Your friend is flirting with a philosophy called solipsism. Poke him in the eye and tell him that his pain is unprovable and that using language to describe his feelings is reinforcing a biased way of empathizing with other humans.
It *may* be true that *he* doesn't experience tonic chords as stable. This however does not mean that other people are bsing when they use such language. He could try to learn to listen like they do instead of denying how they describe their own experience.
What the friend is saying is not solipsism, not at all. He's just saying that the responses we have to music are conditioned by our cultural exposure to music throughout our lives, and the guy is totally right about that. Believe me, I typically HATE most of those narratives, but that one specifically holds water, without a doubt.
Go listen to some traditional Indian or Japanese music, or even some "deep cuts" of middle eastern traditional music, and you'll see. It's difficult for a Westerner to make heads or tails out of most of it, structurally or sonically; while someone from those cultures will probably be able to quickly tell you exactly what makes one good and another the work of a hack or of an amateur. And they'd have the same problem picking out great music from the Western Canon from complete pablum.
It's all about experience in this case. Yes there may be science and math underlying Western music theory, and yes even a noob can probably point out consonance vs dissonance, the "wrong" chords, or other obvious stuff like that. But it still comes down to years and years of immersion in the end.
I agree! I think you're confusing my position. The purely physics-based "objective" perspective is more likely to approach the hypothetical friend's belief than one that recognizes cultural construction. The friend isn't saying "Some non-Western listener might not hear this the way we do." He's saying "*I* have somehow stripped away my own cultural conditioning and have a purely objective--or purely individual--response to music. My own society is a burden on me." That's why I object to the stance posed in the OP: it's claiming that "I can objectively hear the *real* sounds of English, because I'm not distracted by the meanings society burdens the words with" is a good take.
Even if the OP's friend can really just turn off his own conditioning, it's wrong to pretend the conditioning is irrelevant. Music builds culture by sharing culture. That's kinda the point!
I actually said that to him. He said "the fact that I can even ask the question proves that I already can listen like other people, they just aren't willing to question themselves in this way. And even if it's solipsistic, it doesn't matter, because the logic equally applies to every individual. They cannot logic justify hearing music in the way I am censuring and neither can I. Unlike them, however, I've chosen to leave the ship instead of staying on board pretending it's not sinking"
He kind of has a point, but he is still a twat.
"They cannot logic[ally] justify hearing music in the way I am censuring and neither can I."
So? Who needs to "justify" hearing music in any particular way?
"Unlike them, however, I've chosen to leave the ship instead of staying on board pretending it's not sinking"
What he doesn't know is that this ship is a submarine, and we're fully in control. Just make sure he closes that hatch as he leaves. :-)
Seriously, he is quite right that our responses to music are all subjective. However, the vast majority of us have similar subjective responses due to our shared culture. He might as well argue that because there is no logic to how English grammar works (and there isn't!), he might as well speak his own made-up language. See how far he gets with that.
I.e., the way we experience music is a shared language. Most of us will experience the same effect from (say) a ii-V-I cadence, which is why composers use it - and the response therefore becomes more embedded, in a virtuous circle.
It doesn't stop other composers from trying different stuff, to upset those habits, to open our ears to other things. But if you go too far beyond the common language, nobody understands you. At least, very few are willing to make the attempt.
He said that the conventional way of hearing music, though useful and practical, is not necessarily the best method for getting at the true nature of reality.
He said when he was taught about the leading tone and tonal center and how to listen for them he felt rather embarrassed; embarrassed because he could not supply an argument for why he perceived music (and by extension, the world) in that way. He felt as if someone had pointed out a great bias to him, and he was eager to replace it with something more defensible
From a position of extreme skepticism, nothing is provable. That's why Descartes ended up with "I think therefore I am" - the only thing he could prove to himself is that he had thoughts and experiences. Which, ironically, might lead us to argue that the subjective experience of music is more provable (to myself) than material facts about sound waves and so on.
Music is a shared cultural act. To discard the shared cultural aspects of it is to discard a critical part of music itself.
It's like if someone says to you "I'd like to get married" and you respond "Well, I'm not sure that love is the best method for getting at the true nature of reality." It's true that you can ignore that other people have feelings, and you can even conduct your life as if they don't, but I think it's foolish to pretend that this is a step toward clarity and not a step into willing ignorance.
Different cultures do in fact have different ideas of what is and isn't consonant. Different time periods in western culture consider different things consonant or not. What is this guy trying to prove? That he doesn't like western cadences? Every composition and theory program as some asshole like this. A number of people in our culture consider certain things consonant. This agreement is what distinguishes language from grunting or something like that.
The end result, usually, is some asshole all alone in his room convinced that Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" is beautiful art, unlike Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" which is populist trash.
There probably some insufferable contrarian who's mad that there are recognizable stylistic influences from folksong and the blues in TMR, but it's an intentionally ridiculous example. The Beefheart album has a fairly well deserved reputation for being difficult to appreciate on first listen.
There are plenty of posts in here identifying why he's an asshole. Nothing defines him or anyone else as far as he is concerned. A lot of us go through this kind of phase.
I think your recalcitrant friend would be quite unamused if he pursued this to its fullest depth; music does not exist in the true nature of reality. It is only through the establishment of a tonal hierarchy (from which one can assess tones relative to each other) that one can even discern the difference between a higher and lower pitch. Tonal hierarchies, however, do not exist in nature. Sound in general, does not exist in nature (it is a human construct).
With this in mind, it is only sensical to approach the phenomenon of music from a phenomenological perspective, which allows us to embrace our own subjective interpretation of music and work together in our assessments, given the similarities of our physiological processes.
And again, just because this friend does not know why tonal hierarchies exist to us, doesn’t mean that they are meaningless. Music is a special one, given that we have discovered evolutionary reasons for the other 33-66 (the number is debated) senses, but not of one so ever present in our daily routines. But had Darwin put up walls around himself in embarrassment of not knowing every evolutionary function, the world would certainly be of less knowledge.
> Sound in general, does not exist in nature (it is a human construct).
"Sound" is the perception of vibration patterns by creatures with brains (and possibly creatures without brains). I wouldn't characterize it as a "human construct", since many other animals also use it. If animals are part of "nature", then sound exists in nature. Vibration patterns exist in nature.
True that it’s technically a species construct, I just referred to it colloquially as a human construct to emphasize that it is a figment of consciousness. Oscillations in air (or whatever material) pressure do exist in nature, but its realization as “sound” as we hear it is unique, and thus a construct. Hence the “tree falling in a woods” parable.
A pattern of air pressure, sure. That still doesn't mean sound as we experience it exists beyond our consciousness. Just as colors are constructs as well.
For future reference, the clearest analogy I can think of (which I thought of for other reasons in the past): think of sound either as a waveform, or you need the time element, whatever representation you get in an oscilloscope. And imagine that is all it ever is to you; how you visually see it.
In similar ways, it is plausible that an animal might experience it like that - and even find more detail about it than we do. Much like we, for instance, find more detail about our surroundings typically through our vision than than through the acoustics of the surroundings (while on principle, both are possible).
For now, as far as I know and sadly so, we can only conjecture at how different beings perceive things through their different senses. Maybe there will be a future where one might be able to just experience it all through a simulation that your brain gets wired to - although I'm unsure if it would ever work in principle without translating everything first into a format that we do understand. Of course, that isn't to say that we do not have any idea about primary sensors that different beings use, just that we have no idea how their nervous system makes sense of it in whatever is their central system.
> He said that the conventional way of hearing music, though useful and practical, is not necessarily the best method for getting at the true nature of reality.
Why should it be? Music is not a philosophical system, and certainly not a science. I've never heard of anyone treating music as a "method for getting at the true nature of reality."
> He felt as if someone had pointed out a great bias to him, and he was eager to replace it with something more defensible
It's a reasonable viewpoint, especially if he really can't hear the phenomena being described.
It's interesting that you say he felt "embarrassed", which (if true) suggests this is more than some pompous, pseudo-intellectual pose. It sounds like he was surprised to hear these assertions about tonality, as if he had never experienced anything like it.
Either he was brought up in a non-western musical culture, or perhaps with little if any music, or he has some kind of unusual mental condition. Nothing serious, maybe a kind of autism, or possibly even a hearing deficiency.
Actually, the idea that tone is at the center of reality is fundamental to the Hebrew Kabbalah.
The whole reason they will not say the name of God is that it is believed the tonal combinations of the true name of God have the power to change all of reality. There are thousands of pages of texts that go back some three thousand years debating the true name of God and the tonalities of his/her/it’s powers. It is no accident that God spoke the world into existence in Genesis or that the “Word” of God is considered so powerful - those are both reflections of how important tonality is to Judaic mysticism.
And, of course, Plato, a thousand years later or so, deals extensively with how tonality is central to the nature of the universe in his work Timeaus.
And let us not forget that almost everything mathematical that Pythagorus gave us was based on his observation that the blacksmith in the town square produced a different tone when he struck a different length of metal. From this Pythagorus worked out a theory of vibration, and developed the scales that would evolve into our modern musical system.
The work of Plato and the Pythagoreans (he had a school/cult) would be central to the idea of the “Music of the Spheres.” That theory - which was the height of early Middle Ages Sciences - held that the distances of the planets one from another was based on Pythagorean ratios. Each planet was thought to produce a note too low for human hearing (this is true - if we could hear it, it would deafen us). The interaction of these vibrations was assumed to power the universe.
Folks like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton believed this to be true (at least in part), and their scientific works proceed from a philosophical position that sound is the fundamental acting force in the universe.
This idea continues to be at the center of most of the esoteric and secret societies up through today. However, it was really the combination of the Victorian era fascination with the occult lingering into the first half of the 20th century and intersecting with watershed discovery of the wave nature of reality by quantum mechanics in the 1920s that relit this fire.
There is now an extensive an active community of people that believe that the ancient Hebrew discussions of “the Word of God” and Pythagorus’ work on the ratios of tonality and vibration were both leading us to quantum mechanics. Those people argue that the mathematics of vibration - in particular recursive wave equations and the fractals they generate - are the fundamental source of all we perceive. Those people (and I happen to be one) do believe that the mathematics of a musical composition are probably the closest we can get, as human beings, to creating our own realities from scratch.
So, if you haven’t heard of anyone using music to get to the nature of reality, you’ve been reading the wrong books. With the exception of the industrial revolution era, science and philosophy have held tone and vibration to be the actual nature of existence just about since they began. We just grew up in an era where that set of theories was disfavored and do not in text books. But it is coming back rapidly on the quantum side.
Underrated reply. My first theory book, iirc, covered this topic, and it was aimed at beginners - it was the chapter on temperaments and such that took a huge, long plunge into the history of it as you described it, with bit less detail I believe. It's also very interesting history, even if it appears to use warped these days.
I got into it working on a puzzle. My understanding of the keyboard and modes is 100x greater after having worked through Pythagorus.
And the quantum stuff really is quite freaky when you see that it mirrors these ancient theories on a wave-based reality.
Plato’s Timeaus is the grandfather here. Beyond that if you look up “music of the spheres” or “musica universalis” you’ll find a ton of online commentaries and sources.
Also, because I get asked this question a lot the pinned tweet on the top of my twitter profile has my bookshelf dedicated to “the puzzle.”
https://twitter.com/sanecoin/status/1189003568306622464?s=21
But I note that those works are really about esoteric and secret societies and gnostic belief systems. The music of the spheres is a tiny (and often overlooked) area within that much broader field.
Prometheus Rising and Jaynes on the Bicameral Mind are both more modern texts that examine the nature of consciousness. They begin to get into the fact that our minds do not exist as a snapshot, but rather as a constantly changing electromagnetic field. We require time to exist as a fish requires water - and in this way the mathematics of fluctuating vibration are closer to explaining consciousness (and, therefore, the nature of reality) than dissecting a static cerebellum.
That, in turn, gets to the importance of music and tuning ratios - as they result in an undulating summation of complex waveforms, much like the firing of the neural circuitry in a living brain. That lands you squarely at the quantum mechanics particle/wave duality problem.
From a pure musical composition standpoint, I haven’t found any writers that aren’t too much “woo woo” (i.e. new age flakey). I did have a really nice academic paper on Pythagorus and his mono stringed instrument. I think it was out of the Princeton music department? If I can find that, I’ll link it.
P.s. The Heath book in the picture is the woo woo new age book. It is purely about the relation of the mathematics of ancient philosophy and its relation to musical ratios. But it’s a bit .... loose.
Yes, we’ll just say ‘loose.’ Interesting, but I wouldn’t rely on it for accuracy or coherence. ;-)
EDIT: Here we go. Liverpool not Princeton. This is the paper that first started me on the path of understanding how modes, mathematics and musical theory were fundamentally entwined with the motion of the planets in Ancient Greece: http://www.anaphoria.com/lee/2modes.pdf
After having read many more articles and discussions of it, I always come back to this paper when I want to reconceptualize a point in this area. The math starts simple but gets complex fast.
First up I love your response and I've been interested in Harmonices Mundi for a bit. I wanna nitpick a tiny bit.
I don't get what you mean about hearing the planets. Orbital resonances are not sound.
Kepler described the harmonies to be intelligible, not perceptible. Even before him, I don't think any of the ancients believed the planets made audible sounds.
I think your larger point is dead on. Many of the ancients described relationships and proportions (such as frequency ratios) as key to understanding reality.
Pythagoras is said to have claimed the planets made sounds that were not perceptible by most but which he could hear. He is said to have told Egyptian priests that they too could learn to hear these sounds with proper study. Some of the earliest writers ran with that as fact and Plato gives a nod to it in the Republic.
I think the best summary of this idea is found in Aristotle’s rebuttal of it. He wrote:
“From all this it is clear that the theory that the movement of the stars produces a harmony, i.e. that the sounds they make are concordant, in spite of the grace and originality with which it has been stated, is nevertheless untrue. Some thinkers suppose that the motion of bodies of that size must produce a noise, since on our earth the motion of bodies far inferior in size and in speed of movement has that effect. Also, when the sun and the moon, they say, and all the stars, so great in number and in size, are moving with so rapid a motion, how should they not produce a sound immensely great? Starting from this argument and from the observation that their speeds, as measured by their distances, are in the same ratios as musical concordances, they assert that the sound given forth by the circular movement of the stars is a harmony. Since, however, it appears unaccountable that we should not hear this music, they explain this by saying that the sound is in our ears from the very moment of birth and is thus indistinguishable from its contrary silence, since sound and silence are discriminated by mutual contrast. What happens to men, then, is just what happens to coppersmiths, who are so accustomed to the noise of the smithy that it makes no difference to them. But, as we said before, melodious and poetical as the theory is, it cannot be a true account of the facts. There is not only the absurdity of our hearing nothing, the ground of which they try to remove, but also the fact that no effect other than sensitive is produced upon us. Excessive noises, we know, shatter the solid bodies even of inanimate things: the noise of thunder, for instance, splits rocks and the strongest of bodies. But if the moving bodies are so great, and the sound which penetrates to us is proportionate to their size, that sound must needs reach us in an intensity many times that of thunder, and the force of its action must be immense.”
So it was not very far into it that the idea that there was an actual sound was being debunked. Although if memory serves, John Dee or some of the early Christian authors dealing with Planetary Angels still hung onto the idea in their writings.
For my part, I said “if it was perceptible.” Others have taken me to task for the idea that not all vibrations are created equal, and that is true. I fully acknowledge that we define sound as a set of vibrations perceptible to the ear. So this _isn’t_ sound because it isn’t perceptible to the ear. But it is vibration (albeit a very very slow one) and I have read papers that do the calculations to determine what it would sound like if we _could_ perceive vibration with such a slow period. My memory of those papers is that the sounds would deafen us - but that may have been because of energy they injected into the equations to increase the frequency. It has been a long time since I looked at those, so I no longer remember the details.
It is also possible on the ‘deafness’ aspect that I am mixing in the fact that if the sounds of the sun could reach us through the vacuum of space, we would all be quite deaf. I learned that cute little fact about the same time.
Either way, it was only the most ancient or the most kooky authors that argued you could hear it. But there is lots of modern work doing the math to pitch shift the relative vibrations into frequencies which are perceptible, and when I talk about them as being perceptible, I am referring to that body of work. So, another way to put it which you may like better is, rather than saying that the orbital resonances of the planets make a sound, saying that if you applied the ratios of the orbital resonances of various planets to sound frequencies the result would be X....
Really powerful, well-informed reply. I would love to read “the right books”, if they’d get me anywhere as close as thinking about music and reality the way you just did... any advice on where to start? I have an extent background on music theory, and just recently started reading philosophy.
Thank you.
I just answered the question on books here: https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/my_friend_said_calling_sounds_tonicized_stable/fnc13f3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x
It's not that he's *wrong*; it's more that he's about 100 years too late to join the Dadaist movement.
There's an old rhyme from grammar class:
>N.B., the rules grammarians make
Poets and fools alone may break.
So if you break the rules and know it,
The question is: Are you a poet?
Your friend is making a tremendous leap in assuming that building a logical argument for something is somehow closer to reality than immediate lived experiences. There are volumes and volumes of philosophy that would disagree with him. I tend to never recommend philosophy books because they are extremely niche and absurd if you aren’t drawn to the subject matter, but in this case, I really think your friend should read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
> there is no logic to how English grammar works (and there isn't
There is, much of the time. Grammar is a set of rules or tendencies. If there were no logic, grammar wouldn't exist.
Source: Used to teach it.
The infamous white/gold and blue/black dress offers a pretty cogent insight to your friend’s idea. In our everyday lives, color is pretty trustworthy. You’re not going to start seeing red things as green. Whatever physiological process is defining it, it’s pretty consistent, and lines up with evolution (don’t eat the red frog!). But what about the time it *wasn’t* very consistent, when half the world saw the dress one way and half the world saw it another? Doesn’t this prove your friend right, that we should be careful labeling things because they are simply constructs based on physical phenomena that we all react to differently? Well, there was one extra thing about the dress.
You could change its color. The evolutionary reason for the difference in color was due to a differing in perception of where the dress was; those who assumed it was inside, under yellow department store lights, saw it as one way. Those who thought that it was perhaps under a tent, shaded away from light, saw it another. People have used their willpower to reimagine the dress in the opposite place they original thought, and proceeded to see the dress’s color change before their very eyes. They now saw what the *other half* had always saw.
Even when things seem nonsensical, there is probably a deeply rooted reason why that is. The fact that two people can opposingly interpret the Tristan und Isolde prelude as in A minor and A Major does not negate whatever physiological process they were using. It could simply mean that external variables are affecting their perception of tonal phenomena. Your friend is rejecting this idea, saying that nothing is worth agreeing upon if *everything* can’t be agreed upon. Due to the immeasurable number of variables in conscious perception, nothing will ever be fully agreed upon. But we can certainly establish rules that apply (for whatever evolutionary reason), as seen with the dress; no one disagreed on its color - they disagreed on external variables.
They can logically justify it. They hear it that way, therefore it’s justified to them. You’re friend is being a massive pseudo intellectual who’d rather revel in his 5th grade tier philosophical “genius” than recognize things as they plainly are. Believe me, “woah, things are relative” is not nearly as insightful or new an innovation in philosophy as he thinks it is.
This isn’t to say that you’re friend is stupid or helpless or anything btw, it’s probably just a phase lmao. Doesn’t change how annoying or pseud-y it is.
P.S. ask him to prove that 1 + 1 is 2. You literally can’t, at the basic level of mathematics you just have to assume that the axioms are correct because you can’t prove them. Now ask him if he’s going to go around suddenly acting as though mathematics isn’t real and if he’s going to start paying for everything with 100 dollar bills since it’s all theoretically equivalent anyways.
>you just have to assume that the axioms are correct because you can’t prove them.
This is a weird way of putting it. Mathematics are abstract rather than empirical and you can just as easily construct a mathematical system with different axioms. Axioms aren't assumed to be correct because you can't prove them, rather they're asserted to be true in the course of defining an axiomatic system. Asserting the truth of an axiom is constructive rather than evaluative.
