Blue notes

[tapper mike]

Agrees with JC

[slipstick]

Agrees with JC

Let's keep religion out of this .

Steve

[Bojmir Raj Raj]

Blue note is something else. On the guitar for example it is when you slightly bend the string so you produce a tone just slightly off pitch

Yes, but oddly enough the "off" is off from 12-tone equal temperament, but the blue note is, strictly speaking, *more* on pitch. It's more in tune with the natural harmonic series- blue notes in AfroAmerican music are more in tune with the seventh partial of the harmonic series, whereas the pitches of 12-tet are compromised to be fairly close to in tune with the first five harmonic partials. Hundreds of years ago in Europe, here was a lot of discussion about extending western music further up the harmonic series, but the musicians who actually did this were Africans in the US.

[Jafo]

Blue note is something else. On the guitar for example it is when you slightly bend the string so you produce a tone just slightly off pitch

Yes, but oddly enough the "off" is off from 12-tone equal temperament, but the blue note is, strictly speaking, *more* on pitch. It's more in tune with the natural harmonic series- blue notes in AfroAmerican music are more in tune with the seventh partial of the harmonic series, whereas the pitches of 12-tet are compromised to be fairly close to in tune with the first five harmonic partials. Hundreds of years ago in Europe, here was a lot of discussion about extending western music further up the harmonic series, but the musicians who actually did this were Africans in the US.

Couldn't agree more. Well said, sir!

Although, on fixed-pitch equal temperament instruments, a blue note is nothing more than a note flattened by a half-step, such as a minor third or seventh or a diminished fifth. It seems that the guitarists followed the keys' example, then learned to milk the bend from the flattened note to the blue note and up to the equally tempered note.

Me, I'd rather stick mostly with the neutral thirds and sevenths, since they work beautifully with both major and minor, and use the juicy bends for emphasis. (I'll leave the over-emoting to Al Pacino!)

[jancivil]

It appears to be true that vocalizing tends to follow something more on the order of overtones than the total artifice of 12 tone equal temperament, yes. I find the 11th partial of interest, halfway between 'flat 5' and P5 in that scale. If you produce it opening up a filter or via amplifier feedback it comes off as #11 to me, oddly enough.

[jancivil]

Now, when I add the C# right next to that C, it sounds wrong,

One should move past the notion of 'wrong' in music'; it's *dissonant*. It will have some use case where it's exactly right.

[goldenhelix]

One reason some intervals sound more stable is because of combination tones. These are the mathematical difference between the two frequencies (at very close proximity this is called the "beat frequency", i.e. if you have 440 and 442 playing simultaneously, you hear an audible pulse at 2 hz). Octaves are the most stable because their combination frequency reinforces the lower tone, i.e. if you have 220 and 440 playing, the difference is 220 which adds gravity to the 220. The combination tone produced by the fifth is an octave lower than the lowest note of the fifth (i.e. if you have 440 and 660, the difference is 220). The reason you hear the upper tone of the perfect fourth as the root and not the other way around is because it produces the combination tone two octaves lower than the upper tone (which adds both emphasis to that tone and also creates a "hidden" fifth relationship between the combination tone and the lowest tone of the fourth). As you progress up the harmonic series beyond a fourth, the combination tones produced aren't reinforcing either of the original two tones, i.e. if you play a C and E, the combination tone isn't an octave doubling of either of those two notes.

[Musicologo]

And yet we have pelog and slendro scales without octave equivalence, we have lapps singing in between 11.9 and 12.15 semitones octaves, we have all sorts of microtonal songs in several parts of the world, and all these people don't seem to find those notes "wrong" neither "dissonant", "tense", "unstable" neither they seem to care about the beating frequencies. Same people call notes "heavy" and "light", "fat", "old", "young" instead of "high" or "low". Therefore all these things about "blue notes", "stable", "right or wrong", "Consonance"/"dissonance", "octave equivalence" and mathematical ratios equating some of those definitions must be taken with a very big grain of salt. We know lots of patterns that seem to unite a big part of human beings. However, there are many differences and exceptions that need to be explained, and these redutionist models fail to account for those. I'm growing more interested in finding explanations for diversity, inovation and change than those patterns (even the term "Blue" is metaphorical coming from some place... why not yellow or red note?).

