Blue notes

[jancivil]

claims about music but in fact they are talking about sound. Notions that 135:128 is less stable than 1:1 for me are problematic, because they imply To whom, where and when? And if not, WHY?

Well, I did get into the mechanisms of hearing and acoustics. Do you actually find a minor second as stable as a unison? If not, do you know anyone who does? It'll be passing strange to assert it as such. Are you actually doing that or just being devil's advocate or arguing that towards this philosophical stuff?

For where I'm coming from, forgive me but I think I should post an example of music. That I talked about physical reality does not indicate I'm not talking about music. The idea of a semitone as a stable point musically, is there any reality to that? What do you mean, really.

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=484530&hilit=terra+incognita
This composition has a real ending. And, the seeming ending before the 'coda' final is a true ending. These are essentially cadences. However they are not stable according to most people's idea of that, in music. Musically, the voices lead to a final sonority; it's a dissonant sonority. Musically and acoustically, it's dissonant. It's still my conclusion to the action.

So do we want to argue Pelog as a musical system where the octave is not meaningful? Looking around the 'net I found that same factoid pasted in out of all context numerous times. But what is the actual thought here? Isn't the actual matter before us a stretched octave? I also found this:

Screen Shot 2017-11-27 at 1.25.52 PM.png

And the seemingly perfect 400 cents of the 12tET major 3rd is not found in nature. It's ~14¢ sharper than a simpler concord. Unstable? Where's the bulletproof argument here?
No, sorry, that factoid does not make the argument you want or imply that it does.

I'm one person here that does make music which exceeds an octave as a limit. Hear the thing I made, which can't be restricted to any particular temperament, as I'm using inharmonic materials... just as pelog will. I still stick to my account of stability as a real thing. The ending sonority is not stable. Or is it? Is that your point? That I'm going with physicality and acoustics for that word does not mean I'm not talking about music.

[Musicologo]

Steve and JanCivil, in a nutshell: I don't believe it's possible to meaningful* general statements about music which are rigorous. Either they are about sound or the production of sounds (and then you can be rigorous) or if they are about music (implying a great deal on how sounds are perceived and conceptualized and embodied) they're all stereotypes. Because yes, the difference between sound and music is that music implies a "whom, when and where".

Saying "X interval is stable" Is basically like saying "Mary likes Doughnuts", it is kinda meaningless. Mary? Which Mary?... There are so many Marys. You would have to say "Mary Winslet, from Fort Lauderdale in 20/07/1945 said she likes doughnuts". That you can say.

The same way you can say "X interval [that has been historically defined as] stable [by some physicians in some context, based on some study] and it is PERCEIVED as stable to ME", or "X interval is perceived as stable by a sample of 400 individuals studied in 1980 in study Z"...

Otherwise such claims are as useful as saying "Blonds are dumb" or "Poor are obese". They are stereotypes. Perhaps they can be useful in communication to some extent, but not much more than that.

I'd be curious if you had the opportunity to ask those bulgarian woman what they think of unisons versus those kind of half-tone dyads. I mean, there are a lot of traditions in homophonic singing, why aren't they singing in unison? Perhaps they don't find unisons "stable" and prefer those complex intervals... This example will haunt me for years to come until I have a reasonable explanation for it (along with other outliers around the world).

Your excerpt regarding Pelog scales has the exact same problem identified earlier. "found [...] are often not judged as perceptually"... there you go... by whom, where and when? And this finding then shaped a theory establishing a "norm"? And how to explain the outliers that arised? etc...

Stereotypes and statistics and norms are useful to a certain extent. But I'd think about what we need them for and be also aware WHY there are outliers and how to explain them. In Music the outliers are often far more fascinating than the norm, and they are the ones that often can drive innovation, change and create new "norms" some decades later...

Why would anyone wants to study "norms" and stereotyoes? To emulate them? To mass produce a bunch of derivatives? To try to induce emotion X in an imagined targeted audience of "consumers" of "published commodities" for profit? There we have a teleology. If that's the goal fine, but then I think we're missing the most essential misteries about music...

[jancivil]

Your excerpt regarding Pelog scales has the exact same problem identified earlier. "found [...] are often not judged as perceptually"... there you go... by whom, where and when? And this finding then shaped a theory establishing a "norm"? And how to explain the outliers that arised? etc...

