Where does music come from?

[Godless Wonder]

Where does music come from? Why do people like it? How come some people have "perfect pitch?" Do any other animals like music, in the same way we do? I know birds make semi-musical noises, but I don't think they have discovered, say the 12-note scale with equal temperament. (but then they haven't discovered harmony either, at least not that I know of, so they probably wouldn't really need that 12-note scale so much. Maybe that's the crux of it, why do we appreciate harmony? How did that evolve? We only have one voice.)

Also, I noticed when I "write" music, it's not really like "writing" at all. It's more like fishing around trying to find something which already exists. It seems that melodies, harmonies, etc, are more apt to be "discovered" by me than written by me. But that may be more a symptom of my musical ignorance, than anything else. But if I am ignorant, then what is it that I am ignorant of? It doesn't seem to be a human invention that I am ignorant of, in much the same way that Math is not so much an invention as a discovery. Of course the relationships of frequencies of the notes have specific mathematical properties, so maybe music is math, and our appreciation for it is just some weird artifact of how our hearing works. In that case animals should get something out of it too. But the dogs I've had haven't seemed to really get too much out of it. (Maybe not enough high frequencies for their taste?)

Anybody figured any of this stuff out? Just wondering.

[john_v_h]

You may find this site (http://www.webster.sk.ca/greenwich/natbasis.htm) of interest. The author holds that the scales proceed from perception of overtones.

[Darth Dane]

There are singers qho can sing two different notes at the same time, one being an overtone, individually controlled.
Meaning a base note can be held and then melody by the overtone.

It is very soothing to hear.

Harmonic choir could be a google search.




DD - Love & Laughter

[Nowhere357]

Originally posted by Godless Wonder
Where does music come from?
What a great question!

Our entire pre-natal development occurs with the constant beating of our mother's heart. Every cell in our brain grows under this influence - and probably reflects it like tree rings reflect the beat of the seasons.

Virtually all of our music is built around a beat, and I've always thought there was a connection there. Sympathetic vibrations - resonation. The basis of music fits our brain.

Thanks, mom! :) (music comes from the heart?!)

[Herman Hedning]

Originally posted by Godless Wonder
I know birds make semi-musical noises, but I don't think they have discovered, say the 12-note scale with equal temperament. (but then they haven't discovered harmony either, at least not that I know of, so they probably wouldn't really need that 12-note scale so much. No probably not, since the equal tempered western scale is a brutal hack and doesn't have much to do with harmony at all. The only interval in harmony is the octave, all others are more or less out of tune.

[Godless Wonder]

Originally posted by Herman Hedning
No probably not, since the equal tempered western scale is a brutal hack and doesn't have much to do with harmony at all. The only interval in harmony is the octave, all others are more or less out of tune. Well, it is a brutal hack, but I wouldn't say it doesn't have much to do with harmony. It allows you to get away with playing peices in all the keys without having to retune your piano, which has everything to do with harmony. Well, perhaps you would disagree, my ears aren't that sensitive to the out-of-tuneness of it. Maybe you're one of those people with perfect pitch? In that case, maybe you perceive that everyone's piano is perpetually out of tune? How awful for you.

I've often wondered it if would be possible to build an electronic keyboard which would "know" what key you're playing in, and in real time, adjust the note frequencies to that key. So instead of a fixed, equal tempered tuning, you'd have a dynamic tuning that changed as you played, depending on what key you were in. But it's probably not possible to do prefectly, as "what key you're in" can be ambiguous, and anticipating key modulation in real time is probably not possible, unless the keyboard can somehow read ahead in the music along with you. But this is getting a bit off-topic now.

[john_v_h]

Absolute pitch is an interesting phenomenon. IIRC it is something like the aural equivalent of photographic memory. Some people have it as an innate talent while others can learn it. I fall into the latter category -- I have been playing music so long that I can usually recognize a pitch.

But the appreciation of tuned intervals doesn't require any such thing. It just depends on sensitivity to beats. I hear lots of beats across the piano keyboard but I'm used to them as the characteristic sound of the instrument. Even so, the tuning can get ugly if you play close intervals, particularly a major third, down in the low bass.

Didn't Beethoven write dense bass chords for special effect in the well temperament system? They would sound especially good in some keys and quite exotic in others. Today, they sound a bit funky in any key.

[Tharmas]

Originally posted by john_v_h
But the appreciation of tuned intervals doesn't require any such thing. It just depends on sensitivity to beats. I hear lots of beats across the piano keyboard but I'm used to them as the characteristic sound of the instrument. Even so, the tuning can get ugly if you play close intervals, particularly a major third, down in the low bass.

Didn't Beethoven write dense bass chords for special effect in the well temperament system? They would sound especially good in some keys and quite exotic in others. Today, they sound a bit funky in any key.

If you actually hear the thirds beating as you play, my hat is off to you. To most, it’s just a “fuzzy” sound at best.

Oddly, modern tuners tend to “stretch” even the octaves almost to the point of beating, so contrary to what may have been stated elsewhere on this thread, there are actually no perfect intervals on a contemporary piano.

It’s now thought that the techniques for tuning a piano in true equal temperament were only developed in the 20th century, and that the 19th century tunings, while close, left subtle tonal differences between the keys. Thus Beethoven, as you say, or Chopin, could change the color of their compositions slightly by changing key. There are specialists around now in so-called Victorian tunings, and most of your electronic tuning devices/programs have built in Victorian (and other historic) tunings to select.

