this was replaced by the perfect scientific theory and a computer program cranking out perfect songs, our incentive for being creative would be g…

This is like saying we should not study physics because if we did then all art could be automatically generated.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#85

Post by dswilkerson »

iainctduncan wrote: post #79

You know those HN posts where someone who barely knows how to program decides to tell you why language X is terribly designed? This is that. Anyone with a decent understanding of music and acoustics can tell it's silly from the title and abstract alone.

Does Daniel Levitin, author of "This is your brain on music", count as someone with "a decent understanding of music and acoustics" ? He thinks that Helmholtz explained harmony (he told me personally). However, as the essay points out, (1) The American Acoustical Society collection has an experiment stretching frequencies from 2.0 to 2.1 that they conclude shows that Helmholtz was wrong, and (2) if Helmholtz was right, there would be not harmony at all, as the essay points out. So even someone like Levitin is wrong.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#86

Post by dswilkerson »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #48

I agree that there's a lot to be desired in the pedagogy of music theory, but this is pretty bad. There are so many little things wrong with it that if I started trying to address them all I'd be here forever. Anybody interested in this stuff would be better off with something like Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale ( https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html ) or Music a Mathematical Offering ( https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk…

Responses that say "If I started listing criticisms I would never finish" usually have none. Name 3.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#87

Post by dswilkerson »

bobson_dugnutt5 wrote: post #19

I don't find this convincing at all. The actual interesting attempt at scientific theory of harmony in this could be distilled to a couple of lines, yet the author rambles endlessly in ways that don't add to the piece at all. I already knew his additions from traditional music theory already, so I can't really see what the purpose of this is.

If this essay can be distilled into a couple of lines, please do that.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#88

Post by dswilkerson »

the__alchemist wrote: post #2

Check out the 3Blue1Brown video on this topic as well! It goes more in depth on music theory than any music-community one I've seen. (Which tend to be presented as "Here are the rules"; Grant, like this article, goes into the "why"; a step below. With great visuals, of course!

Please provide a link.

Re: Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

#90

Post by Affric »

klik99 wrote: post #23

I read through a lot of this article and it does a good job explaining the ratios and math behind harmonics and how that makes chords, but ideas like lower ratios are more pleasant and minor chords feel like something is missing (from the article "I do not hear the Harmonic Series itself -- something is missing") is just wrong - if it was right, then the happiest music would be entirely octaves. Though it's built on…

Yep, I have come to believe that as complex adaptive systems made of complex adaptive systems the part of us that experience music do so through being able to predict new information.

If there is no ability to predict it’s random and just noise.

If there is no uncertainty and it’s just purely repetitive then there’s also no new information and it loses the music (see what happens with overplayed pre-recorded songs).

The sweet spot is when we can to some degree predict what’s coming and thus understand it to be information while not being sure of what’s coming so we get the reward of encoding it.

I think this works for pretty much all genres and contexts. Even listening to techno in a dark warehouse while off ones face: the altered state makes most things seem novel no matter how repetitive and your mind doesn’t tune the information out.

But that’s IMO why octave harmonies largely don’t work: the mind perceives no information in the pure octave, and so little joy is gained from it.

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