Blue notes

[Musicologo]

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

The one in which the definition of consonante you claim to be universal is.

These answers are intuitive and obviously true.

QED. Intuitive realist, even worse than sicentific realist. You just make things up based on your own perspective. Next thing you're saying the earth is obviously flat because you throw water into a lemon and it falls down, yet if you throw it into a place it stays there. right? That's what you're doing.

All you need to do to prove your point is to claim that you define an octave as "dissonant".

It's irrelevant what I define. Definitions are historically constructed, socially mantained and individually experieced. But if you want one of those I can quote a practice where that happens: serialism. Octave is the most dissonant interval there, that's why it is never used and it is avoided [go read Charles wuorinen "simple composition" for instance, for somebody else than me]. If you're in the context of a serial ritual where you're listening to lots of seconds, tritones, sevens, etc... if all of a sudden an octave was played it would completely break the expectations and seen as a "dissonance" and a huge "mistake". Your serialist professor would red mark right there and say something like, make it a seventh instead. or something like that. Context.

who claims the subject of the argument is undefinable

You never get it. You keep repeating false claims. It is definable. But you have to define it according to the musical practice you're dealing with, understanding the concepts and behaviours of the people using it. You can't define on a void or becomes meaningless. It is just like saying "A chair is something for you to sit on. This is inuitive and universal". Wrong. It depends on context. If you put it on a museum it can be "art", if you put a pair of trousers and a coat in it is can be "a hanger". If you throw in it a fire to warm you up it can be "wood". Things are defined in context and never in a vacuum. Any chord can be "dissonant" or "consonant" depending on context and who is using it and who is listening to it, where and when. The point of science is to explain WHY and HOW it is being used. Therefore "Chord X" is more consonant than "Chord Y" In context A, because of a,b,c,d.... and is less dissonant in context B because of e,f,g,h... it has a cultural component to it that it can't be ignored.

[jancivil]

n/m, wrong thread

[aciddose]

You never get it. You keep repeating false claims. It is definable. But you have to define it according to the musical practice you're dealing with,

No, in this case the OP defined it for us when he asked his question.

If you'd simply said "dissonance is a subjective term in general use" nobody would disagree with you. It's when you start up all this bullshit arguing about how it's incorrect to make a definitive statement that you're plain wrong and going completely off-topic.

If you want to argue about whether the preference for low magnitude harmonic ratios is innate you'd better change your field of studies to neurobiology.

As I was playing around with pad chords, I noticed again how playing a certain chord sounds good or bad depending on whether or not one note of that chord is an octave or two lower or right within that hand, so to speak. For instance F-G#-C. Now, when I add the C# right next to that C, it sounds wrong, but if I add a C# an octave lower, it sounds very nice.

Is that mere physics, like waves and their frequencies getting in each others way? And when there is an octave of distance, that is no longer the case and my brain doesn't complain?

Is that sensation of blue notes and chords sounding wrong innate or just a cultural thing?

You can very well argue that the fact that the OP associates phasing with dissonance like most of the world's population is subjective, because now we're arguing bullshit semantics rather than anything useful. Nobody will want to go there and will agree with you just to shut you up.

Well, to me the four notes of my example played at the same time don't sound harmonic, there is something wrong about it, unless I play the C# an octave or two lower.

I vaguely remember that term from school. I thought blue note means a note that does not fit in and sounds wrong. Then again, school was decades ago

For someone who claims to be involved or interested in sociology or related fields I have trouble understanding how you could be such an idiot in terms of reading what has been explicitly stated for you in this thread. fluffy_little_something told you exactly what he was saying, he explicitly defined what he meant by the terms he used and he very clearly asked two distinct questions related to this topic.

The only question you could potentially answer is the second one regarding the propensity of humans to define "dissonance" as a part of their culture in the same manner he does. There are certainly other definitions possible, how often do they occur relative to the apparently most common definition shared by the OP?

I suspect that quantifiers such as "very rarely ..." would be most applicable in this case.

[Musicologo]

Oh, finally we're agreeing on something and getting there.
The answer most useful to OP I think was already given on p.4 Jan '01 at 5.07pm.

