Blue notes

[aciddose]

Regarding stretch tuning which was brought up as a diversionary tactic (another unrelated subject used in a fallacious argument);

A simple explanation of stretch tuning is that strings in physical instruments don't have "perfect" mathematical harmonics. This is because the rate that sound is transmitted in a medium such as the material of the string depends upon the frequency of the signal being transmitted.

I like how the author of the Wikipedia article didn't understand how/why but merely explained "what" The reason why is because physical mediums have properties which break down to something similar to an all-pass filter. Phase-shift corresponds to transmission through the medium, higher frequencies have lower delay (zero at inf) and are transmitted more quickly. Someone should probably find an explanation of this effect as it occurs in other mediums (air, water, solid materials) and "fix" the Wikipedia article, if they can escape the author's and others bots.

Normally you could look at a string and identify harmonics by dividing the length into integer fractions: 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ...

In reality the reflections on a string will not line up in such geometric or mathematical perfection. Due to this fact the harmonics of lower strings are shifted from their expected positions such that when you play a higher octave it will phase with the harmonic of the lower string, even if it is tuned perfectly at 2x the frequency.

So stretch tuning is a completely unrelated subject because it is merely a way to cope with the imperfections of physical instruments by "mistuning" those instruments to reduce the undesirable phasing effect: although this is obviously a trade-off and it is impossible to achieve mathematical perfection using a stringed instrument.

With a synthesized piano sound we have no such trouble, while synthesizing the piano sound we can trivially produce mathematical harmonic ratios and so the problem never presets itself. Perfect harmonics, perfectly tuned scales.

Obviously such a "perfect" synthesized piano won't "sound like" a physical piano, as beauty comes from the unique imperfections in something like a physical instrument which in comparison makes the digital synthesized version sound "sterile" or "boring".

Sampled pianos however do re-create this effect with other limitations that belong in some "best tb-303 plug-in" thread or something on an equal level of "totally bogus waste of time to discuss" subjects.

Everyone knows you get the best tb-303 plug-in by plugging in a tb-303.

[aciddose]

Regarding the best I can understand jancivil's comment, it seems to refer to the difference between stretch tuning and stretched scales?

Musicologo's "keyboard diarrhea" on the subject argues that "yadda yadda yadda, I don't understand what you said but if it were true everyone would prefer more consonant chords!"

I'm not sure what Musicologo is smoking but it's great whatever it is.

Generally speaking though by stretching or compressing the scale so an octave is greater or less than 2 you force almost all harmonics way up, as the common denominator is forced very high to produce harmonic ratios for chords in such a scale. This results in greater dissonance and is fully in agreement with the basic math. If you've ever found your usual 12TET was "too consonant", stretching the scale to line up a particular ratio like 4/3 can have very interesting results... although it'll always also throw most chords into insane levels of dissonance which is generally not found to be pleasurable.

[Musicologo]

I'll do some quoting, perhaps this sheds some light on you.

Accid:

my law

My law states

For everyone.

is considered globally (by large numbers of people)

perceived consonance after statistical variation

You need to disprove my law

Using my definition

you won't find such a case because it is impossible.

nothing is more consonant than an octave.

you have no valid counter-argument

Answer: Bulgarian women singing chords in 2nds like c,c#,d [instead of homophony, 3rds, 6ths, octaves - why they do that? arguably because they find it more consonant];
Organum interdicting 4ths [but allowing 5ths, 3rds, 6ths - why?]

meaning of "fourth" changes

unrelated nonsense about Bulgarians.

If you find nothing wrong with your line of reasoning, and with the very idea of trying to create "objective universal laws" for subjective non-quantifiable properties, then I really have nothing to add. You are treating Dissonance like some physical quantifiable property alike weight or density while it's more in the realm of "prettyness" or "coldness". It will never work. Correlation is not causation. And the theory emanating from you "universal law" is circular: you define it, you lock it because it doesn't depend on the listener, therefore there are no exceptions. By doing this you reject cultural bias and treat those examples as outliers or "sick" (although you have incongruency by stating "everyone" but also then "globaly" or "statistical variation") and as such, you are unable to offer an explanation for why they exist.
A relevant theory is the one that is able to explain why these outliers exist, why such diversity exists in the world. They are not meaningless, they are the crux. They are the counter-example and falsification of the universal "law" and the proof that you cannot make human sciences using the same premisses you use to do exact sciences. You have to include culture to explain variation.

[aciddose]

You're bringing up a chord but making no comparison to other chords. Why do they sing those chords? Have you considered asking them rather than just asserting your own bullshit opinion that you made up on the spot?

They likely find them more dissonant, because they are more dissonant. Or maybe they fell on their heads as children and can't keep tune.

