Is music different to sound..?

[vurt]

did he call us wierdos?


i guess its a fine line for some people, others sit either side, some span the whole collage that is audio appreciation.

[manytone]

And what is even cooler is we work together and we both have perfect pitch (except when i sing ..lol )...

Yeah, intonation when singing is still hard for me. It's almost like there's varying degrees of perfect pitch. Some people can tell you exactly how many cents out of tune a sound is, and for some people hearing something out of tune (with no reference) is physically painful. In that case, I'm glad my perfect pitch ends at being able to identify notes and chords without a pitch reference.

And I'm not glad mine comes from hours and hours spent tuning samples
Naturally...
Paul

[Barf]

I have heard of some research where they found that the visual part of the brain is stimulated when listening music.

Synaethesia.
TB

Just to be clear: this research was done on 'normal' people, not people with synesthesia.

[Debutante]

I have heard of some research where they found that the visual part of the brain is stimulated when listening music.

Synaethesia.

Iv heard it speculated that this is how we developed language - correlating the way a word sounds with the way something looks. If it looks spikey, there will be sharp consonants in word used to describe it. I find this theory totally plausable.

....

I don't believe that because if that were true then languages around the world would be very very similar or even entirely the same. We all see the same objects the same way, so according to that theory, visual cues suggesting the names of things would only lead to very small variations in language. But take any object you want and ask for English, Inuit, Chinese, Manx and Swahili names and see what you come up with...

[intel]

did he call us wierdos?

I reckon he did. I don't much care for his tone. and honestly that's saying alot cos I like all kinds of tones - consonant or dissonant.

[pw]

Music is the organization of noise, or, sound. 'Organisation' can refer to hearing a bird noise or a wave on the beach in a 'musical' way (based on previously cognized categories), or sampling someone ruffling a feather and contextualising it 'musically'.

[Topiness]

Music is the organization of noise, or, sound. 'Organisation' can refer to hearing a bird noise or a wave on the beach in a 'musical' way (based on previously cognized categories), or sampling someone ruffling a feather and contextualising it 'musically'.

That's a definition that I, and I suspect many others on KVR, would be happy with. Contrast this with a relative's reaction when I played her family some Bretschneider + Steinbrüchel (minimalist noise stuff): 'Music should have a tune'. A lot of people would agree with her rather than me...

I used to write this off as narrow-mindedness, but recently i've been wondering if different ways of organising sound really do have separable effects on us. There are lots of effects of music you can explain by basic psychoacoustics - a loud noise is something to give your attanetion to... a heavily reverbed sound implies a large space... a rhythm implies certain kinds of phenomena (an animal running, a drip from a tree, etc).

On the other hand, melody seems to be a bit more associated with language, maybe? and why do some rhythms make us want to dance? no obvious evolutionary advantage there... and where does our perception of harmony come from? That's the most mysterious.

It seems that music has the ability to hit many different parts of our brain, and it's perhaps not surprising that some people should prefer one effect to another. 'Music should have a tune' is perhaps not as closed-minded a sentiment as it sounds, as it points to a qualitatively different musical effect.

[aciddose]

"why do some rhythms make us want to dance? no obvious evolutionary advantage there.."

ok, so imagine you're hammering in a quarry, or chopping wood, or bagging charcoal, or hammering down ores, tanning hides? making tools?

what about sex? rhythm is all important in every part of life, especially the evolutionarily advantagious parts!

dancing and rhythmic music is what developed from all these physical/rhythmic combinations, not the other way around. you just have to look at it with the right perspective.

[Topiness]

"why do some rhythms make us want to dance? no obvious evolutionary advantage there.."

ok, so imagine you're hammering in a quarry, or chopping wood, or bagging charcoal, or hammering down ores, tanning hides? making tools?

what about sex? rhythm is all important in every part of life, especially the evolutionarily advantagious parts!

You have a point, and some great ideas for sample libraries...

