Just & Equal Temperaments

[vurt]

so now youre prsuming to tell me about my own experiences?

ITS NOT RARE!!!

If you see well defined colours and shapes clearly with your eyes open when you hear sounds it is extremely rare.

pandas are extremely rare.
in this thread alone we have already named as many people that we know of as there are giant pandas.
do you think every case is documented? no, because most people dont realise that they have synaesthesia of any kind because its natural to them and doesnt cause any actual problems, the only reason composers and such come to light more prevalently than the average joe is because of anecdotes about them asking orchestras for more blue or more definition in the lines.
even those composers listed if you read about them didnt walk around seeing colours everytime they heard a sound, in most cases it was when actively composing or conducting or playing.

[Dreamw]

so now youre prsuming to tell me about my own experiences?

ITS NOT RARE!!!

If you see well defined colours and shapes clearly with your eyes open when you hear sounds it is extremely rare.

pandas are extremely rare.
in this thread alone we have already named as many people that we know of as there are giant pandas.
do you think every case is documented? no, because most people dont realise that they have synaesthesia of any kind because its natural to them and doesnt cause any actual problems, the only reason composers and such come to light more prevalently than the average joe is because of anecdotes about them asking orchestras for more blue or more definition in the lines.
even those composers listed if you read about them didnt walk around seeing colours everytime they heard a sound, in most cases it was when actively composing or conducting or playing.

Aye thats true , accurate statistics on the subject are quite hard to come by. Thats what I was saying - people who see sounds every time they hear a colour (damn Im getting confused now ) are very rare.
This study by Boston university is a good source of info :

http://www.bu.edu/neuropsychology/synvc.html#q5

How common is synesthesia?
The short answer is that no one really knows. The long answer is anywhere from one in every 100,000 people to one in every 5,000 people, but it's difficult to get a good count

Over half of them would see coloured letters.

[Meffy]

pandas are extremely rare.

Still enough around to give Brent Sienna his comeuppance now and then. He needs comeupping more than most folks do.
http://www.pvponline.com/article/1496/Sun-Jan-05

[JumpingJackFlash]

but like I said before, your ear is the only measure of how well something sounds, so unfortunately math is most likely useless.

I wish someone had said this to Schöenberg (et al.) before he started out

I agree with this completely - in fact my ear is what judges whether the experiment is successful or not. Where I feel a lot of contempory composers such as Xenakis fall down sometimes.
I met a guy who said he got into just intonation . He said at first it sounded off key but after a while it just sounded "right" after that all music written in the equal tempered scale sounded out of key. This has been reported by a couple of musicians, so perhaps the fact that the ratios are precise mathematical divisions of the octave does have an effect on the perceived quality of the music . eg perfect fifth is maths and that works so there may be some relationship between maths and what sounds good ( eventually);

There are some direct correlations between music and physics.
For example, you can do several experiments; stopping a string at different ratios along the length, or making different lengths of piping to blow through etc. If you stop a string in half (or have a pipe half as long as another one), the latter with be exactly one octave higher than the first (double the frequency).

Very closely related to this is the Overtone Series (or 'Harmonic Series'). As you may know, musical notes have not only one fundamental frequency, but several overtones. With instruments of definite pitch, there is a fixed series of harmonics that are generated (the octave, a fifth above this etc.) - This occurs naturally, and is what Pythagorus discovered.

This is not arbitrary, this is not man-made. This is a natural, physical thing. Some people have used this as a basis of consonance and dissonance, and indeed the harmonic series is so important in Western music. - This is how natural horns and trumpets work, this is why major triads are more stable than minor triads, this is why good harmonic writing has a big gap at the bottom but a smaller gap at the top, and so on.

How the octave is divided up is also obviously relevant, but there are natural, physical laws to start with, and to be aware of. I'm just mentioning this as no one else has yet. Anyone who's interested can do research on their own.

[wrench45us]

I have heard that the blues scale follows some sort of natural physical phenomenon based on the overtone harmonic series.
Is there some sort of confirmation on this?

[rp314]

but like I said before, your ear is the only measure of how well something sounds, so unfortunately math is most likely useless.

I wish someone had said this to Schöenberg (et al.) before he started out

Yes, unfortunately Schoenberg, Berg and Webern did not live long enough to be educated by the experts in this forum.

[Dreamw]

but like I said before, your ear is the only measure of how well something sounds, so unfortunately math is most likely useless.

Very closely related to this is the Overtone Series (or 'Harmonic Series'). As you may know, musical notes have not only one fundamental frequency, but several overtones. With instruments of definite pitch, there is a fixed series of harmonics that are generated (the octave, a fifth above this etc.) - This occurs naturally, and is what Pythagorus discovered.

This is not arbitrary, this is not man-made. This is a natural, physical thing. Some people have used this as a basis of consonance and dissonance, and indeed the harmonic series is so important in Western music.