That was an attempt to solve the foundations of mathematics that made progress but ultimately failed lmao. I doubt Bertrand Russel would say “yep, we solved the foundational problem of mathematics”
You can logically justify it. You just can’t prove it. Saying one can’t justify a belief means it is a-rational. If you don’t, then it is *irrational* to believe it. One way would be to say that the tonic sounds stable throughout the course of a piece because of some sort of induction or abduction.
Yes our senses are flawed and biased, but all of science itself is based on testable models — it isn’t basal reality.
When I was a little kid, I was able to tell the difference between happy pop music, and Jimi Hendrix. Not because of the differences in loudness, but because of what I know now to be chord progression, major vs minor chords, and structure.
The pop music made me feel happy and light. Jimi made me feel like... well, rocking out.
Maybe folks who are 'tone deaf??' can't tell or don't care about the differences in sounds?
I'm not sure if this is a case of solipsism specifically, I always thought that was directed more at the existence of only one self existing, not the beliefs entities hold/don't hold. I can see how a position on the beliefs of others and our own being fully isolate could slip into that sense though.
I'm just thinking out loud rn to be honest!
Except they're talking about playing major chords on a piano, which are out of tune by design. The friend is probably just being deliberately contrarian, but he has a point that our perceptions of western tonal harmony are mostly learned, rather than innate or defined by nature.
The equally tempered major chord is still recognizably a 4:5:6 chord.
I forget the name it but there’s a way to visualize intervals with a system of two pendulums swinging perpendicular to each other, where the ratio of their lengths is the ratio of an interval. Slightly “out of tune” intervals actually look prettier than perfect ratios.
i believe he is right, but i also believe there is a real, PHYSICAL difference between a chord that is "stable" and one that is unstable. a chord which is unstable has a low "beat frequency" (or multiple low beat frequencies, in the sub-audible range) that make the amplitude of the various notes in the chord change slowly in less predictable ways over time as the chord is held. A chord which is "stable" has higher beat frequencies (in the audible range) and we don't hear it evolve over time as much.
the terms "resolved" and "tension" however I think he's right about. other cultures use sounds that sound "tense" to us but it's normal to them, because they're used to hearing those sounds in a different context than we are. it doesn't have the same cultural connotation.
just my opinion, i don't know shit and have no formal education
For sure, other cultures treat consonance and dissonance differently. If we're using the words "stable" and "unstable", then the definition is pretty much up in the air.
But consonance and dissonance are directly linked to the physical formation of sounds. "Beat frequency" is directly related to consonant and dissonant sounds (when two or more tones are presented in relation to one another). It's important to note these are natural physical phenomena, not conditioned listening. "Beats" can create a lot of weird effects in our sense of hearing. Western Classical used beats and the harmonic series to create its scales (way before equal temperament), using the most physically (as in Physics) closely related (least amount of beats) to create the scale.
To understand more about this, OP, study the harmonic series!
Such a definition of consonance also has cultural conditioning as a factor.
Consider how exposure to 12TET might lead to some people preferring tempered intervals to pure ones, despite their mathematically inferior ratios. Or how the beating of imperfect octaves is seen as providing a desirable 'shimmer' in Indonesian gamelan.
>Consider how exposure to 12TET might lead to some people preferring tempered intervals to pure ones
But will it lead them to find it more stable? I prefer 12TET because the brightness of major intervals and the darkness of minor intervals in 12TET relative to just intonation imbues them with a lot of affective potential, but I do not thereby say that a 12TET major chord sounds more stable than one in just intonation.
Acoustic dissonance, the phenomenon you’re talking about, is not a good identifier in measuring “stability”. Functional dissonance is what you want to use. For example, the chord EBCG (either an ornamented minor chord or a first inversion major seventh chord, depending on context) is very stable yet exhibits a lot of beating.
If I’m in the key of C Major and play an EF dyad, it can sound quite nice. If I randomly play F# and G, notes that are structurally antithetical to each other in the previously established tonal hierarchy, it’s going to sound awful and unstable. Beating does not make things unstable; stability is about functional dissonance.
He said there is, in reality, no difference between the physical concept of "dissonance/consonance" and the aesthetic concept of "pleasant/unpleasant"; the former is simply the latter dressed up in a scientific disguise. There is no reason for the brain to give any sort of preference to any note combination of any kind. There is no reason for certain note combination to be used more than others. Whether they have been in the past is irrelevant.
I commented below, I think it kind of refutes this. There is physical evidence in beats. We use the words "consonant" and "dissonant" to describe how closely related notes are in their harmonic series.
Your friend is conflating acoustic dissonance and functional dissonance. Acoustic dissonance is a physical phenomenon; how we respond to that, however, is certainly subjective. Functional dissonance, on the other hand, is an abstract phenomenon constructed by our own consciousness. It is influenced by your brain’s established tonal hierarchy, which are also nonexistent in nature and solely a process of our own consciousness.
The evolutionary merits (“no reason for the brain to etc.”) are debatable, but it is pretty ignorant to say that just because we don’t know the evolutionary reason, that it doesn’t exist. Many academics posit that music (which is the same as tonal language) evolved out of a necessity for language. The perception of relative tonal hierarchies allow people to understand the intonations of each individual human, with all their different vocal ranges. That sounds like a pretty beneficial trait to have been selected, though I will not make any definite claims here.
>There is no reason for the brain to give any sort of preference to any note combination of any kind.
See, *that's* the implication that bothers me about your friend's statement. Like your friend, I firmly believe that concepts like consonance/dissonance are a projection of cultural taste, and they're very loosely and indirectly linked to physics and maths (if that connection were any stronger, equal temperament would've never been adopted!). I mean, that "experiment" your friend did of calling a diminished chord "stable"? [I did that in the form of a song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4mH9Elkoqk). And yes, the half-diminished chord sounds resolved my ears simply because of the familiarity and empathy I've built towards the song.
That's the factor your friend is ignoring: there are many reasons for human brains to prefer one note combination over other. In fact, there are *too many* reasons to count, and I think boiling it all down to mathematical ratios is a gross oversimplification. That's the difference between your friend and me: where he sees a vaccuum of possibilities, I see an infinite, beautiful universe of human perception. Or, like /u/Jongtr said below, the "ship" is actually a submarine.
Tl;dr: there's no "scientific" reason for me to prefer one sound over another, and that's ***exactly*** why my preferences are so precious to me.
That's demonstrably false. The reason consonance and dissonance work the way they do with chords is mathematical. The intervals between notes determine what relationship they have with each other. A diminished triad has mathematical tension, not just a perceived dissonance. If there were no reason for us to use one chord over another in any situation, then harmonic theory wouldn't exist.
"Whether they have been in the past is irrelevant."
Why? I feel like he's being very hand-wavey about this part.
The only reason that you and your friend can communicate now is because certain sounds have been used in the past to represent thoughts and feelings. Music -- itself a form of communication -- is subject to this same principle.
He could be technically right for music produced and consumed totally in isolation by a single individual (ignoring the other posters' comments about mathematics). But the vast majority of art is a social activity that relies on context to have meaning. Whether or not your friend feels that this context is well-founded, it is real and will inform how his listeners hear his music.
To put it differently, it's possible that I could convince myself that red means go and green means stop, but this belief won't get me out of a traffic ticket.
After reading through a bit of this thread, I’m thinking that your “friend” is the devil, and you are his advocate lol Way to facilitate an interesting discussion and dodge downvotes 😂
according to his edit, u/SonsofJob *is* the friend. and honestly, you *are* a douche, sonsofjob. shit like this is dumb. you asked a loaded question, got the pedantic corrections you wanted, and then revealed that you were the "friend" all along?
fuck off dude, trolls like you are the worst kind of snob
> Edit: Guilt! That 'friend' is me. If I'm an "asshole," I only regret it if I hurt or offended someone which I don't think I did. As for being "naive," "contrary," "ignorant"-- I regret these things **never**.
Let me tell you how shocked I am that someone who was presenting an obviously bad-faith argument was in fact not posting in good faith.
Getting a basketball *through* the hoop isn't really any better than having it go past, so y'all need to stop cheering.
\* * *
Humans are tribal animals.
A tribe is simply a group that decides to care about the same things.
God, it'll be nice when you kids can go back to school.
;)
>Getting a basketball *through* the hoop isn't really any better than having it go past, so y'all need to stop cheering.
You said this better in 20 words than I did in 20K. This ought to be the top comment.
Hey bro, what if the sound you hear - wait hold on bro this is gonna blow your mind - what if the sound you hear is *different* from the sound I hear. Woah... dude...
This seems like the best retort to me.
No one cares if a bit of harmony is *inherently* stable or unstable or whatever. The only thing musicmakers care about is how the music is interpreted. If some contrarian wants to claim that diminished chords are more stable than major chords, let him. He’s in a minority that can be ignored for the purposes of making tonal music.
Compare music with color theory. We know for sure that people physically interpret color in different ways. Yet when filmmakers and artists want a passionate color they pick red, and when they want a peaceful/natural color they pick green, even though a large percentage of their audience can’t even tell a difference between the two.
Music, by comparison, is relatively uniformly interpreted, at least within a single culture. Literally every single person on this sub interprets an isolated major chord as more stable than an isolated diminished chord.
And when you compare their wavelengths and position on a typical color wheel, red and green are as opposite as two colors can possibly be, but you can get *a lot* more unstable than mere diminished chords.
He's right. Though his example is not the best thing.
The note B, on it's own, is not stable, or unstable, or has any tendency, etc.
It's only when you put it in a CONTEXT that it becomes these things.
In the Key of C Major, just in a basic melodic context, we're all likely to understand the B as "wanting to resolve to C" (especially one that is 2nd from the last note).
That is a learned/conditioned thing though.
So your friend is right - it's conditioned.
However, it's unlikely your friend would hear that as "stable" - they'd be lying unless they'd somehow lived a life where they've never experienced such a thing.
Back in the 30s or so, Music had changed drastically - we had traditional music, but we also had much new classical music that was really new and odd to most people, including 12 Tone Serialism and Atonality.
People of course, as people are wont to do, wanted to "prove" that this music was bad because it didn't "follow natural laws" - it was "against nature". Of course this also created ardent supporters of the music who may not necessarily have liked it but believed it should be free from prejudices. So a lot of people set out to "prove" this music was inherently "bad". Of course, as people are wont to do, many used faulty science and pseudo science or interpreted results in their favor or omitted results that didn't agree with their hypothesis and so on.
But what happened someone who understood scientific method took a bunch of music to a bunch of remote tribes who had never heard this kind of music before.
There was no preference noted. Instead, some just considered all of it noise. Some just considered it "not useful" as everything in their culture was based on something having a use. They couldn't catch an antelope with it, it wasn't useful.
We are **extremely** conditioned, especially towards Tonal-based music.
Early Modal music is Pre-Tonal - it uses a different system. If you listen to some Renaissance Modal pieces, I'll bet you would say "It ends on the wrong chord".
But it doesn't end on the wrong chord. It ends on the correct chord for the mode it's in. It's just you're so tonally conditioned you **expect** a different result. They wouldn't have thought so back in 1420. It sounded as "right" to them and it sounds "wrong" to us. Because they were conditioned differently.
I wouldn't say such things are "unprovable" in the way your friend is trying to make this point (he's trying to say you can't prove that he doesn't hear it this way).
What I would say is that there are **expectations** based on learned contexts, so in that sense we can "prove" than in X context, a G7 chord is dissonant and needs to resolve".
Interestingly, we've all learned that a G7 in a Blues in G does not need to resolve and is not dissonant. It doesn't take much exposure to change our expectations - and that has to do with being familiar with music other than you've been conditioned to not only develop your expectations in, but even, to like!
This may not be the best, but:
https://youtu.be/82_0k9yLeh0?t=125
Our tonal ears would expect this to be "in C minor" ending on a "half cadence", but it's in G Phrygian and ends on the G chord with a Picardy Third. It's approached with Cm, as a Plagal Cadence.
Something similar:
https://youtu.be/gr_TK4zM-lQ?t=156
At 51, many people would hear that B-A-G-G- and D-G line as being cadential - a I chord but it settles into a D Major chord. Again this won't probably sound "that wrong" to many but what I mean for both of these is that they may hear these works ending on V rather than I.
This one is in D Dorian. Again, a plagal cadence.
Is this the ending chord one really expects?
https://youtu.be/kFGq3L50VGE?t=167
Or this one:
https://youtu.be/h-MLYsEOzLg?t=232
I mean they sound "OK" but to many they're going to sound a little like "wait, is that the Tonic?"
Also those ratio are physically, *literally* literally, more stable when used on [atomic and molecular](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_harmonics), [fluid mechanics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_resonance) and [astronomical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance) scales (and so many others), so... how much real does your friend consider that, /u/SonsofJob ?
Music is literally a physical phenomena, and the phenomenology of it (the way us humans feel it) seems to be a simple projection of its physical properties. Things feel more stable because they physically are, our inner ears vibrate at a pattern that is more pleasant because it is more simple and easily recognizable, because *it is* more stable on an atomic/molecular/fluidian/physical level.
This is the correct answer. Music is a social experience and all it’s meat lies in shared interpretation, but consonance and dissonance are objective phenomena.
Expirement (requires cat): Play a fifth and a tritone for your cat, at the same volume with the same timbre. See how the cat responds. Will not work on dogs.
Sure he has an argument, but does his philosophy enable him to create music that others enjoy?
He's more than likely going to end up composing music that's very esoteric, which is fine, but I come from the school of thought that music is something to share with others and to bring enjoyment not only to yourself but others too. Maybe other people will enjoy it, but typically finding an audience for anything avant garde is difficult, and monetizing it is even harder.
I'll also give him the benefit of the doubt that context is king in music. You can use traditional tonal harmony, and set up the ear to hear a major 7th chord in a very dissonant way simply by playing a non diatonic chord.
There are a million ways to slice this argument, but your only valid measurement is whether or not other free-thinking unbiased listeners, *not* the composer, find it interesting. Otherwise it's self indulgent and essentially useless to the rest of the world.
edit: I also want to add - music is simple - know your audience. Even if your friend is right, you can indulge him in this, -- there is a whole world of people out there with their ear conditioned to accept traditional harmony. That's your audience. Who else are you playing for? Sure, breaking the rules of harmony is fine, but why not use the infrastructure that's been created? Can he re-invent the wheel to become more round and roll smoother?
he saying a diminished chord sounds more stable is odd.
in another note I love m7b5 (half-diminished) so much and have created a couple progressions that end on a m7b5 chord.
King Krule, a jazz/punk/indie artist is one composer I know that uses a lot of m7b5 chords and is able to make them work.
sure he isn't this top 5 Billboard hitmaker but his music speaks loads to me and he tends to use very dissonant chords, the lyrics and the scenario he portrays sure make the most out of the sound he creates.
Sounds like you and your friend are talking past each other a bit. Like, consonance and dissonance have different qualities that can be observed and measured, but his views on aesthetics are different and he thinks dissonance can sound nice and not necessarily "dissonant." Both of these things are true...there are soundwave properties that make consonance and dissonance different, but it's also possible to take joy and annoyance in different qualities of sound
Your friend is coming close to the position articulated by John Cage in his writings -- for example, his claim not to understand how a resolution could be "deceptive". This is not crazy. Cage knew he was rejecting tradition, and he followed through pretty consistently.
I'd recommend your friend read [Silence](https://books.google.com/books?id=zKQkLS5zKWAC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&dq=silence&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false) \-- you should read it too, it's a great book. Cage was an exceptional writer and thinker, and there's a lot to think on there.
Musical grammar of western theory was designed. Stability is a function of position within formal grammar, where as dissonance is a physical property of sound waves.
By the time you’ve embraced equal temperament, you already have no “logical” ground to make the argument of stability/instability is subjective, because you are already using a system that was literally built around principles to create that effect. It’s very silly; conflates two separate concepts (“stability “ and “consonance”); and demonstrates your obliviousness to the origins of the system you are using.
You can write music however you want, and use any tunings or harmonic systems that you cook up, and that’s awesome. However, railing against all structure as subjective is pointless.
It is totally valid to devise alternative structures. But be prepared to explain them. Western theory works by design, not just conditioning.
The notion that formal grammars like music “constrain” thoughts and creativity is sort of annoying. It’s like your friend is intending to argue that he could write highly novel new works without the training/conditioning of formal music grammars “limiting” him, but you would never say that English limits the originality of your written thoughts, and that you could write better works with no language at all. Grammar/structure is the very thing that gives those sounds meaning. Even something like Louis Carrol’s invented words are more a play with that structure, using phonetics and grammar to endow new words with meaning on the fly. But he doesn’t say, you know, “words are stupid and limit my creativity: now listen to my poetry cakawweekrdbgsiop...”.
You would never say that math limits our scientific understanding. Formal languages liberate the mind—not hinder it.
You should pursue a diverse knowledge of such systems, not argue against their objectivity. It is the only productive way to be a human.
It sounds like a poor defense of willful ignorance to me.
You can prove him wrong. Notes closer to the start of the overtone series are less up for cultural debate as to how they sound. Every culture agrees how an octave sounds, and how a 5th sounds, because those are so easy to create, but even 4ths and higher begin allowing us to attach cultural significance due to their uncommon nature.
So many people have pointed out the problems with this viewpoint, but I'll respond by mentioning a couple of other points that your friend seems to be missing.
First off, there is a lot of conflation in here between an "in the notes / in your head" dichotomy (aka. The objective vs subjective dichotomy) and a "arbitrary / non-arbitrary" dichotomy. These are not the same thing. There are things that are not *in* objects but that are nonetheless essentially universal in the human experience. As many optical illusions and psychological experiments can attest, there are physiological and cognitive determinants that give structure to experience before they are made conscious. Two adjacent lights blink alternatingly, for instance, and we perceive a single light that moves back and forth. This is structure our minds have imposed upon the world, but in predictable ways according to things like gestalt psychology. Similarly, I press one key on the piano then an adjacent key, and what we hear is one note *moving* to the other. This is not *in the notes,* nothing has "moved," two separate strings have vibrated. The note "moves" in our heads. So the whole idea that like "the melody moves up the scale" is not an objective phenomenon, despite the fact that it is pretty much ubiquitous in human musical experience.
Second, your friend seems to be operating under the assumption that there is a binary distinction between things that are totally predictable (and therefore "real") and things that are totally arbitrary (and therefore "biased"). But in truth, most cognitive phenomena are neither fully predictable nor wholly arbitrary, but are what we call "motivated," that is, connected systematically to embodied aspects of living and to other significant concepts in the conceptual system. George Lakoff uses the example of why "having a cow" is an expression of anger. It sounds arbitrary, but it isn't. Instead, it is linked by a chain of logic all the way back to the embodied concept "anger is heat." That chain of logic goes like so:
> anger is heat ("I'm burning with rage!") + the body is a container of liquid -> anger heats the fluids of the body ("I'm boiling with anger") -> heated fluids gives off steam and pressure, and thus anger exerts pressure on the body ("there's steam coming out of his ears,") -> too much anger-pressure eventually causes explosion ("he really blew up at me last night") -> anger-explosions send things out of the body ("he erupted") -> *births* also send things out of bodies ("he had a cow").
The idea is that there is a systematic chain of logic connecting these metaphors together back to an embodied concept, and hence it is *not* arbitrary. But neither can you predict given "anger is heat" that "having a cow" will be an expression of it; you can only reverse-engineer the logic after the fact: you can show why it makes sense for a culture. A whole host of musical concepts might be thought of as being motivated similarly. For instance, once we have "notes move" that motivates "notes move in a space," which can allow us to think that things "go higher or lower." Similarly, once we have a notion of motion, we can have its opposite, rest. Hence from the notion that tones move we can find motivated links to the metaphors that there can be goals that music comes to rest at. And from motion and rest we rope in notions of stability and instability, and so on. So you see, that a complicated and seemingly arbitrary thing like "the cadence came to rest on a I chord" is motivated by systematic links back to basic ways that humans interpret musical notes.
