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."
so Plato was right, then (Score:2, Funny)
in b4 Fourier
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]
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I have to disagree. People don't like Arnold Schoenberg's "music" because it's just utter dogshit. Dissonance is coincidental.
Saying people don't like Arnold Schoenberg's "music" is disliked because its dissonant, is like saying being fucked up the ass by a gorilla then punched in the back of the head is disliked because people don't like being punched in the back of the head.
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I couldn't have said it better myself. And his paintings were also utter dogshit. But so were the works of many other modern and post-modern artists of his time and to follow. Such a pity that the Nazi's had to stick their nose into it and label it "degenerate art". Now I can't point at the emperor's new clothes and mock without being labeled a f*cking Nazi.
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Such a pity that the Nazi's
Nazi here, get rid of that fucking apostrophe. It makes you look like a moron.
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Actually Gorillas have a very tiny penis for their body size (~1.5 inches long) so as far as being forcibly fucked in the ass by an animal goes they certainly wouldn't be the worst possible option there.
I may be wrong. I am too afraid to search for it at work. But I believe humans have the largest for body size among apes.
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I'd mod this up if I could. It's not what you're doing, it's how you're doing it. Schoenberg is easy to pick on but something like Anton Webern is remarkably expressive and has wider appeal. I just saw some footage of a concert collaboration between Aphex Twin and Penderecki, it was remarkably high budget, very, very atonal, and it looks like the audience knew what they were going to see.
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People don't like Arnold Schoenberg's "music" because it's just utter dogshit.
You could, and "people" do, replace "Arnold Schoenberg" with nearly any composer, music genre, performing soloist or group. You need to understand the difference between your personal taste and that of others. De gustibus non disputandam.
What is not up for debate is whether Schoenberg was a brilliant and groundbreaking composer. As were, say, Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Tschaikowsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, *Bach,.. . And, for that matter, T. Monk, M. Jagger, E. Hagen, and J. Cash, to pic
Western music left Pythagoras behind circa Bach.. (Score:2)
Actually we had to abandon Pythagoras hundreds of years ago, because 'pure' consonance sounds bizarre to our modern ears:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament [wikipedia.org]
Modern chords+chromaticism that we take for granted did not exist before we had the mathematics and engineering to develop temperament, which, if you've ever tuned a piano before, you know introduces specific patterns of beats between intervals and offsets the pure ratios to allow for key changes, etc etc.
Off topic, likewise foreign scales a
Pythagoras strikes again... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or it's just two and a half millenia of enculturation for the heirs of Greek culture, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Yet another attempt by folks who assume their music is the music that nature itself demands to find a universal in the brain. They should take a world music class first to realize that what sounds great to one group of people sounds shit to another. I think, for example, of Gamelan tunings which are not harmonious in the sense of the overtones lining up, but sure sound right to folks in Indonesia. Or some ancient Japanese gagaku.
Why knock Schoenberg? It's pretty tame stuff anyway. Beautiful though.
Also -- the equally tempered scale is not at all harmonious. It's based on a equal division of the octave, which does not occur in the harmonic series. Far from it. Play a fifth on a piano -- it will be off by a substantial margin instead of being a harmonious 3:2 ration. But, since we are used to it, it still sounds pretty great. (Although I do prefer meantone tunings for a lot of music, they just can't play in many keys) It's a problem that the ancients knew about though. We call the disjunction between a stack of 12 fifths (at which point we are back to the starting note) a pythagorean comma after all... (256:242 -- quite a significant difference) That to say, in some sort of pure natural harmoniousness, all Western music fails, because it involves playing multiple notes at the same time (since the 8th-9th century when theories began to develop, notably in the scholica enchiriadis). Nature doesn't like that, because the harmonic series will clash, even on the second best interval, the fifth (3:2)
Note to all geeks -- tuning theory is very cool. It tracks the history of mathematics too.
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As you probably know, the Well Tempered Clavier is not equal tempered,
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You are right that the fifth isn't too bad on the piano. However, there are still a few beats. Compare a major triad with with thirds being perfect. (meantone) That's night and day with an equally tempered triad. There are a lot of "wow-wow-wow" beats. When people sing unaccompanied in a straight tone, they tend to eliminate those beats even after hearing equal temperament their entire lives. The beats in all "tempered" tunings are necessary to spread the problem out, so there isn't a terrible clash between
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Guitar and piano are usually both equal tempered, though pianos typically have a slightly stretched octave to compensate for the strings having harmonics that aren't exact integer multiples of the fundamental. (In other words, it's done to compensate for the physical limitations of the instrument, rather than to compensate for the mathematical limitations of the tuning system.)
One can, of course, tune a piano to just intonation. (My piano is currently tuned that way, partly because I wanted to hear what
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Distortion affects sometimes add dissonant and/or extra harmonics as a by-product.
Example: In baroque music, one often finds counterpoint, which is more or less multiple overlapping melodies. In the classical era (post-baroque) counterpoint is rarer. However, the texture of the single melody is "thicker", often with several different instruments contributing to the same melody.
