4 ms·

A lot more than usual. Leaving the rhythm open to interpretation, much more so than pitch, can lead to wildly different pieces of music. It's like having no pun

A lot more than usual. Leaving the rhythm open to interpretation, much more so than pitch, can lead to wildly different pieces of music. It's like having no punctuation. You can end up with an entirely different piece.

seanhunter 4y ago
Agreed, although in a lot of systems of early notation the rhythm is sort of implied by the text and contextual clues such as knowing whether a particular piece was a certain sort of dance and therefore the likely range of tempi and main beat stress patterns etc. I think it was around 1300 BCE when western music notation included both pitch and rhythm (with mensural notation).
jacquesm 4y ago
That's true, without knowing the rhythm and the phrasing it could sound entirely different than it originally did. But just absolute and relative pitch changes would be fine with me. Sometimes you can recover some of the rhythm by looking at the notes though. And the shape and size of the Lyre plus knowledge about the materials used could give a fair approximation of what the pitch range should be.
- dwringer 4y ago
  Shape and size won't really help since we'd need to know the string tension and spacing. Otherwise it could be literally any scale with any shape and size. It's hard to express just how enormous the difference between musical modes can be when you leave modern tuning and standards behind. My favorite example of a completely different system of music is Gagaku, Japanese court music with ancestors extending back to Han dynasty China and even beyond. Listen to that next to some Bach; that seems like the possible range of interpretations we might end up with! Relative changes in pitch are only the simplest level of abstraction in examining a melody. Beyond that, all note events exist relative to chord structure, harmonic ideas, and even other music that performers and listeners are already familiar with. We would be missing everything except that base layer, which I'd argue conveys next to nothing (even pitch, while technically one dimensional, is interpreted cyclically with each octave. So, note 1 is higher than note 2. But is it really the same note, just 1 octave higher? Or is it something in an entirely different key?). EDIT: Just for illustration, in Bach, the most similar note to a C (with the simplest harmonic relation) is an octave higher/lower C, but the second most similar is a G or F, halfway across the octave! But the most dissimilar is a Gb, a difference of only a half step and directly between those two! From this we can see distance tells us nothing about harmonicity. This is the same issue we see with the difference between major and minor - qualitatively enormous but quantitatively tiny.

seanhunter 4y ago

Agreed, although in a lot of systems of early notation the rhythm is sort of implied by the text and contextual clues such as knowing whether a particular piece was a certain sort of dance and therefore the likely range of tempi and main beat stress patterns etc. I think it was around 1300 BCE when western music notation included both pitch and rhythm (with mensural notation).

jacquesm 4y ago

That's true, without knowing the rhythm and the phrasing it could sound entirely different than it originally did. But just absolute and relative pitch changes would be fine with me. Sometimes you can recover some of the rhythm by looking at the notes though. And the shape and size of the Lyre plus knowledge about the materials used could give a fair approximation of what the pitch range should be.

dwringer 4y ago
Shape and size won't really help since we'd need to know the string tension and spacing. Otherwise it could be literally any scale with any shape and size. It's hard to express just how enormous the difference between musical modes can be when you leave modern tuning and standards behind. My favorite example of a completely different system of music is Gagaku, Japanese court music with ancestors extending back to Han dynasty China and even beyond. Listen to that next to some Bach; that seems like the possible range of interpretations we might end up with! Relative changes in pitch are only the simplest level of abstraction in examining a melody. Beyond that, all note events exist relative to chord structure, harmonic ideas, and even other music that performers and listeners are already familiar with. We would be missing everything except that base layer, which I'd argue conveys next to nothing (even pitch, while technically one dimensional, is interpreted cyclically with each octave. So, note 1 is higher than note 2. But is it really the same note, just 1 octave higher? Or is it something in an entirely different key?). EDIT: Just for illustration, in Bach, the most similar note to a C (with the simplest harmonic relation) is an octave higher/lower C, but the second most similar is a G or F, halfway across the octave! But the most dissimilar is a Gb, a difference of only a half step and directly between those two! From this we can see distance tells us nothing about harmonicity. This is the same issue we see with the difference between major and minor - qualitatively enormous but quantitatively tiny.