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What Musical Notes Can Look Like
- bweitzman 10y agoLike the article (thankfully) mentions, the photographs really do have nothing to with the notes themselves. Intervals and chords have characters, individual notes do not.
- emjoes1 10y agoPerhaps I missed that then because I found no mention of intervals and chords. They seem to explicitly say that they captured pure tones (220Hz for A). This sentence also made it sound as if they were generating a pure note (frequency), "As each note’s unique vibration induced its characteristic pattern into the water, Brown captured it with her camera." Then they went through the chromatic scale capturing each note. I do wish they posted more about how they set this up. It sounds straight forward and if using pure tones should be easily reproduced...
- bweitzman 10y agoIt's the last paragraph of the article.
- sevensor 10y agoIndeed, this experiment says as much about the shape and size of the vessel that holds the liquid as it does about the notes. It's not true that you'd get the same result if you repeated it at home, unless your apparatus was built exactly the same. Also, D minor is the saddest of all keys.
- baddox 10y agoTell that to someone with perfect pitch.
- triplesec 10y agoAbsolute pitch doesn't require you assign character to the notes that you remember. Well, I don't, so I count as a counterexample. I'm no synaesthetic that way, at least not in any conscious way.
- baddox 10y agoI don't have it, but from what I've read it seems most people with absolute pitch associate some sort of character to pitches or at least keys. I'm sure that it's not a requirement.
- chubot 10y agoYeah I noticed that. But can someone explain how she got such varied patterns from individual notes? I agree that the picture may say more about the vessel and the water than the note itself. But then why do the pictures look so different? Was there a different vessel per note? When the tuner registered a note—reading 220 hertz, the frequency that produces an A, for instance—Louviere stopped adjusting. As each note’s unique vibration induced its characteristic pattern into the water, Brown captured it with her camera. The pair worked together to obtain a “portrait” of each of the 12 notes.
- DigitalJack 10y agoThe sound waves induce a surface wave in the 2d plane of the surface of the water. This surface wave reflected reflects of the side walls of the container. At specific frequencies, the reflected waves will interfere with the generated waves in such a way as to cancel the amplitudes out completely at certain points, and double amplitudes at other points. When these points are stable, the pattern is known as a standing wave. The standing waves are the patterns shown here. Imperfections in the container, the medium, and the way the sound source is transmitted to the medium make the patterns imperfect. If they were perfected, they would have a more symmetric, kalaidescopic appearance: https://www.google.com/search?q=kaleidoscope&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjlnI_0ho_OAhUFyT4KHYojBIoQ_AUICCgB&biw=1323&bih=880 https://www.google.com/search?q=kaleidoscope&source=lnms&tbm...
- bugeats 10y agoYeah that article presents a poor understanding of cymatics. However, you can think of the resonant body of the vessel that contains the water as one half of the interval. It's the relationship being the note and its environment that produces the unique pattern. If the vessel were to change, the image would too. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the note alone.
- chubot 10y agoThe article is unfortunately a bit unclear, but it's not true that they have "nothing to do" with the notes. They are just a bit noisier than what we've perhaps seen before. Would you say these pictures have "nothing to do" with the notes? http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/06/the-visual-patterns-of-audio-frequencies-seen-through-vibrating-sand/ http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/06/the-visual-patterns-of... Yes, it is a function of the note/frequency and the medium, not just the note, but that still means they are very much related tot he notes. In particular you can see the different circular symmetries pretty clearly through the noise. http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/20902918854 http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/20902918854
- bweitzman 10y agoYeah I think those patterns are completely irrelevant when talking about the characteristics of notes and combinations of them.
- rhizome 10y agoIntervals and chords have characters, individual notes do not Yes they do, in the forms of texture and timbre.
- bweitzman 10y agoNotes do not have timbre, they are just named pitches (which themselves are just frequencies).
- rhizome 10y agoHm? If it's about how they appear on the staff, why make the distinction?
- bweitzman 10y agoThere are different ways to assign pitches to notes. What is commonly used in modern western music is called equal temperament, but there are other systems, like just intonation, for example.
