8 ms·
What Makes Music Sound Good? (2010) [pdf]
- SeanLuke 3y ago> Most Western instruments produce “harmonic” sounds that, when analyzed as Fourier described, have relatively strong lower overtones f, 2f, 3f, 4f. The overtones of several of these sounds will match when their fundamental frequencies are related by simple whole-number ratios. I've always had problems with existing consonance theories along these lines, probably out of ignorance. I believe that consonance probably has something to do with partial relationships. But it always has seemed the existing theory regarding consonance and partials is half baked at best. Harmonic sounds have partials at f, 2f, 3f, 4f, and so on. So let's take C and G, a perfect fifth. Will say f = C. So C's sawtooth has partials of f 2f 3f 4f 5f 6f ... G, at a perfect fifth, is 3/2 the frequency of C. So it has partials at 3/2f 3f 9/2f 6f 15/2f 9f 21/2f 12f ... The only overlaps are 3f, 6f, 9f, 12f. That's pretty thin gruel given how fast these partials drop of in amplitude (for a sawtooth, a partial at xf drops off as 1/x) Now consider E, a major 3 and also considered highly consonant. This is 5/4. So we have 5/4 5/2 15/4 5 25/4 15/2 35/4 10 ... That's an overlap of just 5, 10, ... with a super fast dropoff. Now consider Eb, a minor 3 and also consonant. This is, wait, Eb can't be approximated in rational values at all, um.... And if you just have sine waves, rather than sawtooth or whatnot, they consist of a single partial so there's never any overlap -- you're back to the pythagorean square 1.
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- pcc 3y agoWith acoustic instruments, sympathetic resonance can play a big role in the overall colour, because eg unplayed undamped strings also respond according to their harmonic likeness to the presence of other excited frequencies. For example, on a piano if you undamp but don't sound one C, by setting the key down gently and holding it, then strike the C an octave below, the higher C will start ringing quite audibly and add its own partials, the same happens also of course to a lesser degree if you say undamp the G an octave + 5th above the C you're striking. This happens all the time during normal piano playing, because pianists purposefully hold long-duration keys down, and the sustain pedal keeps undamped the notes already played. It can also work in the "downward" direction for example on the violin where the open strings are E A D G with E the highest, the well known Vivaldi A minor concerto (eg Suzuki book 4) opens with shifting on that E string to eg 3rd position to play the A which is an octave higher than the open A string. To the extent you get this perfectly in tune, presuming a properly tuned violin of sufficient quality, the open A string ie an octave lower will start "ringing" as will the D below that to a lesser degree; and if you then subsequently damp those open strings, it changes the sound significantly. This "ringing" effect is quite important to violinists in developing their sense of tuning and calibrating exactly where to set their fingers.
- whiddershins 3y agoIt doesn’t stop with are these partials the same as other partials on a different note. The ratio of the partials creates waves of differing complexity and periodicity. This makes the wave easier or harder to comprehend by the auditory system.
- codeulike 3y agoAs well as overtones from an instrument, there are also combination tones that manifest in the cilia (tiny vibrating hairs) in our ears. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_tone ... So even if you play two pure sine waves with no overtones, say C and G, the cilia in your ears will still generate a bunch of other tones based on the relationships between the two notes, and I think a lot of the 'pleasing' nature of 'pairs of notes with simple frequency rations' (Octaves and Fifths etc) comes from that.
- tzs 3y agoThere is also interaction of different notes somewhere in the processing in the brain. On speakers play a sine wave in the left channel and a sine wave of a slightly different frequency in the right channel. You'll hear a beat frequency due to the actual physical interaction of the two waves in the air. Then do the same thing except using headphones with good isolation so each ear only hears one of the sine waves. You still hear a beat frequency even though the two waves are no longer interacting in their air.
- dspig 3y agoI think what's going on with consonance is that there is an implied lower pitch that all the partials are harmonics of - that also works when there are just sine waves.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoHere's a little offering for you that can take you on a deeper dive: https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html
- mrob 3y agoWilliam Sethares published a model of dissonance, where dissonance of a sound is an amplitude-weighted sum of the dissonance of all pairs of partials, with dissonance of individual pairs a function of their frequencies according to Plomp and Levelt's dissonance curve. This model is a good approximation of how humans perceive dissonance, and it generalizes to inharmonic sounds: Local Consonance and the Relationship Between Timbre and Scale https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf Informal explanation of the paper: https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html
- bandyaboot 3y agoAnother interesting aspect of this question is if you approach it from a human evolutionary perspective. The technical aspects of music are certainly interesting as well, but why have our brains been hard wired to respond to it?
