Why Dissonant Music Sounds 'Wrong' 183
ananyo writes "Many people dislike the clashing dissonances of modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg. But what's our problem with dissonance? There has long been thought to be a physiological reason why at least some kinds of dissonance sound jarring. Two tones close in frequency interfere to produce 'beating': what we hear is just a single tone rising and falling in loudness. If the difference in frequency is within a certain range, rapid beats create a rattling sound called roughness. An aversion to roughness has seemed consistent with the common dislike of intervals such as minor seconds. Yet when cognitive neuroscientist Marion Cousineau of the University of Montreal in Quebec and her colleagues asked amusic subjects (who cannot distinguish between different musical tones) to rate the pleasantness of a whole series of intervals, they showed no distinctions between any of the intervals but disliked beating as much as people with normal hearing. Instead the researchers propose that harmonicity is the key (abstract). Notes contain many overtones — frequencies that are whole-number multiples of the basic frequency in the note. For consonant 'pleasant sounding' intervals the overtones of the two notes tend to coincide as whole-number multiples, whereas for dissonant intervals this is no longer the case. The work suggests that harmonicity is more important than beating for dissonance aversion in normal hearers."
Re:so Plato was right, then (Score:5, Informative)
Pythagoras. I first learned this lesson from a book by Harry Parth, but this works:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit3/unit3.html [dartmouth.edu]
Re:so Plato was right, then (Score:5, Informative)
typo, sorry, that is Harry Partch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch [wikipedia.org]
Re:News! people don't like music they don't like.. (Score:5, Informative)
Did you listen to Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night)? It's one of his best known pieces and it's not the most dissonant or atonal (not the same thing). It probably requires some getting used to, stretching the limits of what you listen to, to appreciate it.
Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" was so jarring to the audience when it was first played that they rioted. Now it is a staple of symphony programs, though still a challenge to play.
Consonance (Score:3, Informative)
It's perhaps not obvious but there is no such thing as perfect consonance in music:
- Tone C3 is an exact second harmonic of C2 and a fourth harmonic of C1. That's why the sound so nice together.
- Tone G2 is a third harmonic of C1, but (surprise) not an exact one. That's because if you take 13 third harmonics (C G D A E B F# C# G# D# A# F C') you are supposed to arrive at the same tone. But you don't, there is a slight frequency offset. In practice, this offset is distributed among all 13 intervals so we are generally unable to notice it.
- The fifth harmonic tone (C1 -> E3') is also inexact. It is fairly close to the sound (here E) obtained from the scale above but again there is a slight frequency offset.
- The sixth harmonic (C1 -> G3) is 2*3 times the fundamental frequency, so is as (in)exact as the third harmonic.
- The seventh harmonic (C1 -> ~A#3, noticeably lower) is not on the (twelve tone) scale but it still sounds nice.
- The eight harmonic is exact (2*2*2, C1 -> C4). And so on...
The twelve tone scale is a rather clever invention, it manages to approximate a rather large number of harmonics with a small number of tones. But it is still only an approximation - a perfect consonance can only be obtained for octaves.