The preference for low magnitude harmonic ratios being innate or universal is studying sound and it is subject for neurobiology or psychology. The correlation between this and "pleasantness"/"rightfullness" and then "consonance/dissonance" is a different thing. You might devalue that step and call it semantics, but then everything is semantics. That's why we need to depart from there. I say that association is "cultural" because based on counter-examples, I do not think it is proven yet that "everyone preferes low magnitude harmonic rations" neither that "those who prefer them (concept), in their practices (behaviours), link them with "consonance". There might be a correlation (which seems obvious in the case of OP and your own, and lots of other people, but I think your contexts and musical practices have a big part in it rather than "born that way" - this might be an inductive case of white swans since 12TET is so widespread nowadays) but even then causality has to be established and it my opinion we don't have enough data to do that. That's why I think looking carefully at what seem the counter-examples we have might end up being more useful (looking at black swans).

[aciddose]

The correlation between this and "pleasantness"/"rightfullness" and then "consonance/dissonance" is a different thing.

Ah ha! Caught you there, Descartes!

[Musicologo]

Why? Not Descartes, but Tagg I think. This is an example by Philipp Tagg "Music Meanings". The statement is clear: "I use this video to show my students that notions of consonance/dissonance are NOT bioacoustically univerval". I did not came up with this, research and knowledge exists for several years. I merely have been trying to provide reference and summarize them.




Seeing Bulgarian Women singing joyfully c, c#, d and the mere existence of inharmonic instrument based music traditions is part of what seems to clearly point out to the idea that high magnitude harmonic ratios cannot be universally equated with unpleasantness [as the OP seems to do for instance]. Seeing the historic usage of the term "dissonance" along several music traditions [namely the 4ths in organum or octaves in serialism] seems to also disaprove the universality of correlation between "pleasantness" and "dissonance", etc...

One has to understand the concepts first in order to understand the behaviours and therefore the resulting sounds: Alan Merrian [anthropology of music], Geertz [The interpretation of cultures], Rice [Modeling Ethnomusicology]. I did not invent this science. Scholars have been researching music as culture and IN culture for over 100 years now and coming up with methods to actually do this right, and of course, they digress from neurobiologists and psychologists who merely study acoustics or sounds, where concepts instead of emic [their cultural usage] are "ethic" [defined by the researcher, usually ethnocentric and imposed on the other cultures].

[aciddose]

High ratios aren't equated with "unpleasantness", they're equated with "dissonance" as defined by "consonance == low harmonic ratios".

The fact you've got your panties all in a knot over it only proves you don't understand what that even means.

Next you'll argue that !up/down/left/right.

[Musicologo]

"I use this video to show my students that notions of consonance/dissonance are NOT bioacoustically univerval"

Do you agree with Prof. Tagg or not? If you disagree (as it seems you do), then by all means, publish your research on a peer reviewed journal and settle the matter once for all.

[aciddose]

Well the thing is the definition of "harmony" is "sounds that sound right", so the entire subject is a clusterfuck of bullshit semantics.

This is why terms like "harmonic" now have an objective meaning and the subjective meaning is becoming less prevalent especially in the sciences where it is useless, for obvious reasons. (A term that can mean anything objectively means nothing.)

Observing an outlier and declaring "therefore X is not universal" is disingenuous at best, as what really matters are the percentages. You haven't presented any numbers or other hard evidence showing that such definitions are anything but "very rarely" used in practice. It really does reduce to semantics as clearly anyone who would define "dissonance" as equal to harmonic has the meaning of the terms reversed from usual.

Also, this "example" that you've given isn't necessarily a good example of dissonance to begin with. Again, where are the numbers?

[anomandaris1]

I'm from Bulgaria.

It's very funny how misinterpreted are these songs. These women sing like that first: because they can (displaying virtuoso technique); second - because close intervals reminded them of "bell ringing". There are no "inharmonic" traditional instruments in Bulgaria (you were probably thinging about gamelan - there is no such thing here). The audio is basically vocal "jamming" session.

Traditional bulgarian music is drone (fifth, fourths and octaves) based. Any examples of polyphonic and harmonic music are really rare and are not typical at all.