[goldenhelix]

And yet we have pelog and slendro scales without octave equivalence, we have lapps singing in between 11.9 and 12.15 semitones octaves, we have all sorts of microtonal songs in several parts of the world, and all these people don't seem to find those notes "wrong" neither "dissonant", "tense", "unstable" neither they seem to care about the beating frequencies. Same people call notes "heavy" and "light", "fat", "old", "young" instead of "high" or "low". Therefore all these things about "blue notes", "stable", "right or wrong", "Consonance"/"dissonance", "octave equivalence" and mathematical ratios equating some of those definitions must be taken with a very big grain of salt. We know lots of patterns that seem to unite a big part of human beings. However, there are many differences and exceptions that need to be explained, and these redutionist models fail to account for those. I'm growing more interested in finding explanations for diversity, inovation and change than those patterns (even the term "Blue" is metaphorical coming from some place... why not yellow or red note?).

If this is in response to what I said, I think you misunderstand me. I said this makes certain ratios sound stable or whatever word you want to choose for it. That doesn't in any way say that other tone combinations can't sound pleasing, especially if you grew up hearing them in whatever culture you were raised in. You have to remember that culture does not necessarily follow the path of least resistance, so to speak. And even if it did, it would not preclude the evolution of unique tastes. There will be deviation in any system, but the fact that octaves and fifths (more or less) are so common if anything lends support to what I said, rather than the deviation detracting support from it.

As far as explaining, for example, octaves that are not exactly octaves, Hindemith (who is the main source when talking about my aforementioned "combination tones") talks about how he believes that the brain deals in approximations when it comes to frequency ratios. He even forwards the idea that major and minor thirds aren't even that different when you get down to it because there are regions between them where it becomes difficult to say whether it is major or minor. He would surely argue that octaves tuned microtones apart would still be heard as essentially octaves.

As for the words used to describe these things, they are unfortunately the best we've got. Meaning, we can't really talk about music using... not-words. Saying an interval is "dissonant" or "tense" might not be ideal because it has connotations that might not be 100% accurate but if you have other suggestions, I think we're all ears. I stand by the fact that "tense" is the best word I've encountered so far to talk about more complex frequency ratios. The confusion arises because, as I said, this word connotes that there is discomfort when one hears these intervals, which is not necessarily the case. I've seen this before where people contend something like "how can it be 'tense' if X culture doesn't have a problem with them or hear them as dissonant?" Keep in mind that tension, as I believe it is usefully used in the context of music, does not at all mean that it is not pleasing or that it is uncomfortable. Tension can mean excitement or any other equivalent form of internal excitement. It should occur to you that maybe Bulgarian women singing "tense" dyads IS tense even to them, who find it "normal". That doesn't contradict that they might find it consonant or pleasing. I believe that the human brain is incapable of not hearing complex frequency ratios as some elevation in harmonic tension, but what this means for the specific emotions or tastes is another matter. The thing about "tension" (as I and other people are defining it) is a subconscious thing. You might say "I don't hear it as tense" but then you're not talking about the same thing. The analogy here is that you might not think it really hurts to have someone pinch the skin on your arm. You might even think it feels good. That doesn't change the fact that your brain received a signal saying your arm was being pinched.

[Musicologo]

What ethnomusicologists say is that we need to understand the concepts, shaping the behaviours to then understand the resulting sounds. This applies to everyone in every culture including yours. Therefore the concepts need to be well-defined and understood. "Tense" was ill-defined. In my culture for instance, it has connotations associated with physical manifestations of disconfort, unpleasantness, etc...

You seem to be using the word "tense" to just describe some kinds of relative differences in frequencies and frequency ratios. Therefore when you say «this interval is tense "per se"» this sentence just means something like "this interval is tense because this ratio is present."

So you apply an "emic" concept "tense" to describe something that you expect to be actually ethic/universal because it is mensurable, quantifiable. Therefore get rid of that word "tense" and work with a more precise definition explaining that quantification. Natural sciences do that all the time. You could say something like "intervals with frequency ratios of irrational numbers", or "intervals that deviate more than x% from a rational quotient", etc...

Just saying "tense" is meaningless. Hence, if you use a precise ethic concept measurable and quantifiable, reproducible, then you can put hypothesis and test them. And see where, when and to whom they aply or not and try to explain why they fail when then fail. Also, you can be apt to understand what words people use to describe those ratios. An American might call "tense" to a dyad while those bulgarian women not, because they just feel and physically experience them differently: the concepts emerge after the fact. You might insist they listen to the same ratio - and then with that precise definition we can test it, and the brain is affected by the same ratio, but then the implications and feelings and names given are diverse. And that has to be explained: why those people are experiencing them differently.

This also connects with OP question and what I've put above: why BLUE note and not red or yellow note. What is after all a "blue note" (ethically - is something that can be quantifyable, mensurable, reproducible?) and why people call it that way? If we find out what is a blue note can we see how people experience it in other cultures and what names they give them (if any), etc...?