- rhizome 10y agoThe pitches in alternate tuning systems like JI and maqam are sometimes, but not always, denoted with extra information. Quarter-flats, cent indicators, and so on, distinguish the note-pitch representations. While tuning systems can indeed be transposed or converted to unmodified standard (ET) staff notation, that's more of a convenience that has its own learning curve. So, in JI you wouldn't simply use 'A' to represent (e.g.) 440Hz, it might be A 4, for the "A" key (or "A" staff position) having a 4 cent difference than ET A.[1] 1. http://lilypondblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/example.png http://lilypondblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/example.p...
- triplesec 10y agoi thi in common usage 'note' could cover both your narrow meaning and his the parent comment's wider one.
- zhemao 10y agoAs mentioned in one of the comments, D-E-F is a triad, not a tritone. A tritone is an interval of three whole tones (i.e. an augmented fourth). For instance, C and F# form a tritone.
- meggar 10y agoD-E-F isn't that dissonant either, especially if you add an A or Bb
- recursive 10y agoWell, E-F is one semi-tone. That's among the dissonant-est intervals I can think of.
- meggar 10y agoyup, E-F is more dissonant than D-E-F
- sbuttgereit 10y agoYup. I think the parent to your comment is confusing frequently heard (and thus "accepted") with dissonance. It's not uncommon to hear those notes, even in that order, if the prevalent harmony is a Dm7(9) or Bbmaj7(#11) which aren't rare chord forms, even in popular music. That doesn't make them less dissonant, but merely common-place.
- bweitzman 10y agoI think you could make the argument that more common place actually means less dissonant. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_cluster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_cluster
- sbuttgereit 10y agoI don't agree. Unless you're using "dissonance" in the sense of plain English, there are more precise definitions of the term which have meaning in music. Since the comments in this thread are referring to musical elements such as specific notes, interval relationships, and the contribution of a harmonic context (albeit single chord) I default to the more technical definitions of the term. When I am composing or improvising, I'm thinking of one of two ways (or both) when considering "dissonance": 1) the actual physiological basis of dissonance which has to do with the perception of how the waves of different sounds interfere and are ultimately perceived... an example is when you have two tone sources at the same frequency and one moves gradually to a higher or lower frequency; as they are close, but "out of tune" with each other you can hear a "beating" sound come into place that quickens with increasing distance of frequencies. This changing of interfering waves continues through the point of a single out of tune note becoming an interval between two different notes. Hard dissonances like minor seconds are considered hard because of these frequency relationships. That's probably as good as a definition as I can get there without brushing up on the subject. 2) dissonance as part of a harmonic progression where harmonic structures of relatively greater dissonance resolve to harmonic structures of lesser dissonance. This is in part how we get "V7" chords most favorably resolving to "I" chords, though optionally resolving to "VI", for example. Now the dominant chords are perfectly acceptable and anyone listening to blues, for example, won't hear the dissonant tritone as "objectionable" even when they're never resolved. As for your link, I've written much music using tone clusters (couldn't tell why you referenced it actually) and the kind of tone cluster I'd use depends on the kind of relative dissonance I want and for what purpose. I might start using diatonic sequences of notes (the "white keys" for example) to get a moderately dissonant start, build tension by moving to increasing chromatic (white and black keys, more dissonant) clusters, and then finally release that by going back to diatonic, but perhaps open clusters... if not some triadic constructs. Managing relative dissonance is done using common practice harmony, too, just not with clusters. I think there's an argument that that's what the practice of harmony is really about.
- lisper 10y agoNo, this is not what musical notes actually look like. At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, musical notes are sounds, not images. They don't look like anything. The images in the article are what you get if you render the information in a sound to an image in a particular way. If you render that information in a different way, you'll get a different image.
- botfly 10y agoIsn't that "what things look like"? Like what you see when you see a tree isn't actually a tree but the interpretation of light waves hitting your eye. It's a rendering of the light in a particular way and we somewhat casually call this "what a tree looks like". Often when we talk about the projection of a thing into some visual form we us this kinda casual language. I think to your point, any one of those methods of rendering the information into visual form has equal claim to "what the notes look like"
- lisper 10y agoYes, that's true, but in the case of macroscopic physical objects like trees there is a "natural" rendering designed by evolution that is reasonably called what the thing "actually" looks like. In the case of sounds, there is no such a natural rendering. Turning sound into images necessarily involves some design, and so there's no basis for calling any particular rendering the "actual" appearance of a sound.
