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Despite the clickbaity headline about "musical tastes", there is some real information here. "In their experiments, McDermott and his colleagues investigated a
by panglott 10y ago
Despite the clickbaity headline about "musical tastes", there is some real information here.
"In their experiments, McDermott and his colleagues investigated aesthetic responses to music by playing combinations of notes to three groups of people: the Tsimane’ and two other groups of Bolivians that had experienced increasing levels of exposure to Western music. The researchers recorded whether each group perceived the notes as pleasant or unpleasant to hear. They tested consonant chords, which are common in Western and many other musical cultures, as well as dissonant ones. (In ‘do re mi fa so la ti do’, for instance, the ‘dos’ are exactly an octave apart and are an example of consonant notes.)"
The question is whether there is some innate human preference for consonant or dissonant chords. These scientists concluded that preference for consonant or dissonant chords is influenced mainly by culture (not, say, genetics).
- stcredzero 10y agoIn the middle ages, the third interval was considered too rich, and so simply not used. There are other things our music that were considered sounds of the devil, so were not used either.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoThis neatly debunks the other recent thread which suggested it was possible to reduce harmony to mathematical axioms. Having said that - the harmonic series is obviously interesting and relevant to some music. But any notion that it's some kind of musical master key that can unlock all of music's mysteries is naive.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kens 10y agoI found this study really surprising. It seemed obvious to me that there's a physical basis for why intervals like a perfect fifth sound good. I.e. the 3:2 ratio means the waveforms mesh nicely. (By the way, all the talk of integer ratios seems like numerology, but if you look at the waveforms and frequency spectrum then it makes sense.) But the investigated groups didn't prefer consonant chords over dissonant ones, unlike Western listeners. But they did dislike "roughness" such as a minor second (where you end up with beating), so they are capable of identifying notes that don't go together and have some preferences. P.S. For those who didn't read the study, it has nothing to do with musical tastes and liking one type of music over another (which is obviously cultural). It's more low-level than that.
- elihu 10y agoI don't know if the sounds on the article are the same sounds they used in the study, but their example of a consonant chord doesn't sound particularly consonant to me. (The dissonant chord sounds like it has two notes close to each other, which is almost universally objectionable.) I'm not sure why not; it could be the intervals are tuned in some weird way, or for some reason they chose a timbre whose harmonics aren't in a whole-number-ratio with the fundamental. This is the sort of thing where the experimenter has to be careful about what they're testing. To someone unfamiliar with 12-tone equal temperament, a major chord on a piano might sound out of tune relative to just-tuned 4:5:6 major chord. A just chord can also sound out-of-tune when played in an inharmonic timbre. If you play a major chord on a piano and a listener says "I don't like how that sounds", it might not be that they don't like harmonic music. It might be just that they don't like how a major chord sounds when played on an equal-tempered piano. One way to do this kind of testing is to use pure sine waves that have no harmonics. So, without harmonics there's no particular reason to prefer just intervals to random, arbitrary intervals except that the former may conform to the listeners expectations.