What you did was quickly scan this and cherry-pick something which suited your previous argumentation. The word perception is perfect for that, isn't it. No, the entire idea of presenting that was all through it they were considering the octave in Pelog and Slendro. Concretely it's a little tiny bit stretched from 2:1. All the way to 2.004:1. But you have no use for the concrete, it's all about 'perception' and muddying the waters: 'whose perception'? While you thought you had a rhetorical question, ie., a statement which will overwhelm everything else, here's the answer: Everybody who's considered this, pretty much.

Stereotypes and statistics and norms ...

OMG. The entirety of your reply is a sophistry. You're not really engaging anyone's ideas. The problem here is I approach this all from a practicing musician's perspective and as materials and there's really no sign that you understand the materials technically or care to even consider these as techniques or materials, it's all just something as a launchpad for this philosophical stuff which you seem to think is above practical musicianship. Which you signaled before with the effort to make the term "music theory" into something else, ie., ethnomusicology is superior to 'music theory' because it has theories of the mind, and theories of why. So we're just at cross-purposes here, I'm done.

[Musicologo]

I think I'm just not being understood. It's not philosophy, it's science and theory but starting from the actual practices not the other way around - in your case we'd have to see your concepts and materials and explain them but not resorting to "western music theory"... But a total new one, fortunately other people, probably native english can explain these things better than me:

http://flypaper.soundfly.com/write/phil ... -tonality/

I think this makes more sense.

[slipstick]

The giveaway in that article you pointed to is very early on where it complains that "standard music theory" doesn't adequately explain every type of music in the world. That's true but then it doesn't claim to.

It sounds like you're saying that there is no point having any theories until you have a "Theory of Everything". But that not science it's directly opposing the way it works. In science you take an area of interest, study it and come up with theories explaining that area then move on. You don't say "Oh my theory of quantum gravity doesn't explain why grass is green so it's useless".

Music appreciation is partly physical and partly cultural. Standard "Western" music theory is based on some physical realities and a particular culture and history. Other cultures appreciate the same physical realities differently. It is interesting to look at the way they work as well as the way "Western" music works. But it is "as well" not instead.

Steve

[jancivil]

I think I'm just not being understood.

No, you are making vague yet dismissive statements like <135:128 as less stable than 1:1 is "problematic"> as you find it subjective in order to seem like you are doing something except bullshitting us. I was too patient, that's just nonsense. Then you did that fatuous bit with pelog/slendro to try and fake something. It's not far enough off an octave to not be an octave. If you had ever, for a moment, considered ratios in intonation soberly, I mean to give it any consideration you will have learned how absurd that assertion was. And when one shows you something which really proves something is fact rather than vague pseudo-philosophical point-free wandering you dismiss it and act like no one knows anything. I managed to hit on it right here, the whole thrust is post-modernist 'No one knows anything'. It's the worst kind of sophistry, and it's the worst because it's intellectually dishonest.

And this 'ethnomusicology' as superior to everything a practical musician looks into in the realm of KNOWLEDGE may work for you as a way to not bother knowing demonstrable, useful things about music but it's truly not worth seeing anymore. I'm irritated to have kept seeing it because what it represented to me was a serious failure of respect where you would do well to find some.

Putting you on ignore now.

[aciddose]

Integral ratios like 2, 3, 4 are not "intervals" at all but rather merely harmonics. You need a fraction which has a non-unity LCM/GCD ("unstable") in order to make the note distinct from other integer harmonics played together. In other words harmonic tones are more like EQ rather than discrete notes, they only emphasize or reduce through interference the existing elements of the fundamental tone.

In that sense it's like singing "EEEE" vs. "AAAA" vs. "IIII" on the same note. The timbre is modified but not the note/melody.

It's especially important to make the distinction between discussion of chords (harmonics don't matter, they're merely modifications of the fundamental) vs. melody (harmonics do matter, playing 1, 3, 5 discretely in time means they're no longer going to blend with the fundamental.)

If that distinction isn't made it just makes the whole discussion look very, very stupid. Pointless ranting and bickering about nothing at all. Typical for anything you see jancivil involved in.