[goldenhelix]

What ethnomusicologists say is that we need to understand the concepts, shaping the behaviours to then understand the resulting sounds. This applies to everyone in every culture including yours. Therefore the concepts need to be well-defined and understood. "Tense" was ill-defined. In my culture for instance, it has connotations associated with physical manifestations of disconfort, unpleasantness, etc...

Which is precisely why I attempted to define it more clearly for those who don't seem to understand what I am referring to. To re-iterate, this is not my own meaning of the word that I have arbitrarily invented and expect others to follow. If you read literature dealing with this subject matter, this is a term that is used and it does not have anything to do with discomfort even though the ordinary meaning of the word can connote that.

You seem to be using the word "tense" to just describe some kinds of relative differences in frequencies and frequency ratios. Therefore when you say «this interval is tense "per se"» this sentence just means something like "this interval is tense because this ratio is present."

I don't understand the distinction. An interval IS a ratio... if you have another way of quantifying it, I'd love for you to explain it to me.

So you apply an "emic" concept "tense" to describe something that you expect to be actually ethic/universal because it is mensurable, quantifiable. Therefore get rid of that word "tense" and work with a more precise definition explaining that quantification. Natural sciences do that all the time. You could say something like "intervals with frequency ratios of irrational numbers", or "intervals that deviate more than x% from a rational quotient", etc...

I actually made it pretty clear that what I am talking about and what people in this subject refer to as "tense" is a relative thing and increases as the ratios become more complex and thus produce different combination tones. Or weren't you reading? All intervals occupy some part of the "tension" spectrum. No one here is attempting to say at one point an interval becomes "tense", at one point it is completely lacking in tension (although octaves and unisons are basically that) and at one point it is of absolute tension.

Just saying "tense" is meaningless. Hence, if you use a precise ethic concept measurable and quantifiable, reproducible, then you can put hypothesis and test them. And see where, when and to whom they aply or not and try to explain why they fail when then fail. Also, you can be apt to understand what words people use to describe those ratios. An American might call "tense" to a dyad while those bulgarian women not, because they just feel and physically experience them differently: the concepts emerge after the fact.

This is a bit hypocritical because you're telling me I have to apply scientific rigor to what I'm saying but you're ignoring that if I were to explain the concept of "tension" as it is used to talk about harmonic elevation to Bulgarian women they would necessarily disagree that aforementioned dyads are "tense". You don't know that because 1. you haven't done it and 2. you have already concluded and are apparently incapable of distancing yourself from the assumption that "tense" refers to "unpleasant", which I'm now stating for the however-many-th time that it does not. The quicker you get over that, the more likely we'll actually be talking about the same thing.

[jancivil]

And yet we have pelog and slendro scales without octave equivalence, we have lapps singing in between 11.9 and 12.15 semitones octaves, we have all sorts of microtonal songs in several parts of the world, and all these people don't seem to find those notes "wrong" neither "dissonant", "tense", "unstable" neither they seem to care about the beating frequencies. Same people call notes "heavy" and "light", "fat", "old", "young" instead of "high" or "low". Therefore all these things about "blue notes", "stable", "right or wrong", "Consonance"/"dissonance", "octave equivalence" and mathematical ratios equating some of those definitions must be taken with a very big grain of salt.

I'm going to be direct and frank here. What use is this to have for anyone?
No, a ratio tells us a fact about an interval in the systems which are 'rational' in the construction of a set of tones. Take facts for what they are, no salt. 135:128 is not as stable as 1:1. I don't think the human perception agrees with the reductions of Helmholtz as easily as all that, but I would venture to suppose my statement there as a fact. The notion of how unstable or dissonant can be subjective. This is why in the other thread I posed a certain cluster as not less stable than a major triad. Acoustically. Now it may be that many of use are conditioned to where dissonance is more objectionable and anything the other side of that major triad is unacceptable as a final. Yet, at a certain point the assertion regarding clusters will be sort of just true because of certain things known about nature, including acoustics and including the human ear as the receiving transducer. IE: I don't necessarily mind a piece ending on a real dissonance (& I don't need conventionality to rule over my thought) but that does not mean that isn't what it is. OTOH I accept more action in a sonority as consonant than some will. So, if we are to speak meaningfully with each other we have to define things.

I'm someone that makes music with quite some dissonance. I've used the scale approximated from the overtone series as a fabric in my music (regarding <no octave equivalence>) and 'microtonality' accrues from there. I enjoy having knowledge about differences.

The Gamelan musics have a shape and a form and there is definitely beginning, middle and end in the forms, so there is certainly a point where an idea completes, with a type of resolution. It does nothing for us to bring in an isolated fact such as that as though it obliterates the notion of tension and repose in music.

