dudes, don't be dissin' intelligent design

it's intellimagent

Jeebus had OCD for sure.

his fixation with hoes and wine is something to behold!

and practically invented bling when he dragged around that giant cross

You've done him proud with ur serialized display Vurt.

... surfing too!

I agree and interesting indeed. However the question wasn't what makes consonance or dissonance or what makes sound pleasing to us, that was just some points that I brought up in proposing why these scales came to be in the first place, which I took to be the question.

I do find the question of "why do we find certain timbres or musical intervals to be pleasing?" to be one of those "what is the meaning of life?" type questions, difficult to answer to say the least. However I don't find the question of "why do we have scales?" to be quite so deep. That's more like asking where certain words or tools came from. The cultures from which these scales arose found that certain combinations of frequencies sound pleasing, or elicited some kind of emotional response (don't forget that even certain intervals were banned in certain times, like the evil augmented 4th in renaissance music). The physical tools they had at the time such as stringed instruments were also able to be tuned in such a way that they co9uld hit many of these pleasing frequencies close enough when an octave (doubled frequency, no beating) was divided up into equally spaced divisions (equal temperament), or frequencies that seemed to want to move to them.

So my little explanations may be only part of the story, but I think for someone who genuinely may not know or have thought about the mathematical relationships between the notes of these scales, it could still be informative. I remember the first time I learned about the ratios of many of the most common chord notes, I was pretty amazed.
Last edited by Echoes in the Attic on Wed Jun 20, 2012 7:14 am; edited 1 time in total

This thread is a chuckle

Hoe jokes never get old

Unlike religion which any civilised culture would have put on the back bench at least 100 years ago
I still dont understand how christians (and other religions) can be so blind to the fact their religion is an amalgamation of pagan and egyptian beliefs based on the zodiac and other cosmic cycles and there is no historical record of a Jesus Christ, besides the biblical fictions, the first of which was written several hundred years after his supposed death.


Damn, I think I brought the tone down

Back on topic

Sure, but it's so close to 5:4 that our brains would perceive it basically as such wouldn't you say? I detune synth oscillators because I like the sound, and a guitar can still sound good to us slightly detuned on some strings but we can still enjoy those intervals as if they were perfect. Which leads to another point however which is that although we gravitate to these pure ratios, I think we enjoy imperfection from them as well, but that gets into a whole other story.

for some reason frequency ratios are pleasing or displeasing.
hmm

I agree

We can talk about religion in Hyde Park I guess,
I like that one-
'treat thy neighbour as oneself' or somesuch
Koran has too.
Science has all the percievable really,
spirit is not percievable.

That's because it doesn't exist.


Anyway.
What makes something musically pleasing to us is mostly a matter of our listening environment as we develop. There is music that offends me as it was/is not a part of my culture. I'm sure there are other cultures where my music is less then palatable to them.

Just as there are fashion statements that disgust me but others find visually satisfying.