Modern popular music seems to be gradu
Wrong summary title (Score:2)
And by the way the title of the cited paper is
The basis of musical consonance as revealed by congenital amusia
.
Like language, it's convention. (Score:2)
It's all associations. Associations with nature, associations from culture, associations we build from other music, etc. It's how our brain works, and how it's keyed to react to environmental events.
We can like fast driving beats because they match our excitement we've felt at other things. We can like slower rhythms for their likeness to intelligible patters we recognize in our lives. In general, the music just has to be present, and we'll generate the associations.
Dissonance just tends in our environm
But... (Score:2)
What if you *like* Schoenberg?
Re:But... (Score:4, Insightful)
The first step towards getting better is admitting you have a problem.
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He's not one of my favorite composers, but all composers use dissonance to some degree, and I like some who use a quite a bit of it: Prokofiev, Wagner, Stravinsky, Ligeti, et al.
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Yes, exactly. Where would Kubrick have been without Ligeti? :-) (Or Disney without Prokofiev and Stravinsky.)
The point I'm sidling up to is that although TFM may have identified some of the reasons why some people find dissonant music unpleasant, it doesn't explain at all why so many of us seek it out.
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Speaking of Schoenberg, try Blood Sweat and Tears' cover to the Stones "Sympathy for the Devil". It's not exactly 12 tone, but pretty close for jazz.
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Sorry, but... (Score:2)
Re:Sorry, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a number of problems with the study as presented in the abstract. But, I bet you didn't study amusia and how studying them may tease out additional information. That part is new, at least to me. Too bad you chose the "heard it before" line instead of pointing out obvious failures of the abstract.
People with amusia had no preference on the notes, and no "preference for harmonic over inharmonic tones". But they didn't appreciate the "beating" which is more predominant in dissonant notes.
If these are all true, they should have had some sense of the beating in the dissonance, and been able to at least detect with accuracy greater than chance dissonant notes. Or maybe the idea that beating and dissonance are related is incorrect.
And if there was no preference for harmonic tones with amusia, the study cannot exclude beating while including harmonicity as a foundation of musical preference. Being incapable of detecting both doesn't give any clue as to which is more important.
They have fallen back on the old psycho-acoustical models since the study failed to show anything at all. I didn't read they study, but if it shows something else, I'd dismiss the person who wrote the abstract. If anything, I would have concluded that beating is not the foundation of dissonance.
After all, a minor second can sound perfectly lovely as part of a Major 7th chord. I am thinking it has something to do with context, and I see no mention of context here. The entire reason for mentioning Schoenberg is that he wanted to take away the context that we relied on, and make us listen to the notes and the rhythms. A chord is no longer a chord, and it serves no function in a key, because there is no key. No leading tone, no major or minor, no context.
Given a lack of context, some people can enjoy the dissonance of Schoenberg because they expect a lack of context. Given context, the same sounds can be very jarring, even when heard by people who appreciate Schoenberg.
I agree it's horseshit, but at least I explained why.
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If these are all true, they should have had some sense of the beating in the dissonance, and been able to at least detect with accuracy greater than chance dissonant notes.
Unless the dissonant notes were played using pure tones and intervals wider than auditory filters, in which case dissonance can exist without beating, no?. I'm sure other methods might have be used as well to tease them apart, this is just what I'm thinking of without having immediate access to the article.
Or maybe the idea that beating and dissonance are related is incorrect.[...] if there was no preference for harmonic tones with amusia, the study cannot exclude beating while including harmonicity as a foundation of musical preference [...] If anything, I would have concluded that beating is not the foundation of dissonance.
I'm a little confused by your objections here. The authors' conclusion is exactly that the idea that beating and dissonance are (perceptually) related is incorrect, as you just stated. The study shows no
What's wrong with dissonance? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a musician. What used to be considered dissonant in the past is acceptable and even pleasant today to our ears. Try playing jazz to a medieval musician. And there are musical systems based on notes not present in the Western 12-note scale (e.g. Indian music, the 'blues' note). Culture plays a big part in our perception of music. Also, a minor second by itself sounds bad, but in the presence of more notes it sounds wonderful, for example a major 7th chord. It's all in the context. So what's the point?
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But if you think about it, it's like being in an elevator full of farts and occasionally getting a whiff of perfume.
I'm sure it's an acquired taste.
Hogwash (Score:2)
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Ratios (Score:2)
Something is missing in the summary, the 'yet' does not reveal a disagreement as the amusical listeners disliked the same intervals.
It should be noted that it's traditionally considered the ratio of the frequencies that causes dissonance, not the closeness of the notes. To be harmonious two notes need to have frequencies that come into sync quickly. So a sixth (5:3) is is actually less harmonious than the closer fifth (3:2).
It would be interesting to check the numbers from their theory on the frequencies
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So are you defining dissonance as the musical use of discordance within a piece? Insofar as discordance is natural they would be very linked but I agree a lot is learned. The authentic V-I cadence is almost naturally derived but there are plenty of cadences used in different styles and times, like IV-I