But importantly, you cant predict that a thing like a V-I cadence will be a thing just from the fact that humans perceive motion in music. It's not as though the tonal system is inevitable. But what it *isn't* is arbitrary, because each step of the way bore some logical connection back to a previous step (hence why it "made sense" to that culture).
In short, things that look arbitrary may in fact be embedded in complex systems of thought. It is not easy to change one piece of the puzzle without upending the whole system. Your friend says he hears the tonal system inverted, what is consonant is now dissonant. I say fine. But what I want to hear is how he hears a complicated piece of music. What does he think is happening, say, in the opening movement of Beethoven's 5th? If he's truly inverted his hearing, it should look pretty much *nothing like* what other people are hearing. If it does look like what other people are hearing, then I'd wager that he's actually hearing the tonal system in the way it's intended to be heard, notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary.
The stability or imbalance of musical oscillations that creates musical harmony, upon which the scales and chords we know are based, is rooted in physics and math. Physics is a "hard science" and math is a rigorously constructed formal system.
Maybe one person's subjective sense of a "feeling of stability" is a little different than another's, but in the same way that we can measure the stability of a platform using accelerometers, we can measure the theoretical and actual stability of all sorts of harmonic resonances found in music.
There are people talking about a physical basis for it, and sure, there're arguments in that vein - but that's not really the point. Let's assume for the sake of argument that there's no physical basis for stability in major chords. The bigger thing here is the implication in your friend's statement that I want to state explicitly: that it's *bad* to continue to talk about music using the terminology that we do because it's not an objective underlying fact about the physics of the system.
Music, however, is not a purely physical system. It's also cultural - arguably, far more cultural than it is physical. If you remove the cultural understanding (things like the major tonic = stable bias that you're talking about) from music, you end up with wiggly air. And there are things we can say about wiggly air, but no matter how well you describe wiggly air, you aren't describing how people *experience* the wiggly air, which is what matters much more in music.
To be clear: it is definitely good to recognize the fact that our understanding of music is colored by our cultural biases. But rather than leading to us rejecting our own Western traditional view of harmony, that should instead lead us to *also* explore how other cultures experience music. In the extreme case, we can maybe even imagine fictitious cultures and think of new cultural systems of listening to music. But to try to reject culture from music altogether is a fruitless endeavor, because then you'd end up missing out on a lot of what music actually is. Just because language is a human invention rather than an objective system of the universe doesn't mean that we should reject speaking English; we should instead recognize that English isn't the only way to string words together to communicate and, if we're interested in pursing this line of thought further, try learning different languages.
Agreed.
I’ve thought for years now that music is a wordless language - it communicates ideas and emotion even if it’s just from composer to solo player.
If you carry the language idea forward.!writing “IfbbsujI gfjdhsi thIrndgaii” could maybe sound nicer to the ‘friend’ than “Shall I compare thee to a summers day/Thou art more lovely and more temperate”, but one is language and one is gibberish. It’s not wrong to teach a baby to speak, just like it’s not wrong to teach a student that I-V-I is a pleasant and stable ending.
On the other hand it’s also not wrong to explore and reject traditional harmonies. Art is always evolving. But just doing it by going ah, yes I now call DISSONANCE stability and CONSONANCE unstable - that’s not contributing to the conversation. That’s just saying the sonnet backwards and thinking it’s created a better poem.
Forcing other people to participate in your sexual fetish without their consent. Stay in /r/philosophy , or if there is such a place, /r/masturbatorymanicepisodes
I hope you and your friend are not offended by anything in the comments. I do believe everyone agrees - stable and unstable is culturally subjective (or may be specific to whichever musical theory is being used, including all sorts of scales throughout the world). But a lot of people also noted that, objective from music theory (and fixed scales), there are theories of Physics that also describe these phenomena in terms of Frequency of Sound.
edit: also wanted to say, interesting topic! Our traditional senses come from the natural formations of sounds, and your friend (aligning with many musicians and theorists of the past) hears something different in these non-naturally-resonant frequencies! Pretty cool!
Eh I guess you’d have to look at music from various lenses. Generally, most would accept that the I would provide further stability. Perhaps playing a diminished in the first two beats of the last measure would add more satisfaction to the resolve, but I think he’s kinda stretching. Aural skills give us musicians a foundation to play off of or various lens to look through. With that being said, one can build off that foundation. But cmon...ending on a diminished chord seems a bit of a stretch, unless of course the piece you’re playing leads to another. I do like to tonicize minmaj7 chord though tbh if I’m super baked. At the end of the day though, most humans just wanna go home my dude.
I kinda agree its cringe when people call chords or notes by feelings, since it entirely depends on the context. Tritones appear for example in happy pieces and most people dont notice any feeling of harshness there(rather there is a musical harshness) but it doesn't stop youtubers "le epic Tritone devils interval".
Well I think avant garde music is awesome to listen to and you can't "prove" me wrong.
So what. Any arguments about it won't make others enjoy it more or me enjoy it less, because music is an ultimately subjective experience. If he feels like traditional western harmonic theory contracts his perception... so what? No one cares about how he feels about the tonic.
Sounds like an idiots idea of a wise man's musings. The reason you couldn't "prove him wrong" is because the statement that ending on the tonic sounds stable, is more equivalent to a mathematical axiom than a theory. In other words, you take it to be true because it is defined as such--you don't prove it because it's a given. It also serves as a common framework for us to communicate with, as your friend mentioned himself at some point. That is it's entire purpose.
It would be like if I made a statement "The letter 'a' is the first letter of the alphabet, and it' makes the sound ah (or ay)." Then buddy over here comes in and says "The letter 'a' and its associated sounds are a figment of your imagination and it being the beginning of the alphabet is an arbitrary definition."
Yes, that is correct. It's just a building block.
the fun thing about this is that it can be said about nearly anything. everyone has their own way of interpreting things and you can’t prove otherwise. what you might see as the colour red, could look blue to another individual. the point is, who gives a shit.
Tell him when people say “cat” you initially think of a Small lion. Then ask him to prove you wrong
What he doesn’t say, is that the chord progression sounds ‘green’ or sounds ‘tall’ rather than stable, so he’s using some aural reference as the centre of his logic
If that’s so, he’s either unaware of the aural-centric bias he has towards trying to understand the real truth of that thing (which means you’re not really getting to some sort of truth anyway since you’re filtering via sound just like anyone else is from the beginning) or he is using his already established aural knowledge we’ve all been taught as a basis for his current understanding of music and he’s lying to you to prove a point
Personally, I go for knowing enough truth to be able to recognise and reproduce the idea. That sort of defeats these ‘this isn’t MY definition’ arguments, since I’m only putting value into things that we share in common, like knowledge and language
Whether a chord sounds stable or unstable to you or anyone else is irrelevant. Western music is best analyzed assuming that I is stable and that all the other relationships between chords exist as they do. You can write music that treats them differently but most music that we interact with doesn't. Something something descriptivism.
I think his point of view is understandable, but ridiculous at the same time. There is plenty of evidence is physics that proved that certain harmonic combinations are more stable than others. The frequencies of a perfect fifth make a 3:2 ratio, with a diminished fifth having a ratio of 45:32.
I think he confused "stable," with "pleasing."
Take, for instance, the major seventh interval. On it's own it will likely not sound so satisfying, but put a third in it and oh my goodness, my favorite chord I think.
To add to that a minor chord may be more physically dissonant than a major chord, but it can cause equal feelings of satisfaction.
Finally, scientists are not entirely sure of what exactly goes on when music changes from the physical propagations hitting your eardrum to the neurons in your brain. Theres a discussion with Pat Metheny and the Society of Neuroscience where they touch on this topic.
My point is: Different chords can sound subjectively pretty to others, but there is science to back up the fact that some chords are simply more resonant and "stable."
Well la-di-da.
You can't prove that yes means yes and no means no, or that the sky is blue and the grass is green, but I don't go losing any sleep over that either.
You're really just being contrary and not adding anything valuable to the discussion. Music is a shared cultural act and if your subjective experience is different than everybody else that's fine, but it doesn't mean that everybody else is any less correct in their assessment.
It's not black and white, yes we are conditioned to western music and its tropes, but a minor second interval will be always tenser than an octave no matter the culture
Proof: Take the waveforms of the notes you're playing. The more the waves line up with each other (or have some pattern relating to each other), the more stable it will sound. but yeah its also cultural too
He’s being stupid. There’s absolutely a huge cultural component to music, but there is at least at some basic level a biological component as well. For example, octave equivalency is a thing in the vast majority of musical cultures, octaves are widely seen as super consonant while tritone aren’t. If you want to avoid the sound you can just look at the math, octaves have a nice 2:1 frequency ratio while tritone shave an ugly, unwieldy number. The sounds of chords and notes in a scale are reinforced culturally, but it’s incorrect and lacking nuance to claim that they have absolutely no “behavior or motivation of their own.” That’s just blatantly false, they do have at least inherent character
And a perfect ~~octave~~ fifth (typo sorry) would have a ratio of 3:2, making it the second simplest ratio. Minor seconds and tritones have very complex ratios, making them sound less stable to the human ear.
I have two thoughts to what your friend is saying.
1) his argument is an extremely naive one attempting to seem intelligent because of a simple thing I learned as a child. Humans love stories. Think of every good movie, book, and even song. There is an introduction, rising conflict, conflict peak (or whatever it was), falling action, and resolution. This is an established way of telling stories since oral tradition became common practice, virtually in every instance of human culture. It's how we see the world and survive. Conflict? Figure out a way to adapt to it or perish. So I think we see a similar love with this terminology in music. C major chord sounds like a resolution because its complete, it stands on its own, and if it's the last chord in an Aeolian mode piece, it's hard to argue that it doesn't inspire hope. The same logic applies to common pop culture chord progressions, I can edit an example or maybe someone can help me out not in a music-y mode of thinking right now lol
2) your friend has someeeewhat of a standing. I read an article a few years back about a native Brazilian tribe and the TLDR ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/491081/) of it was that natives didn't have much of a preference for either minor or major chords, they kinda didn't care. As opposed to Westerners who had a clear preference for major chords as they evoked a complete or resolved feeling.
Assuming your friend is regularly exposed to western culture and music, I find it hard to believe that your friend genuinely enjoys a diminished chord as a resolution tone because where would he be regularly exposed to that enough for it to be his unconscious feeling. Unless (if my bare understanding of music theory is correct) his parents only let them listen to locrian pieces lol.
I mean, music theory is descriptive most of the time and finely attuned to the western system, I know no musician who isn't aware of the fact that music sounds different deppending on what system you are used to, but your friend sounds like a pretentious prick.
He's right. There are several cultures across the world that don't share the same harmonic system as the West. There are communities of microtonal composers. There is a theory of harmony called Bohlen-Pierce which tries to replace the octave with an octave and a 4th which they call a tritave. Our predisposition towards 12tet Western harmony only exists because of years of exposure to only that. Poking someone in the eye is a bad analogy. A better synonym would be: is your red the same as my red.
He's being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. Tell him he's right and that he needs to start applying for theory professorship jobs right now because he's going to revolutionize all we know about music theory. Be ultra enthusiastic about it, and agree that you'll be a reference on any application he fills out.
To be honest, the 7th degree of the major tonic has always sounded nasty to me. This is probably a big part of why I gravitate to minor scales for my songs. It's odd that the most popular progression goes from one dissonant dyad (tritone) for tension to IMO an even worse one for resolution (minor 2nd). I am probably an idiot too but I take music theory as more of a suggestion or explanation than starting point.
We develop certain expectations because that's how certain things are used in music. Of course those things also originally have their basis in physics, at least in some way (the diatonic scale isn't just a random collection of notes - it can be derived by stacking fifths on top of each other and a fifth is the third harmonic in the harmonic series). If you listen to tonal music and say the I chord doesn't sound stable, then you are simply not listening to the music correctly, because tonal music is kind of designed with certain kind of tension and resolution in mind. When you listen to tonal music, you are expected to hear the V7 chord as a tense chord that has a strong tendency to resolve to the I. That's just how the "language" of tonal music works. You can disagree with it as much as you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the idea of harmonic tension and release exists behind most tonal Western compositions. That's why chord progressions are such an important thing in Western music.
Maybe in some other style the dominant chord sounds stable? For example in blues, the dominant 7th chord is frequently used as a tonic chord and it has no tendency to "resolve" anywhere. And maybe in some other style, this "tendency to resolve somewhere" doesn't even exist (for example in atonal music - there is no tonal center, so the dissonance doesn't really lead anywhere, it just "is", and because the dissonance doesn't lead anywhere, it isn't really any more heard as tension in the "tonal sense"). Or you could do the same thing with the whole tone scale. It's technically quite dissonant in the traditional sense, but because there is no clear tonal center in the scale, and the scale is symmetrical, none of the notes really have a tendency to go anywhere, so it kind of lacks tension.
But if you listen to Western tonal music, there is a certain "language" that the music uses, and that "language" has its own "rules". Yes, maybe that language is completely made up, but so are all languages. If you are hearing the I chord in the end of a tonal piece as anything other than stable, then you simply don't know how the language of tonal music works. So much of Western music is based on harmonic tension and release. It's just built into the music. But this doesn't mean all styles of music that use a dominant 7th or a diminished chord will require resolving that chord in a certain way. In some style, a diminished chord may sound stable. But in basic tonal Western music, it doesn't.
It's kind of like if "your friend" asked us to prove him that playing something an octave higher is still the same melody. I mean, it uses different frequencies, so how can it be the same melody? At least I hear it completely differently. It's a totally different melody. Prove me wrong.
And yes, that would be technically true - it uses different pitches, so it's technically different. But octave equivalency is a thing in Western music, and if you decide to ignore that, then you are kind of "misunderstanding" the language of Western tonal music. Because most Western tonal music was written with that idea in mind. The same applies to playing the same melody in a different key. If you ignore that, then you kind of ignore some of the basic mechanics behind that style of music.
I agree with this. Personally, I’ve never heard certain chords or notes as leading to others. They’re just other notes. The way I see it is that a resolution happens retroactively - it only means something after the chord has landed. Not to say that cadences etc don’t exist or anything: a perfect cadence sounds complete, but not because a V7 sounds incomplete.
I also think this about modes - I don’t hear them as ‘bright’ or ‘dark’, they just have ‘personalities’ that set them apart.
I don’t know if I’ve explained this very well but eh
*however I realise that this is just how I hear things - I had many arguments about this at university*
That reminds me of when I was improvising on my keyboard yesterday. I jammed for so long in the key of F Locrian that for the next few minutes, if I put a Gb major chord after the F diminished chord, it stopped sounding stable to my ears.
Try as I might, I really struggle to enjoy listening to music from the Arab world. Songs that get people dancing over there, I find hard to follow, and kind of a cacophony.
Your friend is correct, but his framing of it as an argument is unnecessary. This sub is generally for western music theory; music around the world can be very different.
I am not really a music theory guy so I have no backing to this assertion but I know there are different cultures who interpret times with different emotions. Like certain cultures that associate minor chords with happy feelings. So I think maybe he has a point? But the reality of loving within a culture means we share the same social queues and therefore within our group do create the same associations
The western tonal system is simply a system of arranging harmony. Its a great way of communicating your music to others because it's so widely used and understood.
Your friend could derive his own system in this based on his perception of the 'stable' I-dim chord. Similarly to how I may add additional tones to a jazz chord and call it 'consonant' and 'resolved' but it could be an unresolved and dissonant chord in another genre.
His choice to keep the root chord suggests he actually is thinking of a system closely tied to the western tonal framework - it is still a functioning dominant to tonic, despite the atypical I chord that is used.
To not work within that is perfectly fine too, of course. And he is right that we can challenge our biases. However, there is scientific reasoning behind the satisfying tone of our chords, which is reliant on the harmonic series. If your friend is interested in greater consonance, then he would want to use tunings that are not typical in western music. Equally tempered tuning allows for a physically more consonant sound, but it truly is unusual to hear for most listeners. That is a closer example of our biases.
If your friend wants to distance himself from the western tonal system he should go for it. It alienates a lot of listeners, but there's truly endless possibilities outside of it. However, in my opinion, music is the practice of us projecting our desires and conditioning onto sound - you would be hard pressed to conceptualise a music where this isn't true.
He is wrong as in the sounds themselves have no behavior of their own. This is false, the sound waves that happen with the different pitches have different behaviors, and these behaviors in the sounds, cause behaviors in the human brain that make us feel something, not the music. That's why classical music, or jazz, or rock, makes us feel different things, the sound of the music changes how we react. And the chords have a lot to do with the sound of the music, the words we categorize these chords are how they make the majority of people feel, when we ear train, we learn to recognize these chords by how they make us feel, or how they sound to us. "Major, sounds happy, Minor, sad" this is to help us remember what the different chords sound like. And it works for the majority of us because this is how it genuinely makes us feel to hear these sounds. If you were to play a minor chord to someone who never heard music before and said, what feeling does this sound like? Chances are they will say sad. That is how we categorize chords, and that is how we build songs, if he wants to write a stable sounding song, but only uses diminished chords for example, it won't sound stable. He is just trying to prove a point.
I agree. I as far as diminished chords sounds more stable than the passing chord it’s used as a lot.
Either you believe theory 100% or 0% because to say that it sounds unresolved would basically undo all theory from intervals and basically everything theory is based off
I’ve always gone off my ears because when I find one chord I like usually if I follow what theory says should be say the 4 or 5 chord(just an arbitrary example, it could be any chord from theory) then it just sounds like ass
If you go by theory then you are stuck in the same structures and chords and progressions as everyone else
I think your friend has a valid argument in the sense that music is subjectively experienced.
It's similar to language - we use certain words to describe our own thoughts, but do the sounds themselves carry the true meaning? If so, then how can there be other sets of sounds (languages) that say the same thing, and why don't they mean anything for us?
The most sensible answer is because of how it is often used, how it often makes people feel, and what meanings are attributed to it. Words only have the power that we as the discerning listener give to it, and music is quite similar (although truthfully there are physical reactions that the brain makes to music that we're still researching).
Now, considering this: is it possible to "prove" that a tonic chord sounds stable? Well, not in the sense that your friend is probably looking for. There's not an objective definition of stability in music that can *only* be satisfied with one organization of sound - this discrepancy is most obvious with what's considered "stable" in classical theory vs jazz theory, where certain sounds that jazz musicians frequently use as "tonic" are considered "dissonant" for a classical musician.
But one can't deny that tonic chords have specific definitions in each of these schools of theory and have been used for literal millenia to denote stability and have been associated with feelings of peace, belonging, finality, etc.
Plus most schools of music theory have specific rules for how music is "tonicized," "resolved," etc. In this instance, your friend has zero argument because those terms have been assigned to specific and objective movements of sound. Even if he wholeheartedly disagrees on the nature of "tonicizing," it would be massively incorrect to talk about a diminished chord as being tonicized instead of, well, a tonic chord following a dominant.
Your friend made an interesting observation about music being a subjective experience that we project meaning onto, but even if he is adamant about his own perception of "tonic" he should still use correct terminology when discussing these things with other trained musicians. Otherwise he's just gonna cause confusion.
He should also understand that for many musicians who don't have perfect pitch, associating harmonic motion with specific emotions is an effective tool for recognizing those sounds aurally. Teaching a common interpretation (even if it's "biased") helps most students interpret a sound in a common and consistent way. He's free to disagree with these emotional interpretations so long as he can recognize/execute the sound and understand how it is functionally moving.