[aciddose]

You don't say "Oh my theory of quantum gravity doesn't explain why grass is green so it's useless".

Well technically it does make the theory useless, as it's clearly not represented in observable reality. So the theory is reduced to working in only a subset of possible observations: it's known to be flawed and incomplete.

You can then use that theory to make predictions, but those predictions are known to be inaccurate except in very specific circumstances. That's the definition of a useless prediction: "we can predict so long as we already know ..."

So in that sense any music theory that is unable to cope with music outside its limited scope is inherently ad hoc and severely flawed.

The scientific method simply stated is: "We can safely assume our theory is flawed, we'll continue to test it until we can find out how and we'll fix it."

There is a word for that: learning.

[aciddose]

A bit further on that thought:

For example consider "new physics" or "new music". If we know that our theory is ad hoc, it means we know that we do not know something important that would allow us to connect currently separate parts together. That "theoretical glue" is "new physics". We can't say for certain now that time travel is absolutely impossible because we lack a "theory of everything": maybe the glue that can connect those parts is made up of what makes time travel possible.

Look way back to Maxwell's theory. This was "new physics" and we're using technologies based upon that research and theory right now. A new theory is all about discovery of new things that we didn't know existed and the discovery of that "glue" that allows us to bind a new theory that wraps them all up.

That western music theory is demonstrably ad hoc only means that you should be excited by the fact that there definitely are various sorts of "new music" out there yet to be discovered.

[aciddose]

Well, to me the four notes of my example played at the same time don't sound harmonic, there is something wrong about it, unless I play the C# an octave or two lower.

I vaguely remember that term from school. I thought blue note means a note that does not fit in and sounds wrong. Then again, school was decades ago

To answer your question in a practical way:

You're talking about a combination of ratios. For example if you look at the number of cycles of the lowest note of a chord that are required to "line up" the phase of all other notes/harmonics it should become obvious.

It would probably help if you used just intonation rather than equal temperament. You could compare the results and confirm that the ratios in JI create the same effect approximated by ET.

Then, given the ratios of the notes from the JI you use you can write down all those ratios and compute the number of cycles required to form a complete cycle for the chord. You'll most likely find that given the lower octave note you end with a much lower number than the higher octave note.

Similar to: 27/9 = 3/3 = 1, Vs 54/9 = 6/3 = 2

When you get more dissonant ratios involved you're dealing with numbers like 39 vs. 457 instead of just 1 vs 2.

So you can mess around with fractions if you like, this is what they mean when they say "more stable": it's a stupid way to say "a smaller number".

... but if you use "music theory" terms it makes you look "really cool" like one of these dicks:


Just add wizard hats and staves.

[jancivil]

pelog/slendro and 'octave equivalence':

It's not far enough off an octave to not be an octave. If you had ever, for a moment, considered ratios in intonation soberly, I mean to give it any consideration you will have learned how absurd that assertion was.

What I found was 4 or 6 cents off a '2:1'. And the very dry consideration of the matter by people looking at it as though a science problem hit upon the term 'stretch tuning'.

Another area here where we'll see that same term is piano tuning. So with a stretched piano tuning we encounter the very thing we saw from Musicologo trying to make the word 'stable' seem suspect. And as I noted, the major third in 12tET is significantly more different than nature's '5:4 third' than the supposedly so different octave on a gamelan is from 2:1. As an example of culture making terms moot it's incompetent. It makes the entire thesis fall on its face because we find someone bullshitting us. That's a strong word but it's keeping it real as the kids say.

So, was there anyone else who really finds a semitone sounding at the same time as stable as a unison (or a stretched piano {IE., all actual pianos}) 'octave' once we reach the point were it's measurably stretched)? In any culture. It's not subjective. It's not as easily reducible as some will like, but the term dissonant might have a concrete basis. That it doesn't always will be subjective. I hope that is clear.

[aciddose]

It's trivial to demonstrate that an octave is merely a 1/2 ratio which is the smallest possible ratio, the divisor = 2. That said an octave isn't an "interval", nor are other integer ratios like 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on.

They're harmonics. Arguably all harmonics are inherently "stable" because that's what a harmonic is: an integer ratio!

[aciddose]

It's important also to realize that "an octave" is the same up or down. If you go up, the ratio is 2. If you go down the ratio is 2 but applied to the notes above! (AKA a reciprocal.)

