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Melody in the form of the pentatonic scale is much more universal across cultures, though. Use of non-trivial harmony is significantly less widespread, it's usu
by sirtaj 10y ago
Melody in the form of the pentatonic scale is much more universal across cultures, though. Use of non-trivial harmony is significantly less widespread, it's usually no more than a melody played over a single root tone or chord. South-Asian classical and folk music is one example in which Western-style harmony is not used at all.
- MrManatee 10y agoYou're right, of course. My wording is was bit poor. What I should have said that harmony is less ad hoc; it has less "degrees of freedom". With regards to melody, there are tons of tuning systems that are quite close to the usual twelve-tone equal temperament. It would be hard to give a convincing argument that one of these sounds better than all others. Contrast this to the system of harmony where the basic principle is that ratios of small integers sound good together. This is not the only possible system of harmony, but it does seem to represent some kind of local optimum. And this makes it more amenable to the kind of purely theoretical reasoning that the article is trying to do.