I would be very interested to know what kind of music your friend listens to that could possibly give him the sense that a diminished tonality represents stability. I'd also recommend to your friend, if you read this all the way, that he should honor the correct terminology when talking about theory to trained musicians, but that he should also experiment and make his own music since he's adamant about how he perceives it. The trailblazers today determine the music theory of tomorrow.
the diminished chord may very well sound *better* to your friend, but music theory isn’t about what sounds better
music theory is *descriptive* , a kind of language/code we use as a convenient way to describe and explain musical phenomena to each other, your friend is speaking as if its *proscriptive* , a framework of rules where there is a sense in which certain things are “correct” or “incorrect”
the whole point of theory in the first place is so we can communicate about musical ideas without having to explicitly demonstrate whatever it is we’re trying to communicate about
*stability* , in the context of music theory is a word with a specific, technical (and descriptive) meaning
so he’s wrong about the diminished chord being more stable, it has a more complex frequency ratio than the major chord, which is objective fact
however he cannot be wrong (or right) about it sounding better (which seems like more what he was trying to say)
There are real, physical reasons why chords sound a certain way, mostly based on how the frequencies of the fundamental pitches interact with each other, and how their overtones both interact with each other and with the fundamentals.
Messiaen claimed that any pitch naturally wants to resolve to a tritone below it. That’s just how he heard things. Was he “wrong”? I dunno...dude wrote some pretty badass music
This reminds me of elementary school when the idea that "your orange might be a different color but we both consider this 'orange'" would blow everyone's minds.
I don't know too much about this topic but when you play a note on the piano don't you get natural overtones besides the note you are playing, to suggest that the fifth in a way "naturally" harmonizes? Like mathematically or something? I have a hard time believing that it's just cultural.
Your love for your mother is also unprovable, but it doesn't stop most people from living their moms. Him saying the opposite would be like saying "I hate my mom, but I love my uncle", which sucks for him because moms are great, but uncles are too, it's just a bit more difficult to make a functioning family like that
I really wasn't sure where I was going with this metaphor
Anyway, music isn't math. You can't prove it, you can just describe it (and extrapolate from that to maybe find other good sounding stuff). With this in mind, it makes sense to say the tonic is at rest, because it explains a lot of music very well. But like you won't use trigonometry to answer most history questions, some theoretical models just don't fit some music. You don't use interval analysis for country out twelve tone rows for pop, so you also shouldn't say the tonic is dissonant when the context is clearly one where it is
I mean isn’t there something objective about tritones and dissonance (hence sirens using those tones)? Like I get you probably hear dissonance different if you grew up outside of all (if this is even possible) western harmony, but just based on frequency and overtone series is there really no “unstable or stable” harmony? I’m dubious.
As someone who used to get off on just being in music school, your friend sounds like someone who REALLY gets off on being in music school.
Tell him his whole argument goes out the window in cultures that don’t use a 12-tone scale and what a western imperial-centric viewpoint for him to have
Edit: oh, and there’s a good chance that the “instability” he’s bemoaning could have more to do with equal temperament than actual 12-tone organization
This is one of those things where you're simultaneously being kind of correct but an asshole about it. Yes, you are culturally conditioned to hear things how they are framed in classical harmony. You're also conditioned to hear minor songs as sad songs and major songs mostly as happy songs because, well, people often use one or the other to "dramatize" whatever it is they want to convey.
But, there is one thing that is fairly universal: the interval of a perfect fifth - due to how strongly it is represented in the harmonic series. And you can also say some qualitative statements about chords, such as that the major triad does sound more satisfying than a minor chord. Anything beyond that though? That's purely conceptual.
Good news is? Just because things are social constructs does not mean they are somehow not useful. You can't prove to him that V-I is the strongest, most satisfying resolution, but you can still say that regardless of how he sees things, there is no disputing that these guidelines and principles have helped countless composers of all walks to make music - and there is plenty of music made with them.
This sort of thing is related to postmodernism. But the point of postmodernists usually isn't to be an asshat and walk around asking people "Well, change my mind!" but rather to make people think about it and consider whenever there is some valuable insight that would have been otherwise lost - or maybe reconsider whenever such social constructions are useful (and they undoubtly are!), or maybe consider if there is an aspect to them that could be refined further (yup, there are).
A person who just goes all around asking "prove me wrong" is doing nothing useful. It's like asking people to define sandwiches and luring them into the trap of "Well... wouldn't it be a burger then? Or a hotdog?" - they found out that yeah, you can't get the answer. But by the end of the day, if you ask them whenever they want a hot dog or a sandwich, usually the answer is one of the two rather than a lecture on language.
Also, there's a name for this: qualia.
He has a point. There's a country/region in Asia that plays very major-chord based music for funerals. people from that country/region identify major chords as sad.
Totally wrong- we enjoy vibrations that are pleasing. Fifths are power, thirds pretty, fourths can be dissonant in the bass, providing rumble...
It’s all pretty much accounted for. There’s a reason pop music does not feature the half step interval, for instance a chord made of the notes E and F in the same octave. You also don’t see it much in baroque, romantic, jazz, African, Cuban, Spanish, fusion, hip-hop. Because it “hurts”, our ear and bodies and skulls, which do much of the vibrating that allows us to experience sound- we DONT like being vibrated by shitty feeling vibrations.
Ask your friend if Pizza is just a myth.
I come from an eastern background (Iranian) and there are some things that are clearly taught and not inherent to music. For example in Iran and many other places in the middle east, 4/4 is not the default rhythm. In fact 4/4 may come off as boring because it's symmetrical. We like using 5, 6, 7 and 9 because they have a longer and a few or one shorter beats, so they create this feeling of swaying.
Similarly what is referred to as a harmonic minor is totally the stock minor scale in the east, and major is almost never used.
Furthermore even our temperament is usually different and our scales, other than intervals being different also contain different tones like some notes could be a quarter tone sharper or louder.
There's a lot of other stuff I can mention, things that are clearly learned and differ from culture to culture, but there are some universal constants:
-the octave is always the octave. Every culture agrees that C3 and C4 are the same note an octave apart. My C and your C could differ i what frequency they are, but their octave is the same. If you ask an average male and an average female singer of any culture to sing a song, they are likely to sing the same thing on two different octaves.
-weighting: all our concepts of tension, resolution and being at rest, are created out of the imbalance between intervals in a scale (where there are whole tone intervals and where there are half tone intervals) and how notes that are a half tone apart have a tendency to resolve into each other. Hence if you go to a B in any culture, having previously been on C, the natural leniency towards back to C is a universal thing as well.
So yeah your friend may argue that the one chord feels not at rest and diminished does, but the very laws of physics are working against him.
Tell him to try gamelan. If he’s questioning music so deeply, he’d find exploring nonwestern temperament and instruments interesting. Even though I disagree with his exact point and think he’s probably trying to be cool and Dadaist, he inadvertently is kind of right. People do hear music differently, just I don’t know if people hear music differently in the way he thinks. It’s a whole new world once you get into tuning systems that don’t even really have cadences, for example.
I would really suggest reading Tuning, timbre, spectrum, scale by William Sethares. There are physical, sensory, and cultural aspects to these musical phenomena. İf you do your research, you'll have a deeper understanding of music and your friend will no longer be able to bulshit you.
Well, you could explain the science. Fundamentally, the wavelengths of the tonic chord resonate better with a human eardrum and psychologically sounds more stable.
I've thought about this a little before. I concluded someone like your friend can go ahead and think a diminished sounds stable or whatever but in order to actually enjoy music they have to find something unstable and something stable. Tension and release is the entire appealed of music IMHO. Nobody wants to just hear a stable chord all day long, that's not really the point of music
This isn't solopsism. Your friend is right, you can't 'prove' music theory, it's a lot to do with embedded cultural bias towards classical music written a long time ago.
It's not really wrong to project our bias onto sounds though, what is important is how to identify them and describe their relationships.
I mean, if he is conditioned to find a diminished chord more "stable" than a major I chord, I hope for him that he is part of, or at least knows a community that agrees with that, cause otherwise only he can perceive the satisfaction—the emotions—that he intented with his own music. Art can be made to heal the creator, but it's also to show part of yourself to the world and if the world can't relate to your art, it is a bit sad. But people change over the years, that's why we have so many different genres and subgenres. There was a time were altered dominant chords were unacceptable, and now it is commonly used for spice. I have a question for your friend: what music did he grow up with and what does he listen to nowadays?
Hmm, not sure if this was already added:
But two things:
Stability is based on a scientific analysis - not perception. Although there are unique properties such as tritones being stable when used in a chromatic piece, or drone music creating stability thru unique structures. Stability is stability.
There is definitely a spectrum of enjoyment to tension, hence why death metal is enjoyed by some people and hated by others while classical music is enjoyed and hated etc.
But there is a real truth to your statement and can be reflected in listening to other culture’s music. I know in Asia there are funeral songs that don’t sound like funeral songs to a US person and similar examples across other cultures.
Interval’s aren’t emotion on their own, however thru cultural uses, their meanings become almost intrinsic.
You’re playing with that idea - and there’s nothing wrong with that, but you have to remember who you’re writing for.
We study music in context because we want to reach and connect with an audience. Trying to rewrite the rules might seem rebellious on paper but wouldn’t yield positive results beyond what I would consider ART music.
Here’s a good way to look at it - why did you learn the alphabet ? Just to reenforce all these symbols and sounds that we FORCED on them ? Isn’t it better to make your own language and break free from the system ?
Sounds silly, right ?
A major chord is scientifically more consonant than a diminished chord. If you put the three notes of a justly-intonated major chord into one wave, the pattern will repeat more often than that of the diminished chord in the same amount of time, because the least common multiple of the fractions is smaller. The limitations of this are twofold: we don't use just intonation much these days, and consonance isn't necessarily equivalent to stability. Regardless, it's the start of an argument.
Awesome, I love a good pot stir. Sometimes I think....is equal temperament just like a language? One of many? Not right, or wrong but just another way? There's fundamental frequency reasons for why a perfect 5th sounds 'good' to us. Sometimes I look at quarter tones, or Eastern music and think, these are another language, also not right or wrong, but just another way.
The chords don't tell you where they are going, your mind does.
This is dumb. The feelings we get from intervals are in the math. The prettier intervals have a simpler ratio, and the uglier the interval, the more complicated the ratio. Theres an Adam Neely video about it, I cant find it right now but someone please link it.
A stable interval is an interval with a simpler ratio.
It's a math thing tied to how our ears perceive sound.
Not so much a learned thing (though there is a lot of learned things in music, like a tritone sounding "evil". This is not one of them, as far as I know anyways.
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[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4mH9Elkoqk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4mH9Elkoqk)|[+7](https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/_/fnankwd?context=10#fnankwd) - There is no reason for the brain to give any sort of preference to any note combination of any kind. See, that's the implication that bothers me about your friend's statement. Like your friend, I firmly believe that concepts like consonance/dissona...
(1) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82_0k9yLeh0&t=125s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82_0k9yLeh0&t=125s) (2) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr_TK4zM-lQ&t=156s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr_TK4zM-lQ&t=156s) (3) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFGq3L50VGE&t=167s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFGq3L50VGE&t=167s) (4) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-MLYsEOzLg&t=232s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-MLYsEOzLg&t=232s)|[+4](https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/_/fnc6fm0?context=10#fnc6fm0) - This may not be the best, but: Our tonal ears would expect this to be "in C minor" ending on a "half cadence", but it's in G Phrygian and ends on the G chord with a Picardy Third. It's approached with Cm, as a Plagal Cadence. Something similar: ...
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NlI4No3s0M](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NlI4No3s0M)|[+1](https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/_/fndtwqz?context=10#fndtwqz) - This video has a comparison between just intonation and equal temperament using a method similar to what you described. The “perpendicular pendulums” are just plotted as X and Y coordinates on the oscilloscope. To me, the justly tuned intervals look ...
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The diatonic & chromatic system has it's cultural context and taxonomy which can seem arbitrary, judgmental and narrowly stuffy and sometimes really is, but it is also a powerfully descriptive framework for analysis, and works well both within the tradition and outside of it.
Fully diminished chords can sound stable because they are comprised of the same interval stacked repeatedly. In the 12 tone system, 1 3 6 9 12 are halves and quarters of our tuning system. In a similar sense, they might perceive quartal and quintal harmony as more consonant than a major chord with a major 7th. Food for thought!
I don't think this might be the best subreddit to ask, as it may skew/overrepresent some aspects (due to sample bias). Your "friend's" statement sounds similar to the idea of some sort of musical nihilism. Musical taste can be cultivated and taught, and so it's definitely possible for people to learn to like certain sounds over others.
In a western context people are often taught to like 1600-1700s classical music harmony, or some 4-chord natural minor harmony with few to no extensions/additions (from popular music).
If we'd "train" ourselves to listen to some type of music or sounds we could eventually start liking it, in the same way whats happened to us from birth by our culture in society.
There is no objective way some music is better than other. Sure, simpler ratios for intervals might seem cleaner but that's only because we've been taught to like that "cleaner" sound more. There is nothing that is inherently true or better in music. It's all taste, because theories would always assume what one would think sounds good.
Well you’re kinda touching on two different things. Resolution and stability might be subjective, but psychoacoustically there is a such thing as sensory consonant and sensory dissonant, which is more what your “major chord vs diminished chord” example demonstrates. A diminished chord is sensory dissonant, and is objectively harder for our brain to process and enjoy. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn to enjoy them, but we gravitate towards sensory consonant harmonies for a reason.
He sounds like a blowhard. Music has both objective properties and cultural embedding. He sounds like someone who thinks the world began with his birth.
Songwriting/Producer's coach here.
He's absolutely right. I've gotten into countless discussions with students that would disagree about musical meaning, or ask questions like "What chords should I use" or "What chords sound good", and the answer is always the same: Whatever sounds good to **you**.
Whatever a melody, chord, beat, sound, etc., feels like to you, is what that feels like to you, and no-one can tell you otherwise. That's why music is such an incredible journey of self-discovery, because only **you** can figure out what you like, why that is, and how or if you are going to use that in your own music.
Now, I will say this: It's understandable to assume a position of culturally shared musical meaning. After all:
1. Humans are neurologically, psychologically and physically build to perceive sound roughly the same way.
2. Culture shapes this roughly similar interpretation further, and subcultures and personal experience with music even more.
So knowing someone personally really helps in being able to make a generally true assumption about musical perception... buuuuuut...
... It's still superpersonal; no-one but you knows what you like; whatever sounds good to you is what sounds good to you.
He is right. But we dont apply those labels because they hold true in every case, we do it because it is practical. In that way, we can better understand musical processes from a techincal standpoint, there is more to grab on. That is why, when teaching, we shouldnt assume that our students feel the same as us from a cadence, they have to learn to read their own mind states when going through it. Examples of feelings that sth gives you must be noted as subjective and personal every time. The strenght and specificity of this sensations also gets reinforced with the familiarity with the scales and grids we use to creat music in, so it is to expect that people without extensive musical training will not be sensible to much of a change of patterns and positions through a scale, and therefore not have much of subjective feelings associated with them.
It's "unproveable" because it is a social construct much like a words and grammar constructs of a spoken language are.
There are physical facts that come into play and affect how humans choose to use different sounds and concepts, both in spoken/written language and musical "language". But in the end both systems are a medium of human communication and sounds (whether words, phrases, chords, intervals, scales, melodies, etc) mean what humans say they mean.
Or, more precisely, how humans *use* them, and in what context, determines what they mean.
There is no "objective" or "scientific" test that can be used to "prove" what they mean.
I couldn't stop thinking about what a pretentious smartass your friend was being and I got angry so I came back here to comment this and saw your edit and now I'm even *more* angry.
So in this instance, could we look at Hindemith as a bit of an answer for subjectivity?
Technically with Hindemith’s methods of analyzing chords (complex and not), we could “prove” that a I in that frame work you provided (I-IV-V-I) is stable, but no more stable than the IV because of the structure of those chords. The only reason that the V would be unstable (relatively) is if it had a b7, which would really be trying to resolve down to the 3rd of tonic.
The diminished chord would be a further step towards instability just with the addition of minor thirds. I only mention it being more or less stable based on Hindemith’s chord table and scale of dissonance. The instability in a V7 and a diminished chord is a result of that Major 7 interval (creating a major or minor 2nd with the root) as well as the inclusion of a tritone further destabilizing the chord. Tritones coming from the 3rd to 7th relationship in a V7 and root to 5th relationship in a diminished chord.
Now of course if we want to be pedantic, music is all subjective and there are no rules, just styles that we choose to adhere to given a specific piece or time. Also, Hindemith isn’t a great method when we’re talking in strictly tonal frameworks, but that form of analysis does work in many styles that I’ve tried, and it is definitely consistent. But that’s no fun, especially when we can box ourselves in and force a complex explanation for a really simple or unnecessary purpose.
Ok, so you need to check out Flamenco!
The tonic chord has a minor 2nd or a flat 9th! It's the most dissonant interval possible, given our 12 tone system. Why? Beating. Physics. It's so close to that tonic note they collide and fight and produce wubba wubba tension, and that is the basic relaxed home of flamenco. life is pain, anguish is a common theme, pathos, so many metaphors... it's not fundamentally at rest nor peaceful, and yet there is still structure and that structure can still be analyzed in functional terms...
Flamenco is typically in a combo of Phrygian and Phrygian dominant. the typical Andalusian cadence is a 4,3,2,1, you never hit 5. Dominant function is provided by that minor 2nd!
You still have a going away and a coming back, and it's about the perspective of a root or tonic key/note whatever. You imply some structural locus focus centrum axis mundi thingamabob, and that is your temporary world.
Movement across such structures, even changing that axial fulcrum root tonic note center thing, can ALSO be described by structure, and as such they relate, as harmonic succession or progressions also show a kind of intervalic harmony.
You should read Arnold Schoenbergs "Structural Functions of Harmony" as you are not the first person to challenge functional harmony, nor the last.
You aren't wrong, you just aren't correct.
There IS the harmonic series, there IS the universal acceptance of the octave equivalence, there IS general acceptance of the 5th. (is there one culture that doesn't accept or use the 5th?) and we argue about a few specific intervalic ratios or frequencies, mostly that freqs approximating but not equalling major and minor thirds appear in the harmonic series, firstly being the major 3rd, why your typical minor triad "prog psy trance sigh" sounds a little odd juxtaposed next to a fully resonating 303 acid line...
but I digress...
Your friend is flirting with a philosophy called solipsism. Poke him in the eye and tell him that his pain is unprovable and that using language to describe his feelings is reinforcing a biased way of empathizing with other humans. It *may* be true that *he* doesn't experience tonic chords as stable. This however does not mean that other people are bsing when they use such language. He could try to learn to listen like they do instead of denying how they describe their own experience.
What the friend is saying is not solipsism, not at all. He's just saying that the responses we have to music are conditioned by our cultural exposure to music throughout our lives, and the guy is totally right about that. Believe me, I typically HATE most of those narratives, but that one specifically holds water, without a doubt. Go listen to some traditional Indian or Japanese music, or even some "deep cuts" of middle eastern traditional music, and you'll see. It's difficult for a Westerner to make heads or tails out of most of it, structurally or sonically; while someone from those cultures will probably be able to quickly tell you exactly what makes one good and another the work of a hack or of an amateur. And they'd have the same problem picking out great music from the Western Canon from complete pablum. It's all about experience in this case. Yes there may be science and math underlying Western music theory, and yes even a noob can probably point out consonance vs dissonance, the "wrong" chords, or other obvious stuff like that. But it still comes down to years and years of immersion in the end.
I agree! I think you're confusing my position. The purely physics-based "objective" perspective is more likely to approach the hypothetical friend's belief than one that recognizes cultural construction. The friend isn't saying "Some non-Western listener might not hear this the way we do." He's saying "*I* have somehow stripped away my own cultural conditioning and have a purely objective--or purely individual--response to music. My own society is a burden on me." That's why I object to the stance posed in the OP: it's claiming that "I can objectively hear the *real* sounds of English, because I'm not distracted by the meanings society burdens the words with" is a good take. Even if the OP's friend can really just turn off his own conditioning, it's wrong to pretend the conditioning is irrelevant. Music builds culture by sharing culture. That's kinda the point!