Absolutely fascinting - but tell me, these harmonics, I can understand that they might be generated by a string or whatever but what about computers ? For example in MaxMSP you have things called cycle objects (as you may know) these cycle objects generate a sine wave at the frequency of a number you put into them, but as far as I know only this frequency is generated - would these harmonics still be present if the original sound source is one isolated frequency and if so how ? If not how come this is the case with strings, horns etc ?

[JumpingJackFlash]

Absolutely fascinting - but tell me, these harmonics, I can understand that they might be generated by a string or whatever but what about computers ? For example in MaxMSP you have things called cycle objects (as you may know) these cycle objects generate a sine wave at the frequency of a number you put into them, but as far as I know only this frequency is generated - would these harmonics still be present if the original sound source is one isolated frequency and if so how ? If not how come this is the case with strings, horns etc ?

Electronically generated pure sine waves contain no overtones (and therefore no harmonics). - They are the simplest and purest form of pitch. So if you were limiting yourself to using sine waves only, then yes you could avoid any use or awareness of the harmonic series. (Whether your work will sound like good music though is open to debate). Real world sounds, like those produced by real instruments, are not pure sine waves and thus contain harmonics (some more so than others). - Artificial vs. natural sounds.

However, there is the theory that the reason why some notes sound consonant (pleasing to the ear), is due to the presence of common harmonics. (See WIKI), and dissonant notes (unpleasant to the ear) result from very few (or no) common harmonics.

I think this theory makes sense, but I don't know whether it can be proven or not (partially due to the subjective nature of consonance and dissonance). But in any event, even where you use pure sine waves, if you have one that is exactly twice the frequency of the other, the resultant sound will not be unpleasant. If you had one sine wave 7/5 times the length of another, the resultant sound will likely sound much less pleasant.

This could be due to an association thing. - Almost all Western music is so heavily ingrained with the principles of the overtone series, that even when no overtones are present, we still hear the effects. (?)

[Toxikator]

Just as an aside:

If music-color synesthesia were really as common as has been claimed, why is absolute pitch so supposedly rare? Everywhere I've looked the number cited is roughly 1 in 10,000 people that can correctly identify a pitch absolutely without a reference tone.

Anyone with music-color synesthesia should be quite capable of doing this, however, so long as their memory functions well enough to remember 12 note names for the 12 pitch class colors (since it is generally reported by synesthetes that pitch classes' color correlations do not change).

So the question is if music-color synesthesia is really as common as 1 in 23, why is perfect pitch so rare?

[Meffy]

Interesting experiment: Play some major triads using sine waves tuned in the mathematically perfect Pythagorean scale. Play the same chords in TET. Which chords sound engaging, musically lively? Which sound flat and uninteresting? I did this using an ancient version of csound but any synth that can generate clean sine waves in arbitrary tunings will do.

[BosseJo]

"The Singing Neanderthals - the origins of music, language, mind and body" by Steven Mitchen is interesting, he writes about why music emerged at all (and he writes about perfect pitch, why he thinks it's rare for example).

"Lies my music teacher told me - music theory for grown-ups" by Gerald Eskeline is very interesting if you want to want know more about tuning (and a lot of other things). Just to tease you, from the book:

Lie:
Singing along with the piano will help develop an accurate sense of pitch.

Truth:
Singing along with the piano will tend to prevent the development of an accurate sense of pitch.

[JumpingJackFlash]

"Lie:
Singing along with the piano will help develop an accurate sense of pitch.

Truth:
Singing along with the piano will tend to prevent the development of an accurate sense of pitch.

That rather depends on what is meant by "an accurate sense of pitch". If you mean Just Intonation, then yes, singing along with an instrument in Equal Temperament will obviously not help much. However, if you want to sing in-tune with a piano, then singing along with one would be rather an obvious (and fruitful) thing to do.

[james0tucson]

Just as an aside:
If music-color synesthesia were really as common as has been claimed, why is absolute pitch so supposedly rare?

Is it rare? My experience in choirs and orchestras is that there is usually at least one person who has "perfect pitch" and can be used as a human tuning fork. I have always considered it maybe an unusual gift, but not especially "rare"; granted I'm mostly considering a sample of only serious musicians, and I imagine a person with perfect pitch will probably be drawn to singing or instrumental music.

[BosseJo]

"Lie:
Singing along with the piano will help develop an accurate sense of pitch.

Truth:
Singing along with the piano will tend to prevent the development of an accurate sense of pitch.

That rather depends on what is meant by "an accurate sense of pitch". If you mean Just Intonation, then yes, singing along with an instrument in Equal Temperament will obviously not help much. However, if you want to sing in-tune with a piano, then singing along with one would be rather an obvious (and fruitful) thing to do.

It's from Gerald Eskelin's book. Please read it first.

[Dreamw]

Just as an aside:



So the question is if music-color synesthesia is really as common as 1 in 23, why is perfect pitch so rare?

It isnt that common. No reliable statistic gathered show far shows this.