[RTS]

Music is truly an amazing and all encompassing phenomenon. The website linked to by john_v_h (by Robert Fink) appears to be an excellent resource. Another interesting link is http://www.new-universe.com/pythagoras/mcclain.html . I myself play drums (acoustic and electronic -Yamaha DTX-11 with a Boss Jam Station5 and Roland CDX-1 DiskLab Digital Studio) guitar, sticks/bones and spoons. I do art galleries and coffee shops as a "21st Century One-Man Band". But with all the electronic technological wonders and gadgetry, it seem everyone enjoys my playing the 'Bones' and 'Spoons' most. I guess because 'Bones' is such a long forgotten ancient art.

[Jesse]

Here's an interesting article on why we like the sound of the 12-note scale:

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994031

Musical roots may lie in human voice

Key universal features in world music may have their roots in the ever-present sound of the human voice during the course of evolution, suggests a new study.

The analysis of thousands of recorded speech samples found peaks in acoustic energy that precisely mirror the distances between important notes in the twelve-tone scale, the system that forms the foundation of almost all music.

"The mysteries of music have a biologically principled explanation," says Dale Purves, at Duke University, North Carolina, and lead author of the study. "A reasonable speculation is that we hear these tonal relationships because they are involved in our interpretation of each other's speech."

As a slide whistle shows, it is possible to change seamlessly the pitch of a sound from low to high and back again. But for making music, human cultures have sliced the pitch dimension into twelve distinct tones.

...

The Duke researchers randomly extracted over 100,000 speech samples, each 0.1 second long, from recordings of thousands of English sentences. Acoustic analysis of the combined samples revealed 10 frequency peaks that match the most significant intervals used in musical scales worldwide.

Mandarin and Farsi

Moreover, the relative heights of the peaks backed numerous studies in which listeners ranked the harmoniousness of intervals. Speech in other languages - Mandarin, Farsi, and Tamil - also displayed the same pattern.

The frequency peaks are caused when a sound wave from the vocal cords is shaped by resonances of the throat and oral cavity. The researchers say that, aside from animal calls, speech emanating from oscillations of the human vocal cords is virtually the only natural sound that we hear as tones.

This fact, combined with the new finding that preferred musical intervals are better predicted by the acoustic quirks of the human vocal tract than by mathematics, leads the scientists to argue that the structure of music is rooted in our long exposure to the human voice over evolutionary time.

Some other links from this article:

Ability to tell music from noise could be hardwired (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999653)

Babies' musical memories formed in womb (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999994)

People really do have an innate sense of rhythm (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999828)

We all begin life with perfect pitch, but only some retain the skill (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999444)

Ability to judge musical pitch almost entirely inherited (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999497)

[spacer1]

Originally posted by Godless Wonder:
Of course the relationships of frequencies of the notes have specific mathematical properties, so maybe music is math, and our appreciation for it is just some weird artifact of how our hearing works.
It could also be said that colours (and their frequencies) have mathematical properties, which may highlight a similarity between painting and music. Another similarity between the two, and in answer to your question, I believe that the origin of music (and possibly all forms of art) is the expression of emotions. Just as certain colours may instill a certain mood, so do different chords and scales.
I've often wondered it if would be possible to build an electronic keyboard which would "know" what key you're playing in, and in real time, adjust the note frequencies to that key.
If the keyboard were to adjust the note frequencies, it would make playing the keyboard virtually impossible, since there would be no fixed "note" assigned to each key on the keyboard. Unless you mean, for example, if you were playing in the key of C and the keyboard just adjusted every note up a tone, such that you would actually be playing in D.

An interesting question.

[Godless Wonder]

Originally posted by spacer1 [...]
If the keyboard were to adjust the note frequencies, it would make playing the keyboard virtually impossible, since there would be no fixed "note" assigned to each key on the keyboard. Unless you mean, for example, if you were playing in the key of C and the keyboard just adjusted every note up a tone, such that you would actually be playing in D.

An interesting question. No, that's not what I meant. There would still be a note assigned to each key. (Forgive me if I explain (badly) what you already know.) Equal temperament is a way of tuning an instrument like a piano so a piece played in any key will sound reasonably good. Notes are ever so slightly out of tune in all keys. It is a compromise, or a "brutal hack" as described above, necessary because there is no possible ideal tuning. Now, you can retune your paino (in a half-hour to an hour or so, if you are good at it) so that a piece played in the key of say, C, will sound nice and in tune, but, if you then attempt to play a piece in another key, it will sound awful. When musicians are playing together, they generally know what key a piece is in (and a piece may change keys several times). If the electronic keyboard "knew" what key was being played, it could in real time adjust its tuning to match that key more precisely than equal temperament. An "A" would still be an "A", but tuned ever so slightly differently depending on the key. There are a number of problems with this i'm sure, i.e. a piece may purposely venture into an ambiguous key. Maybe there are other reasons it won't work, my music theory isn't that strong (hence the question.)

(And perhaps it's bad form to add on to an old, nearly forgotten thread, I don't know.)

[spacer1]

Originally posted by Godless Wonder:
And perhaps it's bad form to add on to an old, nearly forgotten thread, I don't know.
I don't know either, but I'm glad you replied. :)

I found this webpage (http://www.musicmasterworks.com/WhereMathMeetsMusic.html) interesting and very relevant.