3 ms·

The hard part is I don't think we hear harmony the same way. The way we hear music, what makes sense about music, is a function of the music we've listened to

• rrmm 6y ago
  Probably the same thing can be said about shakespeare as well. We just have a very wildly different context than its contemporaneous viewers. And our culture and language as it is now is hugely influenced by all of shakespeare's works that we probably miss a lot of what could have been novel and interesting about it.
• dharma1 6y ago
  This is interesting - I think going backwards in time, different musical harmonic/sound conventions still make "sense" to us. Like you could be listening do music from nearly any period of time from the past 500+ years and it would broadly "make sense" to the listener, even if you weren't directly exposed to it before (with the exception of perhaps experimental 20th century atonal classical music, or microtonal music from other cultures). But I'm not sure it works the other way around - if you took a 17th century person and played music from the last 50-100 years to them - Michael Jackson, bossa nova, Debussy, Smashing Pumpkins, whatever - they probably wouldn't "get it".
  • rrmm 6y ago
    Some stuff based on pentatonic scales (blues) would probably make sense. From what I recall it's almost universal in different cultures. Bobby Mcferrin has a fun demo about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take people to get into it. You could probably find some indigneous populations to work with.
    • mrunkel 6y ago
      Cool link. Thanks!
    • williamdclt 6y ago
      > But yeah I bet some jazz would be baffling. I wonder how fast it'd take people to get into it Even without going into crazy experimental free jazz, most people of western cultures are baffled by something like Giant Steps. I don't know how fast they could "get into it", but I don't think it would easy
      • rrmm 6y ago
        See this seems really weird because Giant Steps is super simple and makes sense to me, inherently. And I can't step back from that and see it otherwise except to acknowledge that your point is probably true. But that is purely an intellectual standpoint because I know people are different. Maybe it's like some optical illusion pictures that once you see it you can't not see it.
  • leetcrew 6y ago
    bach would probably have an aneurysm from all the parallel fifths and octaves in a typical rhythm guitar part.
    • kmill 6y ago
      Or he might understand it as an organ stop. The 5 1⁄3′ (quint) and 4' (octave) stops just create constant parallels. The prohibition of parallel perfect intervals is for independence of distinct voices, which strengthens counterpoint. It prevents a voice from being confused for the overtones of another. When independence isn't necessary, you can find these sorts of parallel intervals in even Bach's music.
      • rrmm 6y ago
        Music of his time and right before are interesting to me because they in a lot of cases were coming at harmony from a different place than we are (hexachords and modality). So I heard things that were surprising compared to common practice afterwards; certain harmonic choices would jump out at me that were dictated by voice leading, but they felt extremely modern and somewhat alien. That and the connection to jazz improvisation that sort of existed with basso continuo accompaniment in baroque music blew me away.
    • adonovan 6y ago
      The rule about no parallel fifths exists to help the listener distinguish several melodies played together (counterpoint)---a bit like the rules of English style governing unambiguous use of pronouns. In a rhythm guitar part, there typically aren't multiple lines of melody; the whole chord shifts by a fifth.