- scrozier 3y agoAs a musician and a computer scientist, I'm always interested when music stuff gets posted here. I looked this guy up; he's a bona fide composer, apparently. He looks at music in a very technical way that doesn't sound much (to me) like how musicians talk about music. He also says some wrong things. For example, "We cannot identify the interval between two notes just by listening." Um, yes, you bloody well can. In fact, "ear training" is a core skill in music theory education. And he counts rhythms starting with zero. If you did this with any group of musicians, they would shout you out of the room. Imagine Mick Jagger yelling, "Zero, one, two, three!" I'm not saying he doesn't have his reasons, but these sorts of things incline me to think he's not in the mainstream of musical culture. Which is fine, of course, but may be misleading to readers who think they're getting traditional musical information.
- esafak 3y agoHe is a theorist: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html See his work on orbifolds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbifold#Music_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbifold#Music_theory
- benoliver999 3y agoI don't understand the interval thing. Anyone who knows what 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' sounds like knows what an octave sounds like, and anyone who has seen 'Star Wars' knows a perfect fifth. Does he mean two notes played at the same time?
- scrozier 3y agoI think _maybe_ he meant that you can't tell that you heard a C and an F, only that you heard a perfect fourth. Even that's not 100% true: some people can tell. And it's certainly not what he said.
- superpope99 3y agoI believe what he is referring to is the idea that you can't tell the difference between eg. an "augmented second" and a "minor third". One is written e.g. C-D#, one C-Eb. I've always found the distinction between these two types of interval largely pointless - for exactly his reasoning. They sound the same. Potentially they are useful in discussing theory in writing, potentially they are relevant when tuning using non-equal temperament. But knowing this distinction doesn't help you make music that sounds good. An ear trained pianist, for example, would not distinguish these two intervals, and I would argue that would not be a limiting factor to the quality of music they could produce.
- diimdeep 3y agoEven though one understands everything about what makes music sound good, this knowledge does not guarantee producing music that sounds good. (I looked at music produced by author of this pdf)
- esafak 3y agoThe short version: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/whatmakesmusicsoundgood.html https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/whatmakesmusicsoundgoo...
- codeulike 3y agoI find this much more useful because it talks about _why_ intervals like the octave and fifth sound 'right' and then explains how that influenced the evolution of the western scales (colloquially: why is the pattern of white/black keys on a piano that particular pattern?) https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/ (posted to hn 7 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 )
- optimalsolver 3y agoMusic scientist Phillip Dorrell has argued for the existence of currently hypothetical "strong music," a class of musical stimuli presumably discoverable by strong AI. Any property, in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. So through a really powerful search and optimization process that can more efficiently explore remote, undiscovered regions of music-space, we could get musical stimuli more intense than anything previously imagined. What these songs would sound like is the real mystery. Would they sound anything like the music we're familiar with? Would they lead to musical wireheading? It also seems a bad idea to measure musical goodness by, say, how many times humans will replay a certain audio file. If you use this measure, I don't think you'll end up with what you want at all.
- tempaway25755 3y agosounds like the Colundi Sequence
- HKH2 3y ago> It also seems a bad idea to measure musical goodness by, say, how many times humans will replay a certain audio file. Because people listen to music for words and other sounds that are added to music.
- tsimionescu 3y agoI don't see why we would believe there must exist music more pleasing than what we've already created. Not saying it's impossible it exists, but I also don't see any reason to believe it should exist. Perhaps the utmost extent to which we can enjoy music is really not that high, and something like Bach or Rolling Stones or Taylor Swift or whatever already approaches the theoretical maximum.
- cousin_it 3y ago> Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short distances from note to note. Large leaps sound inherently unmelodic. I wonder about this. Many folk musics have independently arrived at the pentatonic, and music in pentatonic is really quite jumpy. Listen to some jigs or reels and you'll be startled by how much the melody jumps around. In contrast, if you want to find very smooth melodic motion with long scale passages, approaches by semitone and so on, you'll find it much more in Bach than in folk or modern pop. So smooth melody might be more of a minority taste. Or consider the song Axel F. It's pretty much the perfect pop hook, all producers dream of creating something like it and all listeners can instantly latch onto it. Yet it consists mostly of jumps, including a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and an octave.