There were some audio compilations in the 80s with bulgarian vocal music and later, but all these are not authentic - it's arranged and orchestrated music by choir composer, many of them influenced by 19-20th century modernism.

Only someone completely out of touch with Bulgarian culture can claim that these songs demonstrate anything - it's like saying that just because X composer made some weird music, Y listeners enjoy it.


I personally don't think that simple ratios equals pleasantness all the time, because it is easy to tune FM synth to a microtonal ratios, playing microtonal scale and it will sound more in tune without beats (same can be done also to the steps of 12ET, creating more "consonant" whole tone scale, augmented or dimished chord and similar)

[aciddose]

I personally don't think that simple ratios equals pleasantness all the time, because it is easy to tune FM synth to a microtonal ratios, playing microtonal scale and it will sound more in tune without beats (same can be done also to the steps of 12ET, creating more "consonant" whole tone scale, augmented or dimished chord and similar)

That is exactly what you're doing though. If you adjust using "microtonal scales" or "microtuning" of 12TET, you're forcing 12TET into specific desired ratios rather than the approximations of native 12TET which are irrational numbers for the most part. Those irrational numbers however very closely approximate a set of low magnitude ratios and fit them all together in a "best fit" to achieve a "perfect" equal tempered scale, with the sacrifice of a small amount of phasing due to the ratios being up to several cents away from a perfect harmonic.

That said yes, there are definite benefits to "dissonance", I've actually been working on creating a "maximally dissonant scale" because of the interesting properties and the severe limitations of 12TET when attempting to create extreme "dissonance".

So this simply proves that such subjective terms are a waste of time. Which is why it makes a lot more sense to objectively define harmony as "lower magnitude ratios" and dissonance as "higher magnitude ratios", it leaves plenty of room to fit and doesn't force you to assume "dissonance == sounds bad".

[Musicologo]

so the entire subject is a clusterfuck of bullshit semantics.

subjective meaning is becoming less prevalent especially in the sciences where it is useless, for obvious reasons.

Observing an outlier and declaring "therefore X is not universal" is disingenuous at best, as what really matters are the percentages

subjective terms are a waste of time. Which is why it makes a lot more sense to objectively define

Again, where are the numbers?

Do you realize the entire problem lies in this "positive scientific" paradigm? All these assumptions make sense in hard sciences because that is what they do, and they do make sense when studying quantifiable phenomena, like sound, electrons, etc...

But PEOPLE are not electrons, are music is NOT sound.

The goal of hard sciences is to MEASURE things, turn into everything into numbers and then establish patterns and "NORMS". And everyone who is not in the norm is then "an outlier", "useless", "sick" whatever. Why is such knowledge useful at all? To standardize? To create replicas of what already exist? To say to people "here is the norm, now go and do the same thing, or else you're wrong". Let's "mass produce" and in a "more efficient way", using "shortcuts" this. Let's create An algorithm to automatize this...

WELL... IF those are your goals fine. But acknowledge this. The goals of social sciences are NOT this.
The goals of social sciences, and in the case of Musicology (not sound), is understand those "bullshit semantics", why they have such different meanings and what they translate.
Is to understand WHY there is such vast diversity... we already know the patterns for 100 years. We already know the vast majority "prefers" low harmonic ratios, etc... we already know all that. Because that's easy: it's just measure and quantify.

What is difficult is to explain the diversity. WHY there are thousands of different musical practices if we share 99% of the DNA?
Why there are "useless outliers" in the first place? Those useless outliers are the drive of innovation and change in the first place! We're interested in them!

I don't care for someone making the same everyone else does. I care for finding out diversity and explaining it. That's why Musicology is a social science NOT a hard science. I find little use in your objective definitions and its goals might be even dangerous: a standardization or total automatization of musical practices to make profit? Thanks but no, that ship has sailed for me.

I'm from Bulgaria.

It's very funny how misinterpreted are these songs. These women sing like that first: because they can (displaying virtuoso technique); second - because close intervals reminded them of "bell ringing".

