RE: [LAU] Re: That must suck. For me it's about beauty --musicisjustone path

On Wed, 2007-04-04 at 21:24 -0400, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote:

> "Particular patterns" were not chosen. They are a part of the fundamental
> physical properties of our environment. If you look at the harmonic overtone
> series the first 4 notes of harmonic overtones spell out a perfect major
> triad. Our cochleas are constructed so that concentric circles couple nerves
> which are corresponding to octave displacements. It took us however over 17
> centuries before we reached what we refer to as equal temperament and as a
> matter of fact it is a compromise between nature and our interest in 12
> arbitrarily assigned and tradition-imposed octave divisions.

excellent point about the ear, although its also worth noting the
frequency interval we call an octave has no mystery - its just a
doubling of the frequency. the ear is capable of rather non-linear FFT,
something i still find totally and utterly beautiful and wonderful.

however, i can't agree about equal temperament. other tuning systems are
not arbitrarily assigned, but are based on complex cultural and
technological ideas. ET is a compromise not between nature and older
ways of dividing up an octave, but between the simplicity of simpler
tuning systems and the desire to modulate between modes. if you don't
need to modulate between two or more modes, ET serves little purpose,
which is why many musical traditions have not adopted it or anything
like it. the essentially single mode music of northern africa and most
of the indian classical tradition, for example, has no need to shift
keys to provide signifiers - they have evolved melodic inventions to do
this instead. but here in the west, where we stopped paying attention to
rhythm and melody at about the same time that ET was emerging, and
started focusing on harmony, it was critically important to modulate
between modes to provide "meaning" to the music. if your work is based
on harmonic relationships between a set of tones, the possibilities for
a sense of motion, resolution, suspense and so forth get pretty limited
if you're stuck in one mode. ET made it possible to modulate more or
less equally well between many different modes, and thus allowed what we
broad-brush label as "classical" music to evolve. the fact that it was
almost all in either 3 or 4 time and has the level of melodic complexity
that 10 year could come up with is not relevant :)

ico - i know you know this. i'm just making sure that anyone who doesn't
gets infected by my misinformation :)

--p "returning you to our regularly programmed evening raga"

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Received on Thu Apr 5 08:15:02 2007