You seem to want to blur actual differences as though the people that are interested (and interest tends to accord with usefulness) are being closed-minded and it's the ethnomusicologist that knows better. Give us a break. You might rather try and understand people and their statements rather than talk at the room as a big sort of strawman in order to present your thesis.

[jancivil]

What ethnomusicologists say is that we need to understand the concepts, shaping the behaviours to then understand the resulting sounds. This applies to everyone in every culture including yours. Therefore the concepts need to be well-defined and understood. "Tense" was ill-defined. In my culture for instance, it has connotations associated with physical manifestations of disconfort, unpleasantness, etc...
[...]An American might call "tense" to a dyad while those bulgarian women not, because they just feel and physically experience them differently: the concepts emerge after the fact.

Yeah, well, you are not being rigorous at all here. Which dyad?
"An American" - I'm an American and I would not take a major second dyad as a problem.
(I don't even know what you're on about there. And I don't want to guess.)
When you see us here talking about tensions, it just might be we know exactly what we mean, cultural interest notwithstanding. There are definite problems with your rhetoric and one should advise you at this juncture that it makes your presentation of your thesis appear half-baked.

[Musicologo]

Good and fair points Jancivil. Mind that I'm not english native speaker and sometimes I have difficulties in expressing myself in a way that I can be easily understood.

My current thesis is that natural sciences and some philosophers depart from the wrong basis. Often they depart from a certain emic notion of "music" that they seem to take for granted as "ethic" and try to make universalistic 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?

Natural sciences often try to find patterns and use statistics, and then build redutionist models that will have "outliers" and "deviations" to the "norm". Everything/everyone that is not on the "norm" is often left unexplained (or even dismissed or seen in a negative light), and then the applications are built and suited to serve the "norm". Often procedures become standardized to reproduce more efficiently "the norm". I think this a possible approach if you have this end in sight. In music we often have seen this specially linked with publishing industries and music as commodity. This kind of ideologies shape numerous musical practices nowadays and they seem to be on the base of notions as "correct ways of doing X" and other teleologies.

On the other hand on social sciences or on an anthropology based musicology one often starts from case studies. There is no "norm" there are multiple invidiuals in a certain context and therefore there is a lot of diversity and one tries to explain this diversity. Therefore I think this is a more appropriate to treat people and individuals, to value them, to learn from them their concepts, behaviours and resulting sounds, than seeing them as "outliers" left unexplained because they become "useless" in some teleological views.

Insted of just saying 135:128 is more stable than 1:1 one can state that "for this person 1 in place A, time B, the interval 135:128 is a very stable joyful interval BECAUSE of..., while for person 2 it is not because of...". This should be very valuable knowledge about reality.*

There is not a universal definition of music. Certainly physicists and neuroscientists can study sound and the brains, but the moment they start making claims on "music" I get very skeptic because they are often wrong or incomplete about it. Because music is not the repertoires, music is not the sounds.

So the usefulness of my posts, I think, is to raise awareness to these issues and that music is not absolute, there is not "one music theory" and that instead there are specialists out there dedicated to the scienfic knowledge of the musics of the world in context (and not merely sound) that might help explain the outliers and diversity and give a more accurate view of the world.

My examples are concrete examples of perceived outliers (in some cases the outliers are actually very numerous and might surpass the "norm" - how many people have practices based NOT on 12TET or complex intervals?) for many of which I still don't have an explanation that illustrates that reality is complex and no physical simple model can explain it all.

I'm very interested in knowing more about WHY these diversities exist and I often feel frustrated by these over-simplifications and the transmission of them as "absolute truths". I know this is "just" a forum but still... I've learnt so much from these kind of discussions along the years in internet forums, I think it's a useful process.

*I think if one wants to be rigorous could make claims as "irrational ratio intervals have been perceived as tense, unconfortable or unstable to a sample of 400 people tested in place X, time Y", therefore we are now defining them as "tense". This is something natural scientists can certainly do, but when one does this, this is already implying a certain teleology and the mere publication and reproduction of these results and discourses will shape practices and have consequences.

[slipstick]

So what you are saying, to my simplistic mind, is that what is considered music depends on who is playing and/or listening to it? That's certainly true but it doesn't get you very far. Anything is music to someone if they or even the society they exist in think it is music? I think we all knew that didn't we?

But you're saying I can't make any useful statements about the way sounds are organised to be considered as music unless to every statement I add "in some modern extensions to the Western classical tradition" or "in the Balinese tradition" or "in the Indian classical Carnatic tradition". Too long-winded to have any point. Of course I'm talking about my tradition unless I explicitly say otherwise.

Steve