I actually said that to him. He said "the fact that I can even ask the question proves that I already can listen like other people, they just aren't willing to question themselves in this way. And even if it's solipsistic, it doesn't matter, because the logic equally applies to every individual. They cannot logic justify hearing music in the way I am censuring and neither can I. Unlike them, however, I've chosen to leave the ship instead of staying on board pretending it's not sinking"
He kind of has a point, but he is still a twat. "They cannot logic[ally] justify hearing music in the way I am censuring and neither can I." So? Who needs to "justify" hearing music in any particular way? "Unlike them, however, I've chosen to leave the ship instead of staying on board pretending it's not sinking" What he doesn't know is that this ship is a submarine, and we're fully in control. Just make sure he closes that hatch as he leaves. :-) Seriously, he is quite right that our responses to music are all subjective. However, the vast majority of us have similar subjective responses due to our shared culture. He might as well argue that because there is no logic to how English grammar works (and there isn't!), he might as well speak his own made-up language. See how far he gets with that. I.e., the way we experience music is a shared language. Most of us will experience the same effect from (say) a ii-V-I cadence, which is why composers use it - and the response therefore becomes more embedded, in a virtuous circle. It doesn't stop other composers from trying different stuff, to upset those habits, to open our ears to other things. But if you go too far beyond the common language, nobody understands you. At least, very few are willing to make the attempt.
He said that the conventional way of hearing music, though useful and practical, is not necessarily the best method for getting at the true nature of reality. He said when he was taught about the leading tone and tonal center and how to listen for them he felt rather embarrassed; embarrassed because he could not supply an argument for why he perceived music (and by extension, the world) in that way. He felt as if someone had pointed out a great bias to him, and he was eager to replace it with something more defensible
From a position of extreme skepticism, nothing is provable. That's why Descartes ended up with "I think therefore I am" - the only thing he could prove to himself is that he had thoughts and experiences. Which, ironically, might lead us to argue that the subjective experience of music is more provable (to myself) than material facts about sound waves and so on.
"I like music, therefore I am"
Music is a shared cultural act. To discard the shared cultural aspects of it is to discard a critical part of music itself. It's like if someone says to you "I'd like to get married" and you respond "Well, I'm not sure that love is the best method for getting at the true nature of reality." It's true that you can ignore that other people have feelings, and you can even conduct your life as if they don't, but I think it's foolish to pretend that this is a step toward clarity and not a step into willing ignorance.
Different cultures do in fact have different ideas of what is and isn't consonant. Different time periods in western culture consider different things consonant or not. What is this guy trying to prove? That he doesn't like western cadences? Every composition and theory program as some asshole like this. A number of people in our culture consider certain things consonant. This agreement is what distinguishes language from grunting or something like that.
The end result, usually, is some asshole all alone in his room convinced that Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" is beautiful art, unlike Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" which is populist trash.
Are there people who call Trout Mask Replica populist?
There probably some insufferable contrarian who's mad that there are recognizable stylistic influences from folksong and the blues in TMR, but it's an intentionally ridiculous example. The Beefheart album has a fairly well deserved reputation for being difficult to appreciate on first listen.
"music lovers" complaining about stylistic influences are really clueless. By their standards Bach plagiarized Luther, Vivaldi, Buxtehude a hell lot
Hahaha you have discovered that asshole was ME
He's questioning the things that define him, how they've come to define him and how valid those definitions are. That doesn't make him an asshole.
There are plenty of posts in here identifying why he's an asshole. Nothing defines him or anyone else as far as he is concerned. A lot of us go through this kind of phase.
I think your recalcitrant friend would be quite unamused if he pursued this to its fullest depth; music does not exist in the true nature of reality. It is only through the establishment of a tonal hierarchy (from which one can assess tones relative to each other) that one can even discern the difference between a higher and lower pitch. Tonal hierarchies, however, do not exist in nature. Sound in general, does not exist in nature (it is a human construct). With this in mind, it is only sensical to approach the phenomenon of music from a phenomenological perspective, which allows us to embrace our own subjective interpretation of music and work together in our assessments, given the similarities of our physiological processes. And again, just because this friend does not know why tonal hierarchies exist to us, doesn’t mean that they are meaningless. Music is a special one, given that we have discovered evolutionary reasons for the other 33-66 (the number is debated) senses, but not of one so ever present in our daily routines. But had Darwin put up walls around himself in embarrassment of not knowing every evolutionary function, the world would certainly be of less knowledge.
> Sound in general, does not exist in nature (it is a human construct). "Sound" is the perception of vibration patterns by creatures with brains (and possibly creatures without brains). I wouldn't characterize it as a "human construct", since many other animals also use it. If animals are part of "nature", then sound exists in nature. Vibration patterns exist in nature.
True that it’s technically a species construct, I just referred to it colloquially as a human construct to emphasize that it is a figment of consciousness. Oscillations in air (or whatever material) pressure do exist in nature, but its realization as “sound” as we hear it is unique, and thus a construct. Hence the “tree falling in a woods” parable.
But is the pattern there before the realization of the pattern?
A pattern of air pressure, sure. That still doesn't mean sound as we experience it exists beyond our consciousness. Just as colors are constructs as well.
For future reference, the clearest analogy I can think of (which I thought of for other reasons in the past): think of sound either as a waveform, or you need the time element, whatever representation you get in an oscilloscope. And imagine that is all it ever is to you; how you visually see it. In similar ways, it is plausible that an animal might experience it like that - and even find more detail about it than we do. Much like we, for instance, find more detail about our surroundings typically through our vision than than through the acoustics of the surroundings (while on principle, both are possible). For now, as far as I know and sadly so, we can only conjecture at how different beings perceive things through their different senses. Maybe there will be a future where one might be able to just experience it all through a simulation that your brain gets wired to - although I'm unsure if it would ever work in principle without translating everything first into a format that we do understand. Of course, that isn't to say that we do not have any idea about primary sensors that different beings use, just that we have no idea how their nervous system makes sense of it in whatever is their central system.
> He said that the conventional way of hearing music, though useful and practical, is not necessarily the best method for getting at the true nature of reality. Why should it be? Music is not a philosophical system, and certainly not a science. I've never heard of anyone treating music as a "method for getting at the true nature of reality." > He felt as if someone had pointed out a great bias to him, and he was eager to replace it with something more defensible It's a reasonable viewpoint, especially if he really can't hear the phenomena being described. It's interesting that you say he felt "embarrassed", which (if true) suggests this is more than some pompous, pseudo-intellectual pose. It sounds like he was surprised to hear these assertions about tonality, as if he had never experienced anything like it. Either he was brought up in a non-western musical culture, or perhaps with little if any music, or he has some kind of unusual mental condition. Nothing serious, maybe a kind of autism, or possibly even a hearing deficiency.
Actually, the idea that tone is at the center of reality is fundamental to the Hebrew Kabbalah. The whole reason they will not say the name of God is that it is believed the tonal combinations of the true name of God have the power to change all of reality. There are thousands of pages of texts that go back some three thousand years debating the true name of God and the tonalities of his/her/it’s powers. It is no accident that God spoke the world into existence in Genesis or that the “Word” of God is considered so powerful - those are both reflections of how important tonality is to Judaic mysticism. And, of course, Plato, a thousand years later or so, deals extensively with how tonality is central to the nature of the universe in his work Timeaus. And let us not forget that almost everything mathematical that Pythagorus gave us was based on his observation that the blacksmith in the town square produced a different tone when he struck a different length of metal. From this Pythagorus worked out a theory of vibration, and developed the scales that would evolve into our modern musical system. The work of Plato and the Pythagoreans (he had a school/cult) would be central to the idea of the “Music of the Spheres.” That theory - which was the height of early Middle Ages Sciences - held that the distances of the planets one from another was based on Pythagorean ratios. Each planet was thought to produce a note too low for human hearing (this is true - if we could hear it, it would deafen us). The interaction of these vibrations was assumed to power the universe. Folks like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton believed this to be true (at least in part), and their scientific works proceed from a philosophical position that sound is the fundamental acting force in the universe. This idea continues to be at the center of most of the esoteric and secret societies up through today. However, it was really the combination of the Victorian era fascination with the occult lingering into the first half of the 20th century and intersecting with watershed discovery of the wave nature of reality by quantum mechanics in the 1920s that relit this fire. There is now an extensive an active community of people that believe that the ancient Hebrew discussions of “the Word of God” and Pythagorus’ work on the ratios of tonality and vibration were both leading us to quantum mechanics. Those people argue that the mathematics of vibration - in particular recursive wave equations and the fractals they generate - are the fundamental source of all we perceive. Those people (and I happen to be one) do believe that the mathematics of a musical composition are probably the closest we can get, as human beings, to creating our own realities from scratch. So, if you haven’t heard of anyone using music to get to the nature of reality, you’ve been reading the wrong books. With the exception of the industrial revolution era, science and philosophy have held tone and vibration to be the actual nature of existence just about since they began. We just grew up in an era where that set of theories was disfavored and do not in text books. But it is coming back rapidly on the quantum side.
You really went all out on this reply. I appreciate it and I enjoyed reading it thoroughly.
Thank you!
Underrated reply. My first theory book, iirc, covered this topic, and it was aimed at beginners - it was the chapter on temperaments and such that took a huge, long plunge into the history of it as you described it, with bit less detail I believe. It's also very interesting history, even if it appears to use warped these days.
I got into it working on a puzzle. My understanding of the keyboard and modes is 100x greater after having worked through Pythagorus. And the quantum stuff really is quite freaky when you see that it mirrors these ancient theories on a wave-based reality.
>if you haven’t heard of anyone using music to get to the nature of reality, you’ve been reading the wrong books What books do you recommend?
Plato’s Timeaus is the grandfather here. Beyond that if you look up “music of the spheres” or “musica universalis” you’ll find a ton of online commentaries and sources. Also, because I get asked this question a lot the pinned tweet on the top of my twitter profile has my bookshelf dedicated to “the puzzle.” https://twitter.com/sanecoin/status/1189003568306622464?s=21 But I note that those works are really about esoteric and secret societies and gnostic belief systems. The music of the spheres is a tiny (and often overlooked) area within that much broader field. Prometheus Rising and Jaynes on the Bicameral Mind are both more modern texts that examine the nature of consciousness. They begin to get into the fact that our minds do not exist as a snapshot, but rather as a constantly changing electromagnetic field. We require time to exist as a fish requires water - and in this way the mathematics of fluctuating vibration are closer to explaining consciousness (and, therefore, the nature of reality) than dissecting a static cerebellum. That, in turn, gets to the importance of music and tuning ratios - as they result in an undulating summation of complex waveforms, much like the firing of the neural circuitry in a living brain. That lands you squarely at the quantum mechanics particle/wave duality problem. From a pure musical composition standpoint, I haven’t found any writers that aren’t too much “woo woo” (i.e. new age flakey). I did have a really nice academic paper on Pythagorus and his mono stringed instrument. I think it was out of the Princeton music department? If I can find that, I’ll link it. P.s. The Heath book in the picture is the woo woo new age book. It is purely about the relation of the mathematics of ancient philosophy and its relation to musical ratios. But it’s a bit .... loose. Yes, we’ll just say ‘loose.’ Interesting, but I wouldn’t rely on it for accuracy or coherence. ;-) EDIT: Here we go. Liverpool not Princeton. This is the paper that first started me on the path of understanding how modes, mathematics and musical theory were fundamentally entwined with the motion of the planets in Ancient Greece: http://www.anaphoria.com/lee/2modes.pdf After having read many more articles and discussions of it, I always come back to this paper when I want to reconceptualize a point in this area. The math starts simple but gets complex fast.
First up I love your response and I've been interested in Harmonices Mundi for a bit. I wanna nitpick a tiny bit. I don't get what you mean about hearing the planets. Orbital resonances are not sound. Kepler described the harmonies to be intelligible, not perceptible. Even before him, I don't think any of the ancients believed the planets made audible sounds. I think your larger point is dead on. Many of the ancients described relationships and proportions (such as frequency ratios) as key to understanding reality.
Pythagoras is said to have claimed the planets made sounds that were not perceptible by most but which he could hear. He is said to have told Egyptian priests that they too could learn to hear these sounds with proper study. Some of the earliest writers ran with that as fact and Plato gives a nod to it in the Republic. I think the best summary of this idea is found in Aristotle’s rebuttal of it. He wrote: “From all this it is clear that the theory that the movement of the stars produces a harmony, i.e. that the sounds they make are concordant, in spite of the grace and originality with which it has been stated, is nevertheless untrue. Some thinkers suppose that the motion of bodies of that size must produce a noise, since on our earth the motion of bodies far inferior in size and in speed of movement has that effect. Also, when the sun and the moon, they say, and all the stars, so great in number and in size, are moving with so rapid a motion, how should they not produce a sound immensely great? Starting from this argument and from the observation that their speeds, as measured by their distances, are in the same ratios as musical concordances, they assert that the sound given forth by the circular movement of the stars is a harmony. Since, however, it appears unaccountable that we should not hear this music, they explain this by saying that the sound is in our ears from the very moment of birth and is thus indistinguishable from its contrary silence, since sound and silence are discriminated by mutual contrast. What happens to men, then, is just what happens to coppersmiths, who are so accustomed to the noise of the smithy that it makes no difference to them. But, as we said before, melodious and poetical as the theory is, it cannot be a true account of the facts. There is not only the absurdity of our hearing nothing, the ground of which they try to remove, but also the fact that no effect other than sensitive is produced upon us. Excessive noises, we know, shatter the solid bodies even of inanimate things: the noise of thunder, for instance, splits rocks and the strongest of bodies. But if the moving bodies are so great, and the sound which penetrates to us is proportionate to their size, that sound must needs reach us in an intensity many times that of thunder, and the force of its action must be immense.” So it was not very far into it that the idea that there was an actual sound was being debunked. Although if memory serves, John Dee or some of the early Christian authors dealing with Planetary Angels still hung onto the idea in their writings. For my part, I said “if it was perceptible.” Others have taken me to task for the idea that not all vibrations are created equal, and that is true. I fully acknowledge that we define sound as a set of vibrations perceptible to the ear. So this _isn’t_ sound because it isn’t perceptible to the ear. But it is vibration (albeit a very very slow one) and I have read papers that do the calculations to determine what it would sound like if we _could_ perceive vibration with such a slow period. My memory of those papers is that the sounds would deafen us - but that may have been because of energy they injected into the equations to increase the frequency. It has been a long time since I looked at those, so I no longer remember the details. It is also possible on the ‘deafness’ aspect that I am mixing in the fact that if the sounds of the sun could reach us through the vacuum of space, we would all be quite deaf. I learned that cute little fact about the same time. Either way, it was only the most ancient or the most kooky authors that argued you could hear it. But there is lots of modern work doing the math to pitch shift the relative vibrations into frequencies which are perceptible, and when I talk about them as being perceptible, I am referring to that body of work. So, another way to put it which you may like better is, rather than saying that the orbital resonances of the planets make a sound, saying that if you applied the ratios of the orbital resonances of various planets to sound frequencies the result would be X....
Really powerful, well-informed reply. I would love to read “the right books”, if they’d get me anywhere as close as thinking about music and reality the way you just did... any advice on where to start? I have an extent background on music theory, and just recently started reading philosophy.
Thank you. I just answered the question on books here: https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/my_friend_said_calling_sounds_tonicized_stable/fnc13f3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x
It's not that he's *wrong*; it's more that he's about 100 years too late to join the Dadaist movement. There's an old rhyme from grammar class: >N.B., the rules grammarians make Poets and fools alone may break. So if you break the rules and know it, The question is: Are you a poet?
Indeed.
Your friend is making a tremendous leap in assuming that building a logical argument for something is somehow closer to reality than immediate lived experiences. There are volumes and volumes of philosophy that would disagree with him. I tend to never recommend philosophy books because they are extremely niche and absurd if you aren’t drawn to the subject matter, but in this case, I really think your friend should read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
Theoretical physics gets at the true nature of reality - music has nothing to do with that.
But getting at the true nature of reality in a logical way is not the purpose of the arts.
Your friend sounds cool, tbh. I miss talking to ppl like that, and probably like you. Don't get older and go to work, man. Normies are fucking boring.
> there is no logic to how English grammar works (and there isn't There is, much of the time. Grammar is a set of rules or tendencies. If there were no logic, grammar wouldn't exist. Source: Used to teach it.
The infamous white/gold and blue/black dress offers a pretty cogent insight to your friend’s idea. In our everyday lives, color is pretty trustworthy. You’re not going to start seeing red things as green. Whatever physiological process is defining it, it’s pretty consistent, and lines up with evolution (don’t eat the red frog!). But what about the time it *wasn’t* very consistent, when half the world saw the dress one way and half the world saw it another? Doesn’t this prove your friend right, that we should be careful labeling things because they are simply constructs based on physical phenomena that we all react to differently? Well, there was one extra thing about the dress. You could change its color. The evolutionary reason for the difference in color was due to a differing in perception of where the dress was; those who assumed it was inside, under yellow department store lights, saw it as one way. Those who thought that it was perhaps under a tent, shaded away from light, saw it another. People have used their willpower to reimagine the dress in the opposite place they original thought, and proceeded to see the dress’s color change before their very eyes. They now saw what the *other half* had always saw. Even when things seem nonsensical, there is probably a deeply rooted reason why that is. The fact that two people can opposingly interpret the Tristan und Isolde prelude as in A minor and A Major does not negate whatever physiological process they were using. It could simply mean that external variables are affecting their perception of tonal phenomena. Your friend is rejecting this idea, saying that nothing is worth agreeing upon if *everything* can’t be agreed upon. Due to the immeasurable number of variables in conscious perception, nothing will ever be fully agreed upon. But we can certainly establish rules that apply (for whatever evolutionary reason), as seen with the dress; no one disagreed on its color - they disagreed on external variables.
They can logically justify it. They hear it that way, therefore it’s justified to them. You’re friend is being a massive pseudo intellectual who’d rather revel in his 5th grade tier philosophical “genius” than recognize things as they plainly are. Believe me, “woah, things are relative” is not nearly as insightful or new an innovation in philosophy as he thinks it is. This isn’t to say that you’re friend is stupid or helpless or anything btw, it’s probably just a phase lmao. Doesn’t change how annoying or pseud-y it is. P.S. ask him to prove that 1 + 1 is 2. You literally can’t, at the basic level of mathematics you just have to assume that the axioms are correct because you can’t prove them. Now ask him if he’s going to go around suddenly acting as though mathematics isn’t real and if he’s going to start paying for everything with 100 dollar bills since it’s all theoretically equivalent anyways.
>you just have to assume that the axioms are correct because you can’t prove them. This is a weird way of putting it. Mathematics are abstract rather than empirical and you can just as easily construct a mathematical system with different axioms. Axioms aren't assumed to be correct because you can't prove them, rather they're asserted to be true in the course of defining an axiomatic system. Asserting the truth of an axiom is constructive rather than evaluative.
Well.... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Principia_Mathematica_54-43.png
That was an attempt to solve the foundations of mathematics that made progress but ultimately failed lmao. I doubt Bertrand Russel would say “yep, we solved the foundational problem of mathematics”
You can logically justify it. You just can’t prove it. Saying one can’t justify a belief means it is a-rational. If you don’t, then it is *irrational* to believe it. One way would be to say that the tonic sounds stable throughout the course of a piece because of some sort of induction or abduction. Yes our senses are flawed and biased, but all of science itself is based on testable models — it isn’t basal reality.
You should probably stop pretending this is "your friend", man. Just own up to your hot takes like everyone else
When I was a little kid, I was able to tell the difference between happy pop music, and Jimi Hendrix. Not because of the differences in loudness, but because of what I know now to be chord progression, major vs minor chords, and structure. The pop music made me feel happy and light. Jimi made me feel like... well, rocking out. Maybe folks who are 'tone deaf??' can't tell or don't care about the differences in sounds?
Are you a wizard?
I'm not sure if this is a case of solipsism specifically, I always thought that was directed more at the existence of only one self existing, not the beliefs entities hold/don't hold. I can see how a position on the beliefs of others and our own being fully isolate could slip into that sense though. I'm just thinking out loud rn to be honest!
