4 ms·

I don't think you need to imagine "creatures" - there are humans on earth whose culture's music doesn't have the concept of octaves, let alone fifths. All the r

I don't think you need to imagine "creatures" - there are humans on earth whose culture's music doesn't have the concept of octaves, let alone fifths. All the real action in their music is in its rhythmic complexity. But my comment was in reply to this statement specifically: > Somewhere there is a perfect universe where 12 fifths form an octave. For this to be true, I think you'd indeed need a new universe where 3^12 = 2^x, where X is a whole integer.

tshaddox 4y ago
I'm not talking about explicit notions of octaves and octave equivalence, although those do exist in very many musical traditions and appear to be extremely widespread in musical traditions where tones have names (if not ubiquitous—I'm not aware of any exceptions). I was referring to the claims that octave equivalence is in some sense hard-wired in the human brain, or sometimes claimed to be all or many mammalian brains. I'm not qualified to evaluate these claims or even whether how well-accepted they are among experts, but such claims do seem to pop up all over the place when discussing music perception.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  I'm much less qualified: I took a "World Music 101" class in college that described some Native American tribes whose songs had drums, and cries that fell in pitch from high to low to call down the spirits from above, but their music had no concept of octaves. And I agree with you. While I can imagine a culture that hadn't "discovered" the octave, it's difficult to imagine people who can't even perceive octaves when presented with them, and quite easy to imagine other creatures that cannot perceive them.
- maxdamantus 4y ago
  The basic reason for octave equivalence is not from human subjectivity. It's from the fact that something that repeats "x" times is also something that repeats "x/2" times, eg a sequence such as: ABCABCABCABCABCABC Can be thought of as "ABC" repeated 6 times or "ABCABC" repeated 3 times. If you replace the letters with numbers, you can treat the numbers as samples of a sound wave. Just to be clear: the magical number here is 2 (not 12 or 8 or 7) since "octave equivalence" refers to the fact that you can multiply a frequency by 2 and get the same note. Unless the sound is a perfect sine wave, there isn't a particular frequency associated with it due to these alternative interpretations.

tshaddox 4y ago

I'm not talking about explicit notions of octaves and octave equivalence, although those do exist in very many musical traditions and appear to be extremely widespread in musical traditions where tones have names (if not ubiquitous—I'm not aware of any exceptions). I was referring to the claims that octave equivalence is in some sense hard-wired in the human brain, or sometimes claimed to be all or many mammalian brains. I'm not qualified to evaluate these claims or even whether how well-accepted they are among experts, but such claims do seem to pop up all over the place when discussing music perception.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
I'm much less qualified: I took a "World Music 101" class in college that described some Native American tribes whose songs had drums, and cries that fell in pitch from high to low to call down the spirits from above, but their music had no concept of octaves. And I agree with you. While I can imagine a culture that hadn't "discovered" the octave, it's difficult to imagine people who can't even perceive octaves when presented with them, and quite easy to imagine other creatures that cannot perceive them.
maxdamantus 4y ago
The basic reason for octave equivalence is not from human subjectivity. It's from the fact that something that repeats "x" times is also something that repeats "x/2" times, eg a sequence such as: ABCABCABCABCABCABC Can be thought of as "ABC" repeated 6 times or "ABCABC" repeated 3 times. If you replace the letters with numbers, you can treat the numbers as samples of a sound wave. Just to be clear: the magical number here is 2 (not 12 or 8 or 7) since "octave equivalence" refers to the fact that you can multiply a frequency by 2 and get the same note. Unless the sound is a perfect sine wave, there isn't a particular frequency associated with it due to these alternative interpretations.