Just because you're from Bulgaria doesn't make you a specialist in this particular practice neither it makes it standard practice in nowadays Bulgaria. Each country has several musical practices and nowadays anglo-american pop/12TET western classical dominate pretty much everywhere. I don't believe for a second you're a peasant and had a life context leading to anything where this practice could make sense.
However, you advance some interesting explanations to why this particular group of women in this village was acting that way, and this is exactly the kind of explanation and WHY we need: one need to understand context, how this practice emerged, and try to find the concepts and behaviours of these women to understand how these sounds came into reality and why were they recorded in the first place... it's completely different to know if they did that in their "real life" or if they were later folklorized and artificially produced and marketed as an exotic "world music" product (that happened a bit everywhere around europe, africa and asia)... Of course, what matters to me is the "real folk version" of the practice and NOT the "folklorized" practice. That is pretty much all in Tim Rice books and real ethnographic studies in the field.


So: What is the relation between music and sound? Have you understood by now why you can't establish objective definitions regarding music [only sound] and you have to deal with "bullshit semantics"? Science is about answering questions. What are the problems you're trying to solve?
The "norms" of sound? The psychology of reception of sound? Good luck with that. I'm trying to understand the values that shape musical practices and explaining diversity. I'm trying to understand why the OP calls "dissonant" and think it is "wrong" [wrong compared to what? to the records he listened since as a child?] but these group of bulgarian woman calls "plesant" and sings "because they want to show virtuosity" or "becasue it reminds of bell" [what that bell would mean anyway? what are their references as a child]... so probably we have very different goals from the start and notions of what music is.

[Musicologo]

At this point it seems obvious there are two theories on the table regarding OP question.
For accidose it is universal that low harmonic ratios are consonant and this is bioacustically universal. And what is relevant is knowing this. And the few that don't find low harmonic ratios consonant are "useless outliers" and don't need explanation, since it's expected to have outliers anyway.

While musicology theory would point out that the concept of consonance/dissonance is shaped by the musical practices of the individuals in question. The concept of music and musical taste starts to be shaped in infance since lullabies and everything else. Therefore if individuals have a set of references of low harmonic ratios in their daily usage since infance they prefer them, their brain is tuned to it, while if their musical practice and refereces have high harmonic ratios or inharmonic instruments their concept of consonance/dissonance change. Just watch Rick Beato's kid being highly shaped by Nuryl () Since this is relative, and most practices in the world seem to be attuned to harmonic instruments and low harmonc rations vocalizations, this would explain the numbers.

If you're a hard scientist go "test" now: submit kids to nuryl and make them more "efficient". Raise an entire generation of inharmonic and complex harmonic ratio lovers. And in 30 years you can have all this reversed due to aculturation. I ackowledge it's very hard to test this because people are not rat labs and you're probably not able to replicate these contexts in large scale to confirm them. I fully ackowledge the biggest problem with social sciences is dealing with the "semantic bullshit" and test it. Because it's not possible to quantify cultural parameters neither test them in lab. How do you measure and quantify the way going to watch a play in a theater changed your concepts and preferences? How do you measure and quantify the impact a book had on a group of people? How do you measure and quantify the changes playing keyboard in a jazz band do to your empathy?

[aciddose]

When you're finished running in circles go ahead and give me a heads-up.

[aciddose]

Do you realize the entire problem lies in this "positive scientific" paradigm? All these assumptions make sense in hard sciences because that is what they do, and they do make sense when studying quantifiable phenomena, like sound, electrons, etc...

But PEOPLE are not electrons, are music is NOT sound.

The goal of hard sciences is to MEASURE things, turn into everything into numbers and then establish patterns and "NORMS". And everyone who is not in the norm is then "an outlier", "useless", "sick" whatever. Why is such knowledge useful at all? To standardize? To create replicas of what already exist? To say to people "here is the norm, now go and do the same thing, or else you're wrong". Let's "mass produce" and in a "more efficient way", using "shortcuts" this. Let's create An algorithm to automatize this...

WELL... IF those are your goals fine. But acknowledge this. The goals of social sciences are NOT this.
The goals of social sciences, and in the case of Musicology (not sound), is understand those "bullshit semantics", why they have such different meanings and what they translate.