- smcameron 3y ago> Many folk musics have independently arrived at the pentatonic The way I had the pentatonic scale explained to me (embarassingly recently) explains why this is so. If you take all the chords of a given key, and then examine all the notes, and remove any note that sounds discordant with any chord of the key, the notes that remain are the notes of the pentatonic scale. (That's not 100% true, but it's close enough to true for rock 'n' roll.) What this means is, if you have a backing track that sticks to chords within the key, you can kind of noodle around in the pentatonic scale however you like, and it'll sound alright. For guitarists, this is like adding training wheels to your bike... suddenly, you're effortlessly making music, without crashing and burning, and all you're doing is sticking to the pentatonic scale. (Yeah, there's targeting chord tones, and following the changes, etc. but for a beginner/intermediate guitarist, the pentatonic scale is magic.) Before youtube, the above information was rather hard to come by, I found. I played guitar for approximately 30 years before figuring it out via to youtube. I made a youtube video[1] covering what I deemed to be the salient points... I'm not aware of another single youtube video covering all these points, (though all the points are covered by many combinations of other multiple youtube videos). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEH-9N7Yx5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEH-9N7Yx5U
- cousin_it 3y agoI'm not sure that's right. The pentatonic is the most popular scale in folk musics, but folk musics usually use very few chords. The basic 12 bar blues has 3 chords, and they're usually played as major chords or dominant 7th. But soloing over it with the minor pentatonic sounds great.
- willprice89 3y ago> These five properties make an enormous difference to our immediate experience; in fact, you can take completely random notes and make them sound reasonably musical, simply by forcing them to conform to these requirements. Any examples of this? Amazing if true.
- squidsoup 3y agoI don't think ambient and noise music have any of these five properties generally, and it sounds good (where "good" is highly subjective).
- cushpush 3y agoRecently I started a fresh music newsletter (https://letter.remuse.co https://letter.remuse.co) and I have been placing spectrograms for the tracks that get featured, so you can visualize the song as you listen along.
- john61 3y agoThis is not what music makes sound good. Music sounds good if it is expressing human emotions that are resonating within us. In terms of IT: A syntacticaly and grammaticaly correct computer program is not automaticaly a good program.
- humility 3y agoRecently, I watched a documentary in which some characters sat in the middle of the jungle next to a gushing stream, only to be spellbound by the croaking of toads—sometimes solitary, sometimes in unison—for hours on end. I wonder if there's a connection between the natural harmony of sounds and mental stimulation, or a sense of 'mental peace' in a certain mental state, which music taps into as well? Speaking as someone totally new to music theory, I found it quite interesting to arrive at this question.
- heroku 3y agoH is there a service that can produce speech of short statements through a prompt?
- ransackdev 3y agohttps://youtu.be/DAcjV60RnRw https://youtu.be/DAcjV60RnRw
- korginator 3y agoSince the professor is also a composer, are there any examples of his own music? I'm unable to find anything except his lectures on YouTube. I'd really like to hear his take on good sounding music. As a former musician myself, I find my own tastes changing every year, and it's very subjective. Though he talks about the five properties, I tend to disagree with this generalisation - what I like at the moment really depends on my state of mind, mood, time of the day, and what I want to feel like after listening to a few songs. Sometimes I really get into songs with complex patterns and interesting time-signature changes, and at other times I simply settle with some Wes Montgomery. What sounded good to me this morning doesn't work for me now. What I disliked five years ago is something I keep coming back to today. Age contributes as a very significant factor to what sounds good. Speed metal or power metal was "good" in my teens and twenties, but these days I need to be in a very specific mood with specific energy levels to even consider some Pantera or Megadeth. On the other hand, I can easily get into Sepultura ("Ratamahatta", "Roots bloody roots", etc.) even though they are often much heavier, because there's a kind of easy coexistence with their type of music that I find curious. There are other musicians I liked way back then, but you couldn't pay me money to listen to them today - even the same songs I had on repeat. Perhaps the prof is on theoretically sound footing, I'm a layman in this field, but I can't experience what he describes.