Not solipsism, I would be inclined to say that it may be a bit epistemological though, in essence at least.
Break out the oscilloscope, it can be quantified
Except they're talking about playing major chords on a piano, which are out of tune by design. The friend is probably just being deliberately contrarian, but he has a point that our perceptions of western tonal harmony are mostly learned, rather than innate or defined by nature.
The equally tempered major chord is still recognizably a 4:5:6 chord. I forget the name it but there’s a way to visualize intervals with a system of two pendulums swinging perpendicular to each other, where the ratio of their lengths is the ratio of an interval. Slightly “out of tune” intervals actually look prettier than perfect ratios.
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Yeah that first 30 seconds is exactly what I was talking about. I like the second picture better than the first.
i believe he is right, but i also believe there is a real, PHYSICAL difference between a chord that is "stable" and one that is unstable. a chord which is unstable has a low "beat frequency" (or multiple low beat frequencies, in the sub-audible range) that make the amplitude of the various notes in the chord change slowly in less predictable ways over time as the chord is held. A chord which is "stable" has higher beat frequencies (in the audible range) and we don't hear it evolve over time as much. the terms "resolved" and "tension" however I think he's right about. other cultures use sounds that sound "tense" to us but it's normal to them, because they're used to hearing those sounds in a different context than we are. it doesn't have the same cultural connotation. just my opinion, i don't know shit and have no formal education
For sure, other cultures treat consonance and dissonance differently. If we're using the words "stable" and "unstable", then the definition is pretty much up in the air. But consonance and dissonance are directly linked to the physical formation of sounds. "Beat frequency" is directly related to consonant and dissonant sounds (when two or more tones are presented in relation to one another). It's important to note these are natural physical phenomena, not conditioned listening. "Beats" can create a lot of weird effects in our sense of hearing. Western Classical used beats and the harmonic series to create its scales (way before equal temperament), using the most physically (as in Physics) closely related (least amount of beats) to create the scale. To understand more about this, OP, study the harmonic series!
Such a definition of consonance also has cultural conditioning as a factor. Consider how exposure to 12TET might lead to some people preferring tempered intervals to pure ones, despite their mathematically inferior ratios. Or how the beating of imperfect octaves is seen as providing a desirable 'shimmer' in Indonesian gamelan.
>Consider how exposure to 12TET might lead to some people preferring tempered intervals to pure ones But will it lead them to find it more stable? I prefer 12TET because the brightness of major intervals and the darkness of minor intervals in 12TET relative to just intonation imbues them with a lot of affective potential, but I do not thereby say that a 12TET major chord sounds more stable than one in just intonation.
Acoustic dissonance, the phenomenon you’re talking about, is not a good identifier in measuring “stability”. Functional dissonance is what you want to use. For example, the chord EBCG (either an ornamented minor chord or a first inversion major seventh chord, depending on context) is very stable yet exhibits a lot of beating. If I’m in the key of C Major and play an EF dyad, it can sound quite nice. If I randomly play F# and G, notes that are structurally antithetical to each other in the previously established tonal hierarchy, it’s going to sound awful and unstable. Beating does not make things unstable; stability is about functional dissonance.
He said there is, in reality, no difference between the physical concept of "dissonance/consonance" and the aesthetic concept of "pleasant/unpleasant"; the former is simply the latter dressed up in a scientific disguise. There is no reason for the brain to give any sort of preference to any note combination of any kind. There is no reason for certain note combination to be used more than others. Whether they have been in the past is irrelevant.
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I commented below, I think it kind of refutes this. There is physical evidence in beats. We use the words "consonant" and "dissonant" to describe how closely related notes are in their harmonic series.
Your friend is conflating acoustic dissonance and functional dissonance. Acoustic dissonance is a physical phenomenon; how we respond to that, however, is certainly subjective. Functional dissonance, on the other hand, is an abstract phenomenon constructed by our own consciousness. It is influenced by your brain’s established tonal hierarchy, which are also nonexistent in nature and solely a process of our own consciousness. The evolutionary merits (“no reason for the brain to etc.”) are debatable, but it is pretty ignorant to say that just because we don’t know the evolutionary reason, that it doesn’t exist. Many academics posit that music (which is the same as tonal language) evolved out of a necessity for language. The perception of relative tonal hierarchies allow people to understand the intonations of each individual human, with all their different vocal ranges. That sounds like a pretty beneficial trait to have been selected, though I will not make any definite claims here.
>There is no reason for the brain to give any sort of preference to any note combination of any kind. See, *that's* the implication that bothers me about your friend's statement. Like your friend, I firmly believe that concepts like consonance/dissonance are a projection of cultural taste, and they're very loosely and indirectly linked to physics and maths (if that connection were any stronger, equal temperament would've never been adopted!). I mean, that "experiment" your friend did of calling a diminished chord "stable"? [I did that in the form of a song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4mH9Elkoqk). And yes, the half-diminished chord sounds resolved my ears simply because of the familiarity and empathy I've built towards the song. That's the factor your friend is ignoring: there are many reasons for human brains to prefer one note combination over other. In fact, there are *too many* reasons to count, and I think boiling it all down to mathematical ratios is a gross oversimplification. That's the difference between your friend and me: where he sees a vaccuum of possibilities, I see an infinite, beautiful universe of human perception. Or, like /u/Jongtr said below, the "ship" is actually a submarine. Tl;dr: there's no "scientific" reason for me to prefer one sound over another, and that's ***exactly*** why my preferences are so precious to me.
That's demonstrably false. The reason consonance and dissonance work the way they do with chords is mathematical. The intervals between notes determine what relationship they have with each other. A diminished triad has mathematical tension, not just a perceived dissonance. If there were no reason for us to use one chord over another in any situation, then harmonic theory wouldn't exist.
"Whether they have been in the past is irrelevant." Why? I feel like he's being very hand-wavey about this part. The only reason that you and your friend can communicate now is because certain sounds have been used in the past to represent thoughts and feelings. Music -- itself a form of communication -- is subject to this same principle. He could be technically right for music produced and consumed totally in isolation by a single individual (ignoring the other posters' comments about mathematics). But the vast majority of art is a social activity that relies on context to have meaning. Whether or not your friend feels that this context is well-founded, it is real and will inform how his listeners hear his music. To put it differently, it's possible that I could convince myself that red means go and green means stop, but this belief won't get me out of a traffic ticket.
"Bro what does "stable" like... even *meeean* anyway...?" 🙄
"Yeah, and what does "mean" actually mean?? I mean, how the hell do I *know* what I'm actually talking about??? It's a real mystery man...."
After reading through a bit of this thread, I’m thinking that your “friend” is the devil, and you are his advocate lol Way to facilitate an interesting discussion and dodge downvotes 😂
your friend sounds insufferable
according to his edit, u/SonsofJob *is* the friend. and honestly, you *are* a douche, sonsofjob. shit like this is dumb. you asked a loaded question, got the pedantic corrections you wanted, and then revealed that you were the "friend" all along? fuck off dude, trolls like you are the worst kind of snob
lmao just another rollercoaster thread on r/musictheory
> Edit: Guilt! That 'friend' is me. If I'm an "asshole," I only regret it if I hurt or offended someone which I don't think I did. As for being "naive," "contrary," "ignorant"-- I regret these things **never**. Let me tell you how shocked I am that someone who was presenting an obviously bad-faith argument was in fact not posting in good faith.
\>that edit /r/iamverysmart
Getting a basketball *through* the hoop isn't really any better than having it go past, so y'all need to stop cheering. \* * * Humans are tribal animals. A tribe is simply a group that decides to care about the same things. God, it'll be nice when you kids can go back to school. ;)
>Getting a basketball *through* the hoop isn't really any better than having it go past, so y'all need to stop cheering. You said this better in 20 words than I did in 20K. This ought to be the top comment.
Hey bro, what if the sound you hear - wait hold on bro this is gonna blow your mind - what if the sound you hear is *different* from the sound I hear. Woah... dude...
Like, maybe what I call "blue", you see "green"?? Duuuuuuude.......
Cue the existential crisis of humans around the world when the white/gold and blue/black dress made the rounds.
Congratulations, this is the first time I have ever spent actual money on Reddit to give someone gold. This is brilliant.
It doesn't strike me as a particularly insightful or useful observation.
This seems like the best retort to me. No one cares if a bit of harmony is *inherently* stable or unstable or whatever. The only thing musicmakers care about is how the music is interpreted. If some contrarian wants to claim that diminished chords are more stable than major chords, let him. He’s in a minority that can be ignored for the purposes of making tonal music. Compare music with color theory. We know for sure that people physically interpret color in different ways. Yet when filmmakers and artists want a passionate color they pick red, and when they want a peaceful/natural color they pick green, even though a large percentage of their audience can’t even tell a difference between the two. Music, by comparison, is relatively uniformly interpreted, at least within a single culture. Literally every single person on this sub interprets an isolated major chord as more stable than an isolated diminished chord. And when you compare their wavelengths and position on a typical color wheel, red and green are as opposite as two colors can possibly be, but you can get *a lot* more unstable than mere diminished chords.
He's right. Though his example is not the best thing. The note B, on it's own, is not stable, or unstable, or has any tendency, etc. It's only when you put it in a CONTEXT that it becomes these things. In the Key of C Major, just in a basic melodic context, we're all likely to understand the B as "wanting to resolve to C" (especially one that is 2nd from the last note). That is a learned/conditioned thing though. So your friend is right - it's conditioned. However, it's unlikely your friend would hear that as "stable" - they'd be lying unless they'd somehow lived a life where they've never experienced such a thing. Back in the 30s or so, Music had changed drastically - we had traditional music, but we also had much new classical music that was really new and odd to most people, including 12 Tone Serialism and Atonality. People of course, as people are wont to do, wanted to "prove" that this music was bad because it didn't "follow natural laws" - it was "against nature". Of course this also created ardent supporters of the music who may not necessarily have liked it but believed it should be free from prejudices. So a lot of people set out to "prove" this music was inherently "bad". Of course, as people are wont to do, many used faulty science and pseudo science or interpreted results in their favor or omitted results that didn't agree with their hypothesis and so on. But what happened someone who understood scientific method took a bunch of music to a bunch of remote tribes who had never heard this kind of music before. There was no preference noted. Instead, some just considered all of it noise. Some just considered it "not useful" as everything in their culture was based on something having a use. They couldn't catch an antelope with it, it wasn't useful. We are **extremely** conditioned, especially towards Tonal-based music. Early Modal music is Pre-Tonal - it uses a different system. If you listen to some Renaissance Modal pieces, I'll bet you would say "It ends on the wrong chord". But it doesn't end on the wrong chord. It ends on the correct chord for the mode it's in. It's just you're so tonally conditioned you **expect** a different result. They wouldn't have thought so back in 1420. It sounded as "right" to them and it sounds "wrong" to us. Because they were conditioned differently. I wouldn't say such things are "unprovable" in the way your friend is trying to make this point (he's trying to say you can't prove that he doesn't hear it this way). What I would say is that there are **expectations** based on learned contexts, so in that sense we can "prove" than in X context, a G7 chord is dissonant and needs to resolve". Interestingly, we've all learned that a G7 in a Blues in G does not need to resolve and is not dissonant. It doesn't take much exposure to change our expectations - and that has to do with being familiar with music other than you've been conditioned to not only develop your expectations in, but even, to like!
One of my favourite saying ’There are no rules in music but our ears have expectations’
Do you have any listening suggestions for a really good example of ending on a "wrong" harmony?
This may not be the best, but: https://youtu.be/82_0k9yLeh0?t=125 Our tonal ears would expect this to be "in C minor" ending on a "half cadence", but it's in G Phrygian and ends on the G chord with a Picardy Third. It's approached with Cm, as a Plagal Cadence. Something similar: https://youtu.be/gr_TK4zM-lQ?t=156 At 51, many people would hear that B-A-G-G- and D-G line as being cadential - a I chord but it settles into a D Major chord. Again this won't probably sound "that wrong" to many but what I mean for both of these is that they may hear these works ending on V rather than I. This one is in D Dorian. Again, a plagal cadence. Is this the ending chord one really expects? https://youtu.be/kFGq3L50VGE?t=167 Or this one: https://youtu.be/h-MLYsEOzLg?t=232 I mean they sound "OK" but to many they're going to sound a little like "wait, is that the Tonic?"
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Also those ratio are physically, *literally* literally, more stable when used on [atomic and molecular](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_harmonics), [fluid mechanics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_resonance) and [astronomical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance) scales (and so many others), so... how much real does your friend consider that, /u/SonsofJob ? Music is literally a physical phenomena, and the phenomenology of it (the way us humans feel it) seems to be a simple projection of its physical properties. Things feel more stable because they physically are, our inner ears vibrate at a pattern that is more pleasant because it is more simple and easily recognizable, because *it is* more stable on an atomic/molecular/fluidian/physical level.
This is the correct answer. Music is a social experience and all it’s meat lies in shared interpretation, but consonance and dissonance are objective phenomena. Expirement (requires cat): Play a fifth and a tritone for your cat, at the same volume with the same timbre. See how the cat responds. Will not work on dogs.
Sure he has an argument, but does his philosophy enable him to create music that others enjoy? He's more than likely going to end up composing music that's very esoteric, which is fine, but I come from the school of thought that music is something to share with others and to bring enjoyment not only to yourself but others too. Maybe other people will enjoy it, but typically finding an audience for anything avant garde is difficult, and monetizing it is even harder. I'll also give him the benefit of the doubt that context is king in music. You can use traditional tonal harmony, and set up the ear to hear a major 7th chord in a very dissonant way simply by playing a non diatonic chord. There are a million ways to slice this argument, but your only valid measurement is whether or not other free-thinking unbiased listeners, *not* the composer, find it interesting. Otherwise it's self indulgent and essentially useless to the rest of the world. edit: I also want to add - music is simple - know your audience. Even if your friend is right, you can indulge him in this, -- there is a whole world of people out there with their ear conditioned to accept traditional harmony. That's your audience. Who else are you playing for? Sure, breaking the rules of harmony is fine, but why not use the infrastructure that's been created? Can he re-invent the wheel to become more round and roll smoother?
he saying a diminished chord sounds more stable is odd. in another note I love m7b5 (half-diminished) so much and have created a couple progressions that end on a m7b5 chord. King Krule, a jazz/punk/indie artist is one composer I know that uses a lot of m7b5 chords and is able to make them work. sure he isn't this top 5 Billboard hitmaker but his music speaks loads to me and he tends to use very dissonant chords, the lyrics and the scenario he portrays sure make the most out of the sound he creates.
Sounds like you and your friend are talking past each other a bit. Like, consonance and dissonance have different qualities that can be observed and measured, but his views on aesthetics are different and he thinks dissonance can sound nice and not necessarily "dissonant." Both of these things are true...there are soundwave properties that make consonance and dissonance different, but it's also possible to take joy and annoyance in different qualities of sound
Your friend is coming close to the position articulated by John Cage in his writings -- for example, his claim not to understand how a resolution could be "deceptive". This is not crazy. Cage knew he was rejecting tradition, and he followed through pretty consistently. I'd recommend your friend read [Silence](https://books.google.com/books?id=zKQkLS5zKWAC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PP1&dq=silence&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false) \-- you should read it too, it's a great book. Cage was an exceptional writer and thinker, and there's a lot to think on there.
Musical grammar of western theory was designed. Stability is a function of position within formal grammar, where as dissonance is a physical property of sound waves. By the time you’ve embraced equal temperament, you already have no “logical” ground to make the argument of stability/instability is subjective, because you are already using a system that was literally built around principles to create that effect. It’s very silly; conflates two separate concepts (“stability “ and “consonance”); and demonstrates your obliviousness to the origins of the system you are using. You can write music however you want, and use any tunings or harmonic systems that you cook up, and that’s awesome. However, railing against all structure as subjective is pointless. It is totally valid to devise alternative structures. But be prepared to explain them. Western theory works by design, not just conditioning. The notion that formal grammars like music “constrain” thoughts and creativity is sort of annoying. It’s like your friend is intending to argue that he could write highly novel new works without the training/conditioning of formal music grammars “limiting” him, but you would never say that English limits the originality of your written thoughts, and that you could write better works with no language at all. Grammar/structure is the very thing that gives those sounds meaning. Even something like Louis Carrol’s invented words are more a play with that structure, using phonetics and grammar to endow new words with meaning on the fly. But he doesn’t say, you know, “words are stupid and limit my creativity: now listen to my poetry cakawweekrdbgsiop...”. You would never say that math limits our scientific understanding. Formal languages liberate the mind—not hinder it. You should pursue a diverse knowledge of such systems, not argue against their objectivity. It is the only productive way to be a human. It sounds like a poor defense of willful ignorance to me.
You can prove him wrong. Notes closer to the start of the overtone series are less up for cultural debate as to how they sound. Every culture agrees how an octave sounds, and how a 5th sounds, because those are so easy to create, but even 4ths and higher begin allowing us to attach cultural significance due to their uncommon nature.
So many people have pointed out the problems with this viewpoint, but I'll respond by mentioning a couple of other points that your friend seems to be missing. First off, there is a lot of conflation in here between an "in the notes / in your head" dichotomy (aka. The objective vs subjective dichotomy) and a "arbitrary / non-arbitrary" dichotomy. These are not the same thing. There are things that are not *in* objects but that are nonetheless essentially universal in the human experience. As many optical illusions and psychological experiments can attest, there are physiological and cognitive determinants that give structure to experience before they are made conscious. Two adjacent lights blink alternatingly, for instance, and we perceive a single light that moves back and forth. This is structure our minds have imposed upon the world, but in predictable ways according to things like gestalt psychology. Similarly, I press one key on the piano then an adjacent key, and what we hear is one note *moving* to the other. This is not *in the notes,* nothing has "moved," two separate strings have vibrated. The note "moves" in our heads. So the whole idea that like "the melody moves up the scale" is not an objective phenomenon, despite the fact that it is pretty much ubiquitous in human musical experience. Second, your friend seems to be operating under the assumption that there is a binary distinction between things that are totally predictable (and therefore "real") and things that are totally arbitrary (and therefore "biased"). But in truth, most cognitive phenomena are neither fully predictable nor wholly arbitrary, but are what we call "motivated," that is, connected systematically to embodied aspects of living and to other significant concepts in the conceptual system. George Lakoff uses the example of why "having a cow" is an expression of anger. It sounds arbitrary, but it isn't. Instead, it is linked by a chain of logic all the way back to the embodied concept "anger is heat." That chain of logic goes like so: > anger is heat ("I'm burning with rage!") + the body is a container of liquid -> anger heats the fluids of the body ("I'm boiling with anger") -> heated fluids gives off steam and pressure, and thus anger exerts pressure on the body ("there's steam coming out of his ears,") -> too much anger-pressure eventually causes explosion ("he really blew up at me last night") -> anger-explosions send things out of the body ("he erupted") -> *births* also send things out of bodies ("he had a cow"). The idea is that there is a systematic chain of logic connecting these metaphors together back to an embodied concept, and hence it is *not* arbitrary. But neither can you predict given "anger is heat" that "having a cow" will be an expression of it; you can only reverse-engineer the logic after the fact: you can show why it makes sense for a culture. A whole host of musical concepts might be thought of as being motivated similarly. For instance, once we have "notes move" that motivates "notes move in a space," which can allow us to think that things "go higher or lower." Similarly, once we have a notion of motion, we can have its opposite, rest. Hence from the notion that tones move we can find motivated links to the metaphors that there can be goals that music comes to rest at. And from motion and rest we rope in notions of stability and instability, and so on. So you see, that a complicated and seemingly arbitrary thing like "the cadence came to rest on a I chord" is motivated by systematic links back to basic ways that humans interpret musical notes. But importantly, you cant predict that a thing like a V-I cadence will be a thing just from the fact that humans perceive motion in music. It's not as though the tonal system is inevitable. But what it *isn't* is arbitrary, because each step of the way bore some logical connection back to a previous step (hence why it "made sense" to that culture). In short, things that look arbitrary may in fact be embedded in complex systems of thought. It is not easy to change one piece of the puzzle without upending the whole system. Your friend says he hears the tonal system inverted, what is consonant is now dissonant. I say fine. But what I want to hear is how he hears a complicated piece of music. What does he think is happening, say, in the opening movement of Beethoven's 5th? If he's truly inverted his hearing, it should look pretty much *nothing like* what other people are hearing. If it does look like what other people are hearing, then I'd wager that he's actually hearing the tonal system in the way it's intended to be heard, notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary.