For example:

(C4, C5)
1, 2
(C4, C3)
1, 1/2

This is merely out-of-order and by sorting them we can eliminate the fraction:
(C3, C4)
1, 2

The lowest note becomes the fundamental or principal, in other words the divisor of all other larger ratios. It's the unit (equals 1.)

[aciddose]

Even further (more obvious stuff):

When you have a collection of ratios, given JI as an example a common ratio is 5/3. This can't be divided by the unit, which redefines the unit! We now need to look at the fundamental itself as a harmonic while the true unit becomes the "hidden fundamental". If the integer result is that 1 and 5/3 must be harmonics 3 and 5, the real root of the chord is now harmonic 1 even though it isn't played.

The more "dissonant" the ratios are the lower the "hidden fundamental" will need to be for the other notes to become harmonic.

Playing a chord with harmonics like 297, 453 and 1091 will be ultra-dissonant and way out of the range of human hearing.

As an example, a common male vocal range is approximately 100 to 200 Hz while technically we can hear more than seven octaves above that, the vocal phoneme range is to approximately 3.2 kHz or about 5 or 6 octaves.

2^5 = 32 which is probably going to reflect the mid-point within which consonance graduates to dissonance.

So if you're playing chords that end up as harmonics greater than ~32, these will most likely be "more dissonant" chords across all cultures. Below that they will likely be "more consonant".

I suspect that as far as forming a theory this is merely speculative and although the ranges of numbers all very closely match observed reality I'd prefer to look to the neurosciences to discover the mechanisms for the implementation of our ability to identify ratios in the auditory and related systems.

"Wait, speech recognition is about harmonic ratios?" ... well, probably. It's likely the same circuitry can perform various tasks and ratios are definitely a part of the function of neuronal circuits. If you look at how "machine learning" circuits behave or look at real signals measured from neurons, it certainly seems to function much like an analog computer with ratios, log/exp, charge/discharge cycles, communication via pulses and so on involved.

I'd bet on all these properties being emergent from underlying functions.

We're currently at the level of four basic elements of nature as far as that field goes...

[jancivil]

a stretch.png

NB., concluding sentence ^

So is it less stable than a real unison? Science problem or cultural...

https://thewinnower.com/papers/2861-an- ... dro-tuning

ANALYSIS

OCTAVE
For both the Barung and the Demung, the octave tone is a few hertz higher than the theoretical octave, which would be the frequency times 2. This is called octave stretching, and is a normal feature of tuned instruments. By octave stretching, a scales tones correspond closer to how harmonics (such as the octave) actually sound, rather than their theoretical values[vi].



I'm somewhat familiar with the music. There are things in it that will disturb a western-entrained ear, but this is not it.

<Carterette and Kendalls recorded interval for the note 2 and note 3, incredibly, are almost exactly equal to the just intervals 8 / 7, and 21/16..

image003.png

image004.png

This is a level of exactness that would exceed anyones anyone standard for precision in tuning. For instruments in the middle range of human hearing, it would take a full 20 seconds for a beat duration between 8/7 and Carterette and Kendalls recorded average for Slendro note 2.

Kendall and Cartettes recorded interval for note 5 and note 6 deviates from what we recorded from Arizona State Universitys Javanese orchestra. Note 5 roughly corresponds to 3 / 2. To my knowledge, Kendall and Carterettes recorded value for note 6 has no strong similarity to a simple just interval, it sits roughly equally between just intervals 7 / 4 and 12 / 7, and is closer to the equal tempered note . It could be that Slendro notes 6 in Gamelan orchestras, are always tuned in equal proportion to either 7 / 4 or 12 / 7.>

I also pre-apprenticed (decided against committing) as a piano tuner. It's an art. If we were to tune it by a strobe, by machine, it would be gross. There's too much going on with resonance and so forth.

So this group found that some of the tunings were probably done to create 'beating' on purpose.
That's technically 'less stable'. It is probably supposed to be artistically less stable.

But the use of factoids such as these to do 'all bets are off as to even talking about stability in musical materials' is pure sophistry and it does nothing positive for anybody. It's the opposite of scientific and it's culturally and artistically ignorant.