[jancivil]

Fully independent of this 'interest' I encountered this rant, written by someone who may be more completely out of further f**ks to give (it's out of its context but that wouldn't help youse much):

For the uninitiated, the ethnopimp calls himself “ethnomusicologist” and is found loitering in the music departments of universities in Western Europe, America and Canada. The racist term “ethnomusicology” (when did you last hear the music of Beethoven studied under “ethnomusicology”?) refers to the field infested by these worthless parasites masquerading as academics. There are PhD theses, careers and tenure to be had for the asking, for the benevolent Lord expressly created the “third-world” cultures to be a font of rich pastureland for the vultures inhabiting the humanities departments in the West.

Again for my part it became too much a signal of everything wrong here to see those 'points' appropos of nothing and further finding the writer having zero interest in any exchange or meeting my questions, which should be asked and when one is that bold might well be expected. That is all, except to reiterate 'muted'. I commit to the muting.

[aciddose]

Great way to piss off musiclogo and have him threaten to leave the discussion, only to come back and repeat the same identical nonsense once again:



Ask him to do some middle-school mathematics to confirm what he claims.

[Musicologo]

You're bringing up a chord but making no comparison to other chords.

I compared with other possible chords found in analogous practices in other places: vocal singing with 3rd and 6ths and homophony. Can't you really read? Why do they sing in C, c#, d instead of C, e, a for instance?

Why do they sing those chords? Have you considered asking them

Bingo. That's what ETHNO means: ethnography is the main method to understand a musical practice. ANY and ALL musical practices. It's actually the only way to do it right. You have to understand the concepts of the people making the music to understand then their behaviours and results. Without context there is no music. But you'd know that if you ever read any serious rigorous study on musical practices like the ones of Anthony Seeger, Bruno Nettl, Timothy Rice, Alan Lomax, Henry Kingsbury, Alan F. Moore, Peter Tschmuck have you read any of those?

They likely find them more dissonant, because they are more dissonant.

That's just gibberish. You have to go there and study them to find out. When you actually make fieldwork like all the ones mentioned above you'll find fascinanting things, namely that universals don't exist. But we know that for more than 50 years now. You're still confusing sound with music or acoustics with musicology or hard sciences with social sciences whatever works.

About what Jancivil quoted, it seems ignorance from the person ranting, not even understanding what "ethno" means (the ethnographic method as core of the musicology), and furthermore yes, beethoven, mozart and any musical practice should and is studied under ethnomusicology.

The other way around it what is wrong: to depart from a snob eurocentric attidude and try to conform the entire array of musical practices of the world to central european music c. 1600-1950 values and judge them on those lenses and then everything else is worthless, or even worse, to think it is possible to use quantifiable hard-science methods to make social sciences! While people don't understand those issues it's impossible to build scientific knowledge about the musical practices because they are using wrong methods and assumptions in the first place.

Don't you even find anything wrong or suspicious to try to explain beatles or pop music using the same analytical tools as Beethoven, Schoenberg, Bob Dylan or Miles Davis under the umbrella of "A music theory"? That's why it doesn't work: they are all very different practices, most pop music was not made in notation in the first place. Hence the "music meanings" and "everyday tonality" by Phillip Tagg, the "song means" by Alan F. Moore or the "Poetics of Rock" by Albin Zack to actually try to explain those practices.

But I'll definitely end up this discussion here. There are already tons of references in my posts for everyone to see and read and inform themselves, I have better things to do. It's useless to preach science to religious fanatics; It's useless to preach astronomy to astrologists; It's useless to preach medicine to homeopaths and it seems that it's useless to preach social sciences to hard scientits or even worse: it's seems it's useless to preach musicology to certain musicians.

My only hope by now is that eventual readers who want to learn about a certain musical practice will actually forget what I'm saying but go read the scholars with dozens of years of experience and fieldwork and learn their scientific methods and results when they studied THAT MUSICAL practice. It seems I can't convince anyone, maybe they can and science speaks for itself.

I would definitely start at least by reading this entry to stop all this nonsense prejudice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomusicology

Good bye and take care.

[aciddose]

Readers don't want to learn your bullshit subjective limp science "musical practices", we're talking about why a chord sounds more dissonant than another chord when one of the notes is lowered by an octave.

That's it! Why are you bringing up all this completely unrelated shit? Oh yeah, you have the internet version of verbal diarrhea: keyboard diarrhea.

[aciddose]

Don't you even find anything wrong or suspicious to try to explain beatles or pop music using the same analytical tools as Beethoven, Schoenberg, Bob Dylan or Miles Davis under the umbrella of "A music theory"?

What I find suspicious are your extreme anti-science chain of fallacious arguments. It seems like you can't possibly admit that all that subjective bullshit you waste your time on is a waste of time.