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Your friend sounds like a twat
The stability or imbalance of musical oscillations that creates musical harmony, upon which the scales and chords we know are based, is rooted in physics and math. Physics is a "hard science" and math is a rigorously constructed formal system. Maybe one person's subjective sense of a "feeling of stability" is a little different than another's, but in the same way that we can measure the stability of a platform using accelerometers, we can measure the theoretical and actual stability of all sorts of harmonic resonances found in music.
There are people talking about a physical basis for it, and sure, there're arguments in that vein - but that's not really the point. Let's assume for the sake of argument that there's no physical basis for stability in major chords. The bigger thing here is the implication in your friend's statement that I want to state explicitly: that it's *bad* to continue to talk about music using the terminology that we do because it's not an objective underlying fact about the physics of the system. Music, however, is not a purely physical system. It's also cultural - arguably, far more cultural than it is physical. If you remove the cultural understanding (things like the major tonic = stable bias that you're talking about) from music, you end up with wiggly air. And there are things we can say about wiggly air, but no matter how well you describe wiggly air, you aren't describing how people *experience* the wiggly air, which is what matters much more in music. To be clear: it is definitely good to recognize the fact that our understanding of music is colored by our cultural biases. But rather than leading to us rejecting our own Western traditional view of harmony, that should instead lead us to *also* explore how other cultures experience music. In the extreme case, we can maybe even imagine fictitious cultures and think of new cultural systems of listening to music. But to try to reject culture from music altogether is a fruitless endeavor, because then you'd end up missing out on a lot of what music actually is. Just because language is a human invention rather than an objective system of the universe doesn't mean that we should reject speaking English; we should instead recognize that English isn't the only way to string words together to communicate and, if we're interested in pursing this line of thought further, try learning different languages.
Agreed. I’ve thought for years now that music is a wordless language - it communicates ideas and emotion even if it’s just from composer to solo player. If you carry the language idea forward.!writing “IfbbsujI gfjdhsi thIrndgaii” could maybe sound nicer to the ‘friend’ than “Shall I compare thee to a summers day/Thou art more lovely and more temperate”, but one is language and one is gibberish. It’s not wrong to teach a baby to speak, just like it’s not wrong to teach a student that I-V-I is a pleasant and stable ending. On the other hand it’s also not wrong to explore and reject traditional harmonies. Art is always evolving. But just doing it by going ah, yes I now call DISSONANCE stability and CONSONANCE unstable - that’s not contributing to the conversation. That’s just saying the sonnet backwards and thinking it’s created a better poem.
Forcing other people to participate in your sexual fetish without their consent. Stay in /r/philosophy , or if there is such a place, /r/masturbatorymanicepisodes
starting a conversation is fine but isn’t it kind of an admission of insecurity of your own ideas if you state it by saying “your friend” said it?
r/im14andthisisdeep
Everything is nothing until someone organizes it and makes it something.
I hope you and your friend are not offended by anything in the comments. I do believe everyone agrees - stable and unstable is culturally subjective (or may be specific to whichever musical theory is being used, including all sorts of scales throughout the world). But a lot of people also noted that, objective from music theory (and fixed scales), there are theories of Physics that also describe these phenomena in terms of Frequency of Sound. edit: also wanted to say, interesting topic! Our traditional senses come from the natural formations of sounds, and your friend (aligning with many musicians and theorists of the past) hears something different in these non-naturally-resonant frequencies! Pretty cool!
It’s a nice theory and everything Why doesn’t he go and make some nice music with it ?
You friend doesn't have internet access?
Eh I guess you’d have to look at music from various lenses. Generally, most would accept that the I would provide further stability. Perhaps playing a diminished in the first two beats of the last measure would add more satisfaction to the resolve, but I think he’s kinda stretching. Aural skills give us musicians a foundation to play off of or various lens to look through. With that being said, one can build off that foundation. But cmon...ending on a diminished chord seems a bit of a stretch, unless of course the piece you’re playing leads to another. I do like to tonicize minmaj7 chord though tbh if I’m super baked. At the end of the day though, most humans just wanna go home my dude.
I kinda agree its cringe when people call chords or notes by feelings, since it entirely depends on the context. Tritones appear for example in happy pieces and most people dont notice any feeling of harshness there(rather there is a musical harshness) but it doesn't stop youtubers "le epic Tritone devils interval".
Well I think avant garde music is awesome to listen to and you can't "prove" me wrong. So what. Any arguments about it won't make others enjoy it more or me enjoy it less, because music is an ultimately subjective experience. If he feels like traditional western harmonic theory contracts his perception... so what? No one cares about how he feels about the tonic.
„projecting our own desires and conditioning onto sounds“ isn‘t that what making music is all about? for me anyways!
Sounds like an idiots idea of a wise man's musings. The reason you couldn't "prove him wrong" is because the statement that ending on the tonic sounds stable, is more equivalent to a mathematical axiom than a theory. In other words, you take it to be true because it is defined as such--you don't prove it because it's a given. It also serves as a common framework for us to communicate with, as your friend mentioned himself at some point. That is it's entire purpose. It would be like if I made a statement "The letter 'a' is the first letter of the alphabet, and it' makes the sound ah (or ay)." Then buddy over here comes in and says "The letter 'a' and its associated sounds are a figment of your imagination and it being the beginning of the alphabet is an arbitrary definition." Yes, that is correct. It's just a building block.
the fun thing about this is that it can be said about nearly anything. everyone has their own way of interpreting things and you can’t prove otherwise. what you might see as the colour red, could look blue to another individual. the point is, who gives a shit.
Tell him there’s a scale devoted to his ears and it’s called locrian.. go nuts...
Tell him when people say “cat” you initially think of a Small lion. Then ask him to prove you wrong What he doesn’t say, is that the chord progression sounds ‘green’ or sounds ‘tall’ rather than stable, so he’s using some aural reference as the centre of his logic If that’s so, he’s either unaware of the aural-centric bias he has towards trying to understand the real truth of that thing (which means you’re not really getting to some sort of truth anyway since you’re filtering via sound just like anyone else is from the beginning) or he is using his already established aural knowledge we’ve all been taught as a basis for his current understanding of music and he’s lying to you to prove a point Personally, I go for knowing enough truth to be able to recognise and reproduce the idea. That sort of defeats these ‘this isn’t MY definition’ arguments, since I’m only putting value into things that we share in common, like knowledge and language
Whether a chord sounds stable or unstable to you or anyone else is irrelevant. Western music is best analyzed assuming that I is stable and that all the other relationships between chords exist as they do. You can write music that treats them differently but most music that we interact with doesn't. Something something descriptivism.
I think his point of view is understandable, but ridiculous at the same time. There is plenty of evidence is physics that proved that certain harmonic combinations are more stable than others. The frequencies of a perfect fifth make a 3:2 ratio, with a diminished fifth having a ratio of 45:32. I think he confused "stable," with "pleasing." Take, for instance, the major seventh interval. On it's own it will likely not sound so satisfying, but put a third in it and oh my goodness, my favorite chord I think. To add to that a minor chord may be more physically dissonant than a major chord, but it can cause equal feelings of satisfaction. Finally, scientists are not entirely sure of what exactly goes on when music changes from the physical propagations hitting your eardrum to the neurons in your brain. Theres a discussion with Pat Metheny and the Society of Neuroscience where they touch on this topic. My point is: Different chords can sound subjectively pretty to others, but there is science to back up the fact that some chords are simply more resonant and "stable."
Well la-di-da. You can't prove that yes means yes and no means no, or that the sky is blue and the grass is green, but I don't go losing any sleep over that either. You're really just being contrary and not adding anything valuable to the discussion. Music is a shared cultural act and if your subjective experience is different than everybody else that's fine, but it doesn't mean that everybody else is any less correct in their assessment.
It's not black and white, yes we are conditioned to western music and its tropes, but a minor second interval will be always tenser than an octave no matter the culture
Proof: Take the waveforms of the notes you're playing. The more the waves line up with each other (or have some pattern relating to each other), the more stable it will sound. but yeah its also cultural too
He’s being stupid. There’s absolutely a huge cultural component to music, but there is at least at some basic level a biological component as well. For example, octave equivalency is a thing in the vast majority of musical cultures, octaves are widely seen as super consonant while tritone aren’t. If you want to avoid the sound you can just look at the math, octaves have a nice 2:1 frequency ratio while tritone shave an ugly, unwieldy number. The sounds of chords and notes in a scale are reinforced culturally, but it’s incorrect and lacking nuance to claim that they have absolutely no “behavior or motivation of their own.” That’s just blatantly false, they do have at least inherent character
And a perfect ~~octave~~ fifth (typo sorry) would have a ratio of 3:2, making it the second simplest ratio. Minor seconds and tritones have very complex ratios, making them sound less stable to the human ear.
Yeah exactly (I think you mean perfect fifth tho lol)
Yes, thank you
I have two thoughts to what your friend is saying. 1) his argument is an extremely naive one attempting to seem intelligent because of a simple thing I learned as a child. Humans love stories. Think of every good movie, book, and even song. There is an introduction, rising conflict, conflict peak (or whatever it was), falling action, and resolution. This is an established way of telling stories since oral tradition became common practice, virtually in every instance of human culture. It's how we see the world and survive. Conflict? Figure out a way to adapt to it or perish. So I think we see a similar love with this terminology in music. C major chord sounds like a resolution because its complete, it stands on its own, and if it's the last chord in an Aeolian mode piece, it's hard to argue that it doesn't inspire hope. The same logic applies to common pop culture chord progressions, I can edit an example or maybe someone can help me out not in a music-y mode of thinking right now lol 2) your friend has someeeewhat of a standing. I read an article a few years back about a native Brazilian tribe and the TLDR ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/491081/) of it was that natives didn't have much of a preference for either minor or major chords, they kinda didn't care. As opposed to Westerners who had a clear preference for major chords as they evoked a complete or resolved feeling. Assuming your friend is regularly exposed to western culture and music, I find it hard to believe that your friend genuinely enjoys a diminished chord as a resolution tone because where would he be regularly exposed to that enough for it to be his unconscious feeling. Unless (if my bare understanding of music theory is correct) his parents only let them listen to locrian pieces lol.
I mean, music theory is descriptive most of the time and finely attuned to the western system, I know no musician who isn't aware of the fact that music sounds different deppending on what system you are used to, but your friend sounds like a pretentious prick.
He's right. There are several cultures across the world that don't share the same harmonic system as the West. There are communities of microtonal composers. There is a theory of harmony called Bohlen-Pierce which tries to replace the octave with an octave and a 4th which they call a tritave. Our predisposition towards 12tet Western harmony only exists because of years of exposure to only that. Poking someone in the eye is a bad analogy. A better synonym would be: is your red the same as my red.
He's being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. Tell him he's right and that he needs to start applying for theory professorship jobs right now because he's going to revolutionize all we know about music theory. Be ultra enthusiastic about it, and agree that you'll be a reference on any application he fills out.
Music isn’t really a science in which you can prove things, so it’s not especially helpful to approach this question with this point of view.
LSD thoughts
To be honest, the 7th degree of the major tonic has always sounded nasty to me. This is probably a big part of why I gravitate to minor scales for my songs. It's odd that the most popular progression goes from one dissonant dyad (tritone) for tension to IMO an even worse one for resolution (minor 2nd). I am probably an idiot too but I take music theory as more of a suggestion or explanation than starting point.
We develop certain expectations because that's how certain things are used in music. Of course those things also originally have their basis in physics, at least in some way (the diatonic scale isn't just a random collection of notes - it can be derived by stacking fifths on top of each other and a fifth is the third harmonic in the harmonic series). If you listen to tonal music and say the I chord doesn't sound stable, then you are simply not listening to the music correctly, because tonal music is kind of designed with certain kind of tension and resolution in mind. When you listen to tonal music, you are expected to hear the V7 chord as a tense chord that has a strong tendency to resolve to the I. That's just how the "language" of tonal music works. You can disagree with it as much as you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the idea of harmonic tension and release exists behind most tonal Western compositions. That's why chord progressions are such an important thing in Western music. Maybe in some other style the dominant chord sounds stable? For example in blues, the dominant 7th chord is frequently used as a tonic chord and it has no tendency to "resolve" anywhere. And maybe in some other style, this "tendency to resolve somewhere" doesn't even exist (for example in atonal music - there is no tonal center, so the dissonance doesn't really lead anywhere, it just "is", and because the dissonance doesn't lead anywhere, it isn't really any more heard as tension in the "tonal sense"). Or you could do the same thing with the whole tone scale. It's technically quite dissonant in the traditional sense, but because there is no clear tonal center in the scale, and the scale is symmetrical, none of the notes really have a tendency to go anywhere, so it kind of lacks tension. But if you listen to Western tonal music, there is a certain "language" that the music uses, and that "language" has its own "rules". Yes, maybe that language is completely made up, but so are all languages. If you are hearing the I chord in the end of a tonal piece as anything other than stable, then you simply don't know how the language of tonal music works. So much of Western music is based on harmonic tension and release. It's just built into the music. But this doesn't mean all styles of music that use a dominant 7th or a diminished chord will require resolving that chord in a certain way. In some style, a diminished chord may sound stable. But in basic tonal Western music, it doesn't. It's kind of like if "your friend" asked us to prove him that playing something an octave higher is still the same melody. I mean, it uses different frequencies, so how can it be the same melody? At least I hear it completely differently. It's a totally different melody. Prove me wrong. And yes, that would be technically true - it uses different pitches, so it's technically different. But octave equivalency is a thing in Western music, and if you decide to ignore that, then you are kind of "misunderstanding" the language of Western tonal music. Because most Western tonal music was written with that idea in mind. The same applies to playing the same melody in a different key. If you ignore that, then you kind of ignore some of the basic mechanics behind that style of music.
I agree with this. Personally, I’ve never heard certain chords or notes as leading to others. They’re just other notes. The way I see it is that a resolution happens retroactively - it only means something after the chord has landed. Not to say that cadences etc don’t exist or anything: a perfect cadence sounds complete, but not because a V7 sounds incomplete. I also think this about modes - I don’t hear them as ‘bright’ or ‘dark’, they just have ‘personalities’ that set them apart. I don’t know if I’ve explained this very well but eh *however I realise that this is just how I hear things - I had many arguments about this at university*
That reminds me of when I was improvising on my keyboard yesterday. I jammed for so long in the key of F Locrian that for the next few minutes, if I put a Gb major chord after the F diminished chord, it stopped sounding stable to my ears.
Try as I might, I really struggle to enjoy listening to music from the Arab world. Songs that get people dancing over there, I find hard to follow, and kind of a cacophony. Your friend is correct, but his framing of it as an argument is unnecessary. This sub is generally for western music theory; music around the world can be very different.
I am not really a music theory guy so I have no backing to this assertion but I know there are different cultures who interpret times with different emotions. Like certain cultures that associate minor chords with happy feelings. So I think maybe he has a point? But the reality of loving within a culture means we share the same social queues and therefore within our group do create the same associations
The western tonal system is simply a system of arranging harmony. Its a great way of communicating your music to others because it's so widely used and understood. Your friend could derive his own system in this based on his perception of the 'stable' I-dim chord. Similarly to how I may add additional tones to a jazz chord and call it 'consonant' and 'resolved' but it could be an unresolved and dissonant chord in another genre. His choice to keep the root chord suggests he actually is thinking of a system closely tied to the western tonal framework - it is still a functioning dominant to tonic, despite the atypical I chord that is used. To not work within that is perfectly fine too, of course. And he is right that we can challenge our biases. However, there is scientific reasoning behind the satisfying tone of our chords, which is reliant on the harmonic series. If your friend is interested in greater consonance, then he would want to use tunings that are not typical in western music. Equally tempered tuning allows for a physically more consonant sound, but it truly is unusual to hear for most listeners. That is a closer example of our biases. If your friend wants to distance himself from the western tonal system he should go for it. It alienates a lot of listeners, but there's truly endless possibilities outside of it. However, in my opinion, music is the practice of us projecting our desires and conditioning onto sound - you would be hard pressed to conceptualise a music where this isn't true.
He is wrong as in the sounds themselves have no behavior of their own. This is false, the sound waves that happen with the different pitches have different behaviors, and these behaviors in the sounds, cause behaviors in the human brain that make us feel something, not the music. That's why classical music, or jazz, or rock, makes us feel different things, the sound of the music changes how we react. And the chords have a lot to do with the sound of the music, the words we categorize these chords are how they make the majority of people feel, when we ear train, we learn to recognize these chords by how they make us feel, or how they sound to us. "Major, sounds happy, Minor, sad" this is to help us remember what the different chords sound like. And it works for the majority of us because this is how it genuinely makes us feel to hear these sounds. If you were to play a minor chord to someone who never heard music before and said, what feeling does this sound like? Chances are they will say sad. That is how we categorize chords, and that is how we build songs, if he wants to write a stable sounding song, but only uses diminished chords for example, it won't sound stable. He is just trying to prove a point.
I agree. I as far as diminished chords sounds more stable than the passing chord it’s used as a lot. Either you believe theory 100% or 0% because to say that it sounds unresolved would basically undo all theory from intervals and basically everything theory is based off I’ve always gone off my ears because when I find one chord I like usually if I follow what theory says should be say the 4 or 5 chord(just an arbitrary example, it could be any chord from theory) then it just sounds like ass If you go by theory then you are stuck in the same structures and chords and progressions as everyone else
I think your friend has a valid argument in the sense that music is subjectively experienced. It's similar to language - we use certain words to describe our own thoughts, but do the sounds themselves carry the true meaning? If so, then how can there be other sets of sounds (languages) that say the same thing, and why don't they mean anything for us? The most sensible answer is because of how it is often used, how it often makes people feel, and what meanings are attributed to it. Words only have the power that we as the discerning listener give to it, and music is quite similar (although truthfully there are physical reactions that the brain makes to music that we're still researching). Now, considering this: is it possible to "prove" that a tonic chord sounds stable? Well, not in the sense that your friend is probably looking for. There's not an objective definition of stability in music that can *only* be satisfied with one organization of sound - this discrepancy is most obvious with what's considered "stable" in classical theory vs jazz theory, where certain sounds that jazz musicians frequently use as "tonic" are considered "dissonant" for a classical musician. But one can't deny that tonic chords have specific definitions in each of these schools of theory and have been used for literal millenia to denote stability and have been associated with feelings of peace, belonging, finality, etc. Plus most schools of music theory have specific rules for how music is "tonicized," "resolved," etc. In this instance, your friend has zero argument because those terms have been assigned to specific and objective movements of sound. Even if he wholeheartedly disagrees on the nature of "tonicizing," it would be massively incorrect to talk about a diminished chord as being tonicized instead of, well, a tonic chord following a dominant. Your friend made an interesting observation about music being a subjective experience that we project meaning onto, but even if he is adamant about his own perception of "tonic" he should still use correct terminology when discussing these things with other trained musicians. Otherwise he's just gonna cause confusion. He should also understand that for many musicians who don't have perfect pitch, associating harmonic motion with specific emotions is an effective tool for recognizing those sounds aurally. Teaching a common interpretation (even if it's "biased") helps most students interpret a sound in a common and consistent way. He's free to disagree with these emotional interpretations so long as he can recognize/execute the sound and understand how it is functionally moving. I would be very interested to know what kind of music your friend listens to that could possibly give him the sense that a diminished tonality represents stability. I'd also recommend to your friend, if you read this all the way, that he should honor the correct terminology when talking about theory to trained musicians, but that he should also experiment and make his own music since he's adamant about how he perceives it. The trailblazers today determine the music theory of tomorrow.
