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Postedabout 2 months ago
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Trying to classify things as music is a normative approach - saying what music should be. There's always exceptions to rules, as you point out, and people will always disagree and find exceptions.
The article is a descriptive approach - it studies what people think music is.
You can treat music as information. If it's not information, it's just noise.
Sometimes it has a low information density. People like to sing along to stuff they recognise. Sometimes it has higher density - a surprise bit of syncopation or an unusual note. Music is a variation in pitch and rhythm (etc) that is boring enough (in the context of the priors) to be familiar, but not too boring.
OTOH look at how tone poems flopped. There are patterns that are naturally easier to learn - rhythms (in the article) and maybe scales and harmonies (though this is clearly a bit more complex - not every culture has the old Mesopotamian diatonic scales that the Pythagorians formalised). But like Chomsky theorised with grammar, there might be defaults (or a range of defaults) that humans are naturally drawn to as the priors.
In information theory we have:
A message has maximal information content if (and only if) its symbols are statistically indistinguishable from random noise.
Noise or noise-like elements are also important part of many kinds of music.
Of course, I'd argue Bach and Debussy are very information-dense too but they somehow manage to stay uncluttered. The really great thing about music is that encodes information on many different levels, Claude Shannon notwithstanding
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Argumen...
Imagine a chef making a dish of just an empty plate. It is just stupid. Even the biggest food hipsters wouldn't fall for something that stupid.
At some point one should have listened to enough music in their life to call 4'33" out for the bullshit that it is.
If you’re into music cognition, evolution of culture, or cognitive universals vs cultural diversity, this is the kind of data you want to see.
That's another simplification, real pianos are not tuned to 12TET, but use stretch tuning (which can be over 30cents off in the lower range).
I'd rather argue that people like what they're used to and so "people like pure ratios" is seemingly only true if "pure ratios" are not really pure. And that's ignoring a lot of the music that doesn't have roots in Europe.
Integer ratios are the base upon which harmony is built. Temperament is a subtle modification that sounds very close to integer ratios, but allows more complex harmonic structures where dissonance is evenly spread out across all the relationships between tones.
It also helps for an animal to know the volume of these awhoos as it is a good proxy for closeness, and therefore danger. It's even a good thing to know the rhythm of these awhoos as it helps again to assess if these wolves, or wolf, is on the move while awhooing or on the move between awhoos.
And this is just one example I'm currently making up bit at least makes sense that for many animals: tempo, volume, rhythm, patterns in sound, it's needed for survival. So evolution will select for it.
Music is a lot more than just those things I think, but it at least shows some evolutionary backbone as to why I believe that more animals have been evolved to like music. At least, some elephants sure seem to enjoy a good piano [1].
One possible reason is that allowing one’s nervous system to be entrained to external rhythms is potentially exploitable. So humans may have evolved the ability to “let the guard down.”
Another thing that comes to mind is recent pop-sci talking about how individual bees can measure time pretty accurately, which I personally found very surprising, even though I've heard that they "dance" for communication.
Rhythm appreciation is neurologically very interesting since it requires several basic abilities acting at once, including tracking time, but also a certain amount of memory and pattern recognition. Animal appreciation of melodic stuff and harmony is interesting too but seems much harder to study and more dependent on physical aspects of ears
Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.”
We have a time window within which audio stimulae are interpreted as being "the same sound". When you hear two impulses outside that window, they seem to be different sounds. You can play with this by looping two similar or copies of a sound and then varying their offset a few ms either way. They'll move in and out of seeming like the same and different sounds, and around the crossover point you get ringing effects (especially if there's more than two copies, such as with tight echoes).
To me, this seems like a fundamental part of music interpretation. Not the core, but very significant.
It them seems likely to me that:
a) most species have different sized windows b) they perceive blends of frequencies quite differently depending on the window length
So, what seems like codherent, organised sound with a "story" or "meaning" or "structure" to us, probably becomes mush to most other species.
Add to this the different frequency ranges in which animals hear, the different ways their ears focus sound... etc. Us humans are creating organised sound around the biology of our auditory system; the perception of organisation is likely very different for most other species.
Music is a hack.
Interesting choice of example. Dog howls are apparently intentionally off-key.
The goal of the basic choir is to sound like one voice in perfect harmony.
The goal of a pack howling over long distances is apparently to communicate that every member of the pack is present - so each voice is out of harmony with the rest.
That's what people write in the sheet music, but reality is more complicated than that. Notably in swung rhythms ratios are blurry (and dependent on BPM) and specific performers in band will play different ratios at the same time (e.g. drummer will play straighter, soloist will swing more).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_rhythm
If I understand it right, Toussaint's 2005 paper showed that many common rhythms across world music can be generated by distributing beats as evenly as possible. Some of the patterns in this newer research are Euclidean, but the broader finding is that people have a natural affinity for small-integer-ratio rhythms generally. So this is empirical evidence of why these mathematically simple patterns (including Euclidean rhythms) show up across world music.
it dives into many ways that humans interact with and experience music, using the foil of classical western concert music against many other forms of traditional and popular music (including the popular phase of what's now considered classical).
really interesting stuff!
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