You're trying to catalog "what" instead of "how/why".

Science isn't about "what". It's about forming a hypothesis to explain "how/why" and testing it, then forming a theory that can encompass all of the "whats" in the world with one "how/why".

You're just an emotionally immature person who apparently lacks the ability to think rationally of abstract concepts bigger than yourself. You have to force everything in your perspective to be smaller than yourself to enable you to fit it all inside your head, which has in the process inflated your head and caused you to lose sight of the big picture.

We don't care about your crumbs or grains of sand: we are the bigger picture.

If you want to waste your time you should go ahead and look for two grains of sand or two snowflakes that are exactly alike. Perhaps then you can stop being such a precious little snowflake and grow up and see the bigger picture.

[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...

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.

There it is. He wants us to believe he wants something technical to replace 'tense' but in fact he is not interested in it at all. He is interested in bullshit.

'What ethnomusicologists say' is of no moment to the discussion. It's there in lieu of what a musician wants to know. *Tension* is a perfectly cromulent term. "this interval is tense because this ratio is present." is useful! But it's utterly dismissible in favor of trying to seem like there's something more expansive to talk about. Behaviors.

It doesn't matter. I've examined music from several cultures on the technical basis. Deeply.
It doesn't matter why White Europeans created a hegemony where you get people arguing 12tET is perfectly natural and superior because white people done it, or why they do "ethnomusicology" on cultures they don't understand. In the Gamelan instruments brought in, the difference to Western sounding-music is knowable: it's pretty much 8:7, its inversion 7:4 and 12:7 and they are definitely constructing metallic instruments for inharmonicity. I mean to say clangorous inharmonicity in the melodic instruments, which aren't cymbals. And in all likelihood are building in beating (instability) on purpose. You aren't going to know about that construction any better by interrogating the culture or even if you become Balinese. You learn the FACTS. For that matter, if you want to learn why church bells or any bells sound like that you learn what actually creates clangorous effects. If you want to craft bells by synthesis you may want to know some facts. It doesn't matter why people created bells, that won't help us except in this whole other field. Anthropology I think it's called.

Technically the stretched octave may be called 'less stable' than the definitely true 1:1 or 2:1 etc; by the very same reasoning the minor second or 135:128 is. For the sake of Fvck.

We could talk about how bothered this or another person is by that 6¢ difference but we'll find it in a piano as well (again, mooting the point of 'octave equivalence in pelog or slendro') How bothered is every pianist, do you think. But technically there is one thing to talk about here and that's the distance between this result and the known-to-be-true purer concord. Objectively: what's the ratio? Knowable! Not speculative. This should not have become blurred by bullshit.

[jancivil]

The term 'octave equivalence' was brought in as though the thing in this exotic music meant it didn't really deal in the octave, which was supposed to make us question stability.

All of the [tuned instrument] music of Bali or Java deals in simple scales within the octave. So, understanding this I had an immediate strong reaction to seeing that. That thing is arguably more in tune than the piano's major third.

For anyone who is actually interested:
http://www.anaphoria.com/mcphee.pdf

[Musicologo]

Remembering all started with the op asking if its feeling of dissonance between
Ch1: F3-G#3-C4-C#4 and Ch2: C#3-F3-G#3-C4 was innate or cultural.

The answer by accidose is: It's innate, Ch1 is always more dissonant than Ch2 to everybody in the universe in any context because the way I mathematically define what dissonance is.

While I answer: It's cultural. Ch1 might be perceived more dissonant than Ch2 or not depending on context, the individual and their concepts (assuming "dissonance" is a non-quantifiable and subjective term for a start. It is something each individual perceives and not something that is), the way the sounds were introduced in context - depending on timbre, previous and subsequent sounds/voice leading, Ch1 might be presented way more naturally and smooth than Ch2, etc... for instance I find Ch1 less dissonant than Ch2 when Ch1 is presented in strings and Ch2 in trumpets; I find Ch1 less dissonant than Ch2 if I'm repeatidly arpeggiating F-G#-C-C# and then banging Ch1, instead of arpeggiating C-E-G-C and then banging Ch2.

I belive we're dealing with music in context, in culture, not with acoustics in a vacuum, that's the difference.

What ethnomusicologists say' is of no moment to the discussion (...) And in all likelihood are building in beating (instability) on purpose. You aren't going to know about that construction any better by interrogating the culture or even if you become Balinese.

It doesn't matter why people created bells, that won't help us except in this whole other field. Anthropology I think it's called.

Human sciences are antropology of something. That's the point, this is not acoustics, it's music. Music is a cultural understanding of sound. The book of Anthony Seeger is "a musical antropology of an Amazonian People" and the question is exactly : Why Suya sing?".

Therefore this frame of thought, these kind of things are important to know in order to answer the how/whys individuals feel and do stuff, in order to proper to music science: why people created bells that have inharmonic partials is important because this is influencing then their concepts and behaviours (future perceptions) of what dissonant and consonant is. Might actually be an ancient loop. A streched octave might actually be desired and intentional because regular octaves might sound unstable or dissonant to those that grew used to streched octaves. But I wonder only being there and asking and observing the behaviours you can infer such a thing.

The whole point of this vast discussion was to try to show and providing examples that what seems simple FACTS, obvious and assumed as universal probably are NOT. My examples of Bulgarian Women and Pelog scales were merely examples I thought could ilustrate cases in which "dissonance" and "consonance" might be very different perceived and conceptualized. For a large number of people in this forum with taste shaped by 20th century pop music and 12TET I'm imagining they find gamelon scales and instruments "dissonant" and "out of tune", as well as the sounds the bulgarian women produce; it's tempting to project that experience for the entire world and try to find an acoustic explanation for it and declare it innate. However, I'm assuming they do that kind of music because they find it "consonant" and "beautiful", and that's WHY they do it [if they innately found it dissonant why they would do it? there ought to be an explanation].

Therefore, this in my eyes reinforces the idea that it's cultural and not innate. And this for me IS the bigger picture. The bigger picture as explained by Nettl and others is that concerning music, there are NO universals and in order to explain the variability (the whys and hows) you need to take cultural values (concepts shaping behaviours) into account first when making theories - you can't just resort to (results/sound). That's only the last component (sound are shaped by concepts and behaviours).

[aciddose]

The answer by accidose is: It's innate, Ch1 is always more dissonant than Ch2 to everybody in the universe in any context because the way I mathematically define what dissonance is.

What I said was it is to everybody because that is how the mathematics define consonance. People don't subjectively define mathematics or the universe, we're merely elements (prisoners if you will) of it with absolutely no control over it, while it has absolute control over us. If that seems terrifying to you, it is simply due to your emotional immaturity that you are unable to cope with the thought that you might not get your way when you cry about it.

You'll need to convince us that the first harmonic 2:1 is more dissonant than any other ratio, which will call into question the mathematical definition of consonance.

You are attempting to argue based upon semantics that "consonance" has no objective definition and is therefore meaningless because its meaning can be defined arbitrarily. That simply isn't the case.

The problem is you're too much of a schmuck to understand middle-school mathematics. I wouldn't trust you to handle grade-school mathematics like boolean comparisons "is A greater or less than B?", addition or counting. Have you even learned your ABCs?

[Musicologo]

Go back to page 4 and read what's there. you're clearly a realist (scientific/intuitive/internal realism pick one). That train was gone long ago after Godel and Popper mainly. You really should learn about science.
I already told you I'm a pragmatist/constructive empiricist and you're trying to label me as anti-realist/metaphysical (which is also not true and inadequate). You're the immature one for not even have a glimpse of the concepts or how science works: «Truth (and meaning) are always relative to a particular practical context, to a set of practices and values. Truth is what works (in that particular practical context). Science does not describe reality as it is apart from us and our perceptions, nor is that its job. Its job is to describe the common appearances that normal average size objects have to normal human observers. There is a common perceptual world shared by all normal humans. Science aims at systematically describing these and constructing our theoretical understandings of the world from this base.»

The idea that «We can know reality as it exists apart from experience and current scientific theory comes close to doing so, forming a core that will be retained in all subsequent theories.» is already gone.

The mere idea that

What I said was it is to everybody because that is how the mathematics define consonance. People don't subjectively define mathematics

is immature and daft. Who is this "mathematics define consonance"? Someone, somewhere in a book defined it that way and you never pointed to that reference or even questioned it. People create concepts, axioms, define mathematics. They don't appear in a book as a revelation like the bible you know? So you can insult me all you want, but I've gone past your positivist vision of the world long ago. One day (hopefully) you'll get there if you really care about science and learning. Try to understand the difference between hard sciences and social sciences for a start. Try to understand the difference between musics and sound, between determinism and emergence/complexity and maybe you'll start something.

[aciddose]

Which book are you referring to? The one in my head?

This is why I view you as incomprehensibly stupid. These answers are intuitive and obviously true. You reject them outright with zero evidence while you attempt to shove your own bullshit in again with zero evidence to support it.

"... what are electrolytes! Do you even know!?"

"... they're what they use to make Brawndo."

"Yeah, but why do they use them to make Brawndo?"

"... because Brawndo's got electrolytes."

All you need to do to prove your point is to claim that you define an octave as "dissonant". Then anyone with any remaining brain cells will know to ignore you. Arguing with someone who claims the subject of the argument is undefinable is a huge waste of time.