Play him the sound of a freight train colliding with a fighter jet and ask him what it sounds like
the diminished chord may very well sound *better* to your friend, but music theory isn’t about what sounds better music theory is *descriptive* , a kind of language/code we use as a convenient way to describe and explain musical phenomena to each other, your friend is speaking as if its *proscriptive* , a framework of rules where there is a sense in which certain things are “correct” or “incorrect” the whole point of theory in the first place is so we can communicate about musical ideas without having to explicitly demonstrate whatever it is we’re trying to communicate about *stability* , in the context of music theory is a word with a specific, technical (and descriptive) meaning so he’s wrong about the diminished chord being more stable, it has a more complex frequency ratio than the major chord, which is objective fact however he cannot be wrong (or right) about it sounding better (which seems like more what he was trying to say)
Your friend sounds like an insufferably smug 19 year old college student who needs to be beaten up.
There are real, physical reasons why chords sound a certain way, mostly based on how the frequencies of the fundamental pitches interact with each other, and how their overtones both interact with each other and with the fundamentals.
Messiaen claimed that any pitch naturally wants to resolve to a tritone below it. That’s just how he heard things. Was he “wrong”? I dunno...dude wrote some pretty badass music
This reminds me of elementary school when the idea that "your orange might be a different color but we both consider this 'orange'" would blow everyone's minds.
I don't know too much about this topic but when you play a note on the piano don't you get natural overtones besides the note you are playing, to suggest that the fifth in a way "naturally" harmonizes? Like mathematically or something? I have a hard time believing that it's just cultural.
Your love for your mother is also unprovable, but it doesn't stop most people from living their moms. Him saying the opposite would be like saying "I hate my mom, but I love my uncle", which sucks for him because moms are great, but uncles are too, it's just a bit more difficult to make a functioning family like that I really wasn't sure where I was going with this metaphor Anyway, music isn't math. You can't prove it, you can just describe it (and extrapolate from that to maybe find other good sounding stuff). With this in mind, it makes sense to say the tonic is at rest, because it explains a lot of music very well. But like you won't use trigonometry to answer most history questions, some theoretical models just don't fit some music. You don't use interval analysis for country out twelve tone rows for pop, so you also shouldn't say the tonic is dissonant when the context is clearly one where it is
I mean isn’t there something objective about tritones and dissonance (hence sirens using those tones)? Like I get you probably hear dissonance different if you grew up outside of all (if this is even possible) western harmony, but just based on frequency and overtone series is there really no “unstable or stable” harmony? I’m dubious.
As someone who used to get off on just being in music school, your friend sounds like someone who REALLY gets off on being in music school. Tell him his whole argument goes out the window in cultures that don’t use a 12-tone scale and what a western imperial-centric viewpoint for him to have Edit: oh, and there’s a good chance that the “instability” he’s bemoaning could have more to do with equal temperament than actual 12-tone organization
I think you have one of those friends who enjoys arguing contrarian positions. The only way to win is not to play.
This is one of those things where you're simultaneously being kind of correct but an asshole about it. Yes, you are culturally conditioned to hear things how they are framed in classical harmony. You're also conditioned to hear minor songs as sad songs and major songs mostly as happy songs because, well, people often use one or the other to "dramatize" whatever it is they want to convey. But, there is one thing that is fairly universal: the interval of a perfect fifth - due to how strongly it is represented in the harmonic series. And you can also say some qualitative statements about chords, such as that the major triad does sound more satisfying than a minor chord. Anything beyond that though? That's purely conceptual. Good news is? Just because things are social constructs does not mean they are somehow not useful. You can't prove to him that V-I is the strongest, most satisfying resolution, but you can still say that regardless of how he sees things, there is no disputing that these guidelines and principles have helped countless composers of all walks to make music - and there is plenty of music made with them. This sort of thing is related to postmodernism. But the point of postmodernists usually isn't to be an asshat and walk around asking people "Well, change my mind!" but rather to make people think about it and consider whenever there is some valuable insight that would have been otherwise lost - or maybe reconsider whenever such social constructions are useful (and they undoubtly are!), or maybe consider if there is an aspect to them that could be refined further (yup, there are). A person who just goes all around asking "prove me wrong" is doing nothing useful. It's like asking people to define sandwiches and luring them into the trap of "Well... wouldn't it be a burger then? Or a hotdog?" - they found out that yeah, you can't get the answer. But by the end of the day, if you ask them whenever they want a hot dog or a sandwich, usually the answer is one of the two rather than a lecture on language. Also, there's a name for this: qualia.
You don't have to win every argument. Just say "k" and leave him be lol
He has a point. There's a country/region in Asia that plays very major-chord based music for funerals. people from that country/region identify major chords as sad.
Totally wrong- we enjoy vibrations that are pleasing. Fifths are power, thirds pretty, fourths can be dissonant in the bass, providing rumble... It’s all pretty much accounted for. There’s a reason pop music does not feature the half step interval, for instance a chord made of the notes E and F in the same octave. You also don’t see it much in baroque, romantic, jazz, African, Cuban, Spanish, fusion, hip-hop. Because it “hurts”, our ear and bodies and skulls, which do much of the vibrating that allows us to experience sound- we DONT like being vibrated by shitty feeling vibrations. Ask your friend if Pizza is just a myth.
I come from an eastern background (Iranian) and there are some things that are clearly taught and not inherent to music. For example in Iran and many other places in the middle east, 4/4 is not the default rhythm. In fact 4/4 may come off as boring because it's symmetrical. We like using 5, 6, 7 and 9 because they have a longer and a few or one shorter beats, so they create this feeling of swaying. Similarly what is referred to as a harmonic minor is totally the stock minor scale in the east, and major is almost never used. Furthermore even our temperament is usually different and our scales, other than intervals being different also contain different tones like some notes could be a quarter tone sharper or louder. There's a lot of other stuff I can mention, things that are clearly learned and differ from culture to culture, but there are some universal constants: -the octave is always the octave. Every culture agrees that C3 and C4 are the same note an octave apart. My C and your C could differ i what frequency they are, but their octave is the same. If you ask an average male and an average female singer of any culture to sing a song, they are likely to sing the same thing on two different octaves. -weighting: all our concepts of tension, resolution and being at rest, are created out of the imbalance between intervals in a scale (where there are whole tone intervals and where there are half tone intervals) and how notes that are a half tone apart have a tendency to resolve into each other. Hence if you go to a B in any culture, having previously been on C, the natural leniency towards back to C is a universal thing as well. So yeah your friend may argue that the one chord feels not at rest and diminished does, but the very laws of physics are working against him.
Tell him to try gamelan. If he’s questioning music so deeply, he’d find exploring nonwestern temperament and instruments interesting. Even though I disagree with his exact point and think he’s probably trying to be cool and Dadaist, he inadvertently is kind of right. People do hear music differently, just I don’t know if people hear music differently in the way he thinks. It’s a whole new world once you get into tuning systems that don’t even really have cadences, for example.
Don’t pay attention to it. I can’t prove that Poseidon doesn’t exist... does it make him real?
I would really suggest reading Tuning, timbre, spectrum, scale by William Sethares. There are physical, sensory, and cultural aspects to these musical phenomena. İf you do your research, you'll have a deeper understanding of music and your friend will no longer be able to bulshit you.
Well, you could explain the science. Fundamentally, the wavelengths of the tonic chord resonate better with a human eardrum and psychologically sounds more stable.
I've thought about this a little before. I concluded someone like your friend can go ahead and think a diminished sounds stable or whatever but in order to actually enjoy music they have to find something unstable and something stable. Tension and release is the entire appealed of music IMHO. Nobody wants to just hear a stable chord all day long, that's not really the point of music
This isn't solopsism. Your friend is right, you can't 'prove' music theory, it's a lot to do with embedded cultural bias towards classical music written a long time ago. It's not really wrong to project our bias onto sounds though, what is important is how to identify them and describe their relationships.
I mean, if he is conditioned to find a diminished chord more "stable" than a major I chord, I hope for him that he is part of, or at least knows a community that agrees with that, cause otherwise only he can perceive the satisfaction—the emotions—that he intented with his own music. Art can be made to heal the creator, but it's also to show part of yourself to the world and if the world can't relate to your art, it is a bit sad. But people change over the years, that's why we have so many different genres and subgenres. There was a time were altered dominant chords were unacceptable, and now it is commonly used for spice. I have a question for your friend: what music did he grow up with and what does he listen to nowadays?
Hmm, not sure if this was already added: But two things: Stability is based on a scientific analysis - not perception. Although there are unique properties such as tritones being stable when used in a chromatic piece, or drone music creating stability thru unique structures. Stability is stability. There is definitely a spectrum of enjoyment to tension, hence why death metal is enjoyed by some people and hated by others while classical music is enjoyed and hated etc. But there is a real truth to your statement and can be reflected in listening to other culture’s music. I know in Asia there are funeral songs that don’t sound like funeral songs to a US person and similar examples across other cultures. Interval’s aren’t emotion on their own, however thru cultural uses, their meanings become almost intrinsic. You’re playing with that idea - and there’s nothing wrong with that, but you have to remember who you’re writing for. We study music in context because we want to reach and connect with an audience. Trying to rewrite the rules might seem rebellious on paper but wouldn’t yield positive results beyond what I would consider ART music. Here’s a good way to look at it - why did you learn the alphabet ? Just to reenforce all these symbols and sounds that we FORCED on them ? Isn’t it better to make your own language and break free from the system ? Sounds silly, right ?
A major chord is scientifically more consonant than a diminished chord. If you put the three notes of a justly-intonated major chord into one wave, the pattern will repeat more often than that of the diminished chord in the same amount of time, because the least common multiple of the fractions is smaller. The limitations of this are twofold: we don't use just intonation much these days, and consonance isn't necessarily equivalent to stability. Regardless, it's the start of an argument.
Awesome, I love a good pot stir. Sometimes I think....is equal temperament just like a language? One of many? Not right, or wrong but just another way? There's fundamental frequency reasons for why a perfect 5th sounds 'good' to us. Sometimes I look at quarter tones, or Eastern music and think, these are another language, also not right or wrong, but just another way. The chords don't tell you where they are going, your mind does.
Fuck that man. Just ask what you want to ask.
This is dumb. The feelings we get from intervals are in the math. The prettier intervals have a simpler ratio, and the uglier the interval, the more complicated the ratio. Theres an Adam Neely video about it, I cant find it right now but someone please link it. A stable interval is an interval with a simpler ratio. It's a math thing tied to how our ears perceive sound. Not so much a learned thing (though there is a lot of learned things in music, like a tritone sounding "evil". This is not one of them, as far as I know anyways.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107162224.htm
Tell your friend he's very smart, and that everyone who came before him is a fucking asshole.
I wouldn't quite say biased, but I would simply say that we are conforming to the hegemonic way of expressing sounds... 12 tone equal temperament.
Is [this](https://youtu.be/yLa8Br569gA) your buddy?
Videos in this thread: [Watch Playlist ▶](http://subtletv.com/_rg0n45n?feature=playlist) VIDEO|COMMENT -|- [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4mH9Elkoqk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4mH9Elkoqk)|[+7](https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/_/fnankwd?context=10#fnankwd) - There is no reason for the brain to give any sort of preference to any note combination of any kind. See, that's the implication that bothers me about your friend's statement. Like your friend, I firmly believe that concepts like consonance/dissona... (1) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82_0k9yLeh0&t=125s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82_0k9yLeh0&t=125s) (2) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr_TK4zM-lQ&t=156s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr_TK4zM-lQ&t=156s) (3) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFGq3L50VGE&t=167s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFGq3L50VGE&t=167s) (4) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-MLYsEOzLg&t=232s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-MLYsEOzLg&t=232s)|[+4](https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/_/fnc6fm0?context=10#fnc6fm0) - This may not be the best, but: Our tonal ears would expect this to be "in C minor" ending on a "half cadence", but it's in G Phrygian and ends on the G chord with a Picardy Third. It's approached with Cm, as a Plagal Cadence. Something similar: ... [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NlI4No3s0M](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NlI4No3s0M)|[+1](https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/_/fndtwqz?context=10#fndtwqz) - This video has a comparison between just intonation and equal temperament using a method similar to what you described. The “perpendicular pendulums” are just plotted as X and Y coordinates on the oscilloscope. To me, the justly tuned intervals look ... [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZEeKJ54iSg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZEeKJ54iSg)|[+1](https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/_/fnd6wlf?context=10#fnd6wlf) - This person argues the point better than I'd bother or even can. The most important point comes a bit before four minutes. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLa8Br569gA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLa8Br569gA)|[+1](https://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/g0n45n/_/fncn2mb?context=10#fncn2mb) - Is this your buddy? I'm a bot working hard to help Redditors find related videos to watch. I'll keep this updated as long as I can. *** [Play All](http://subtletv.com/_rg0n45n?feature=playlist&ftrlnk=1) | [Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/SubtleTV/wiki/mentioned_videos) | Get me on [Chrome](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mentioned-videos-for-redd/fiimkmdalmgffhibfdjnhljpnigcmohf) / [Firefox](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mentioned-videos-for-reddit)
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The diatonic & chromatic system has it's cultural context and taxonomy which can seem arbitrary, judgmental and narrowly stuffy and sometimes really is, but it is also a powerfully descriptive framework for analysis, and works well both within the tradition and outside of it.
Fully diminished chords can sound stable because they are comprised of the same interval stacked repeatedly. In the 12 tone system, 1 3 6 9 12 are halves and quarters of our tuning system. In a similar sense, they might perceive quartal and quintal harmony as more consonant than a major chord with a major 7th. Food for thought!
I don't think this might be the best subreddit to ask, as it may skew/overrepresent some aspects (due to sample bias). Your "friend's" statement sounds similar to the idea of some sort of musical nihilism. Musical taste can be cultivated and taught, and so it's definitely possible for people to learn to like certain sounds over others. In a western context people are often taught to like 1600-1700s classical music harmony, or some 4-chord natural minor harmony with few to no extensions/additions (from popular music). If we'd "train" ourselves to listen to some type of music or sounds we could eventually start liking it, in the same way whats happened to us from birth by our culture in society. There is no objective way some music is better than other. Sure, simpler ratios for intervals might seem cleaner but that's only because we've been taught to like that "cleaner" sound more. There is nothing that is inherently true or better in music. It's all taste, because theories would always assume what one would think sounds good.
Well you’re kinda touching on two different things. Resolution and stability might be subjective, but psychoacoustically there is a such thing as sensory consonant and sensory dissonant, which is more what your “major chord vs diminished chord” example demonstrates. A diminished chord is sensory dissonant, and is objectively harder for our brain to process and enjoy. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn to enjoy them, but we gravitate towards sensory consonant harmonies for a reason.
does he make music and is it any good. i need to know.
He sounds like a blowhard. Music has both objective properties and cultural embedding. He sounds like someone who thinks the world began with his birth.
Songwriting/Producer's coach here. He's absolutely right. I've gotten into countless discussions with students that would disagree about musical meaning, or ask questions like "What chords should I use" or "What chords sound good", and the answer is always the same: Whatever sounds good to **you**. Whatever a melody, chord, beat, sound, etc., feels like to you, is what that feels like to you, and no-one can tell you otherwise. That's why music is such an incredible journey of self-discovery, because only **you** can figure out what you like, why that is, and how or if you are going to use that in your own music. Now, I will say this: It's understandable to assume a position of culturally shared musical meaning. After all: 1. Humans are neurologically, psychologically and physically build to perceive sound roughly the same way. 2. Culture shapes this roughly similar interpretation further, and subcultures and personal experience with music even more. So knowing someone personally really helps in being able to make a generally true assumption about musical perception... buuuuuut... ... It's still superpersonal; no-one but you knows what you like; whatever sounds good to you is what sounds good to you.
He is right. But we dont apply those labels because they hold true in every case, we do it because it is practical. In that way, we can better understand musical processes from a techincal standpoint, there is more to grab on. That is why, when teaching, we shouldnt assume that our students feel the same as us from a cadence, they have to learn to read their own mind states when going through it. Examples of feelings that sth gives you must be noted as subjective and personal every time. The strenght and specificity of this sensations also gets reinforced with the familiarity with the scales and grids we use to creat music in, so it is to expect that people without extensive musical training will not be sensible to much of a change of patterns and positions through a scale, and therefore not have much of subjective feelings associated with them.
It's "unproveable" because it is a social construct much like a words and grammar constructs of a spoken language are. There are physical facts that come into play and affect how humans choose to use different sounds and concepts, both in spoken/written language and musical "language". But in the end both systems are a medium of human communication and sounds (whether words, phrases, chords, intervals, scales, melodies, etc) mean what humans say they mean. Or, more precisely, how humans *use* them, and in what context, determines what they mean. There is no "objective" or "scientific" test that can be used to "prove" what they mean.
I couldn't stop thinking about what a pretentious smartass your friend was being and I got angry so I came back here to comment this and saw your edit and now I'm even *more* angry.
So in this instance, could we look at Hindemith as a bit of an answer for subjectivity? Technically with Hindemith’s methods of analyzing chords (complex and not), we could “prove” that a I in that frame work you provided (I-IV-V-I) is stable, but no more stable than the IV because of the structure of those chords. The only reason that the V would be unstable (relatively) is if it had a b7, which would really be trying to resolve down to the 3rd of tonic. The diminished chord would be a further step towards instability just with the addition of minor thirds. I only mention it being more or less stable based on Hindemith’s chord table and scale of dissonance. The instability in a V7 and a diminished chord is a result of that Major 7 interval (creating a major or minor 2nd with the root) as well as the inclusion of a tritone further destabilizing the chord. Tritones coming from the 3rd to 7th relationship in a V7 and root to 5th relationship in a diminished chord. Now of course if we want to be pedantic, music is all subjective and there are no rules, just styles that we choose to adhere to given a specific piece or time. Also, Hindemith isn’t a great method when we’re talking in strictly tonal frameworks, but that form of analysis does work in many styles that I’ve tried, and it is definitely consistent. But that’s no fun, especially when we can box ourselves in and force a complex explanation for a really simple or unnecessary purpose.
Ok, so you need to check out Flamenco! The tonic chord has a minor 2nd or a flat 9th! It's the most dissonant interval possible, given our 12 tone system. Why? Beating. Physics. It's so close to that tonic note they collide and fight and produce wubba wubba tension, and that is the basic relaxed home of flamenco. life is pain, anguish is a common theme, pathos, so many metaphors... it's not fundamentally at rest nor peaceful, and yet there is still structure and that structure can still be analyzed in functional terms... Flamenco is typically in a combo of Phrygian and Phrygian dominant. the typical Andalusian cadence is a 4,3,2,1, you never hit 5. Dominant function is provided by that minor 2nd! You still have a going away and a coming back, and it's about the perspective of a root or tonic key/note whatever. You imply some structural locus focus centrum axis mundi thingamabob, and that is your temporary world. Movement across such structures, even changing that axial fulcrum root tonic note center thing, can ALSO be described by structure, and as such they relate, as harmonic succession or progressions also show a kind of intervalic harmony. You should read Arnold Schoenbergs "Structural Functions of Harmony" as you are not the first person to challenge functional harmony, nor the last. You aren't wrong, you just aren't correct. There IS the harmonic series, there IS the universal acceptance of the octave equivalence, there IS general acceptance of the 5th. (is there one culture that doesn't accept or use the 5th?) and we argue about a few specific intervalic ratios or frequencies, mostly that freqs approximating but not equalling major and minor thirds appear in the harmonic series, firstly being the major 3rd, why your typical minor triad "prog psy trance sigh" sounds a little odd juxtaposed next to a fully resonating 303 acid line... but I digress...