- sporkologist 10y agoThey look like a representation of amplitude vs. time on a graph, if they look like anything. The art presented is very nice, but it's an artist's interpretation. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
- JoeDaDude 10y agoSo it sounds like these are effectively the same thing as Chladni Patterns [1] using a liquid surface. It reminds of composer Stuart Mitchell [2] who believed he saw Chladni patterns carved into the Rosslyn Cathedral in Scotland. These he interpreted as a guide to a musical score, which Mitchell then recorded as the "Rosslyn Motet" [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Chladni#Chladni_figures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Chladni#Chladni_figures [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Mitchell [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy2Dg-ncWoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy2Dg-ncWoY
- chubot 10y agoYes, thank you! Here are some other related links. It looks like their patterns are just a little noisier due to the medium of water, but you see the same kind of symmetry. http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/06/the-visual-patterns-of-audio-frequencies-seen-through-vibrating-sand/ http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/06/the-visual-patterns-of... http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/20902918854 http://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/20902918854 -- nice video http://www.cymatics.co.uk/ http://www.cymatics.co.uk/
- brador 10y agoThere must be a better way of writing music down. Out of interest I Googled "alternative music notation" and every alternative is the same lines with dots BS that translates poorly to computer and is difficult for beginners to read. Why has there never existed an alternative musical notation system thats truely different? Is horizontal lines and abstract squiggles with relative positions really the best we have?
- huehehue 10y agoThere are a few alternatives, though most are instrument-specific. For piano, there's Klavarskribo. If you've ever played Guitar Hero/Rockband, it's a bit like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klavarskribo For many fretted stringed instruments, there's tablature. One line per string, and instead of abstract squiggles you get numbers that represent fret positions. They stack easily for chords, and there's intuitive notation for picking styles and such. E.g. sliding from the second to the fifth fret on the A string would look like: E |---------- B |---------- G |---------- D |---------- A |---2/5---- E |---------- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablature I see your point about a truly different system but, as music is basically sound through time, I'm not sure how else it could be notated if not linearly.
- soundwave106 10y agoMost of the alternatives in use I can think come in genres where improvisation is far more important than playing exactly, and as such only a reduced feature set is needed. Examples include the above mentioned tablature, solfege (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge), Roman numeral notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral_analysis), chord charts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_chart), or lead sheets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_sheet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_sheet). Full notation in the pop and jazz genres are rare. For Western classical, honestly, considering the information included in standard notation -- rhythmic complexity, phrasings, special symbols for various afflictions, etc. -- it would be really hard to replicate this in a system that's both easy for humans and computers to read. (Think if musicians had to use something like the piano roll found in most DAWs...)
- agox 10y agoAccording to the article, "If you were to repeat this experiment, you would get the same designs." The initial conditions of the experiment are so susceptible to minor variations, I strongly doubt the author's assertion.
- phlakaton 10y agoI found that to be a fun article, and it could be a starting point for creative exploration, but I think any suggestion that these images relate to our actual psychoacoustic perception of notes and music is wholly unsubstantiated. I do perceive differences in the character of music played in different "keys", but 1) I ascribe these to aspects of timbre, dissonance, tuning, and performance practice rather than fundamental aspects of the notes themselves, 2) there's very little scientific evidence that I'm aware of that these differences correspond to psychological moods. Nonetheless, there's a significant philosophical tradition going back to at least Plato that there is some connection between tonal systems and psychology. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_the_affections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_the_affections and Plato's Republic for a couple of starting points.
- eggy 10y agoIn keeping with the religious interpretations of the article, G - Demon, C# - Tree in Eden, I don't see F as the underbelly of the frog, but more a very Blakean image of Two Eagles on either side of Christ holding the Chalice with a wee spider hanging the bottom above the Sun in Christ's lap! More so, I see G as a Teletubby rather than a Demon ;)