[pw]

why do some rhythms make us want to dance? no obvious evolutionary advantage there... and where does our perception of harmony come from? That's the most mysterious.

well, following on from acidose, and considering dancing a communal act, there are indeed 'evolutionary advantages' to a whole range of practices that promote community and integration.

[aciddose]

our perception of harmony could be related to a number of things, but think of this. if some neurons are triggered at the same time, the total activity will be greater than if they are not. harmonies generally have rythymic elements to them, a fifth for example has a medium rate beat frequency. this is one possible explaination.

another is the fact we percieve sound in a way simmilar to a sepstrum, which is a fourier transform of a fourier transform. what we percieve most of all is the correlation or discorrelation between elements. the elements themselves are not always very important.

the brain is very much a pattern matching device. so, we take pleasure by activating it ourselves. music then, in my opinion, is kind of like masturbation of our pattern recognition systems. we're all pattern perverts, us musicians!

i'm not sure what pw's handle is ment to be, but i'm going to assume it stands for 'pattern wanker'.

[Topiness]

why do some rhythms make us want to dance? no obvious evolutionary advantage there... and where does our perception of harmony come from? That's the most mysterious.

well, following on from acidose, and considering dancing a communal act, there are indeed 'evolutionary advantages' to a whole range of practices that promote community and integration.

Yes, but no obvious reason why particular rhythms would be more relevant to that. which makes sense, because dance rhythms are extremely variable over time and culture... compare waltz with african polyrhythmic drumming.

I suppose you could say that the sound of a dripping tap could make you want to dance if it was associated with social dancing in your culture. But on the whole, it's not every rhythm that makes you want to dance - the regular tapping of a failing hard disk doesn't make you want to stand up at you desk and shake that booootay.

[pw]

why do some rhythms make us want to dance? no obvious evolutionary advantage there... and where does our perception of harmony come from? That's the most mysterious.

well, following on from acidose, and considering dancing a communal act, there are indeed 'evolutionary advantages' to a whole range of practices that promote community and integration.

Yes, but no obvious reason why particular rhythms would be more relevant to that. which makes sense, because dance rhythms are extremely variable over time and culture... compare waltz with arrican polyrhythmic drumming.

I suppose you could say that the sound of a dripping tap could make you want to dance if it was associated with social dancing in your culture. But on the whole, it's not every rhythm that makes you want to dance - the regular tapping of a failing hard disk doesn't make you want to stand up at you desk and shake that booootay.

yes, but this is the work of culture (rationalisation, decision-making), and doesn't discount larger evolutionary trends. And while the anthropologist in me will indeed agree that there is a wide variety in rhythm over time and culture, it is also interesting just how much overlap there is, like a fundamental basis on which variety plays.

[Topiness]

our perception of harmony could be related to a number of things, but think of this. if some neurons are triggered at the same time, the total activity will be greater than if they are not. harmonies generally have rythymic elements to them, a fifth for example has a medium rate beat frequency. this is one possible explaination.

Not sure about that... with pure sines at least, I thought the human ear was supposed to eliminate beat frequencies for intervals of a minor third and above? see Plomp's Curve, etc...

[Adaerus]

When describing sound, many of the physical descriptons have corelations in terms of music: frequency is pitch, spectrum is timber, time is duration. While the first terms in the pairs are what one can mesure with tools, the second terms are psychoacoustic effects (subjective perception)of the sound and hardly measurable by tools. They differ from one person to annother. Since pitch, timbre and duration are musical descriptins of dimentions, therefore Music is the psychoustic effect (subjective perception) of acoustic events.

It is just because of this subjective perception of acoustic events that we call nature sounds or even man made noises "music to our ears". I don't know of a culture that doesn't call a bird's chirping as bird song, although I don't think any of that has to do with them actually singing but more with what our brain percieve as something rhythmic and/or melodic. Rain can be musical in the right state of mind, a forest can be musical, heck, even a factory can be musical (see "music concrete").

All of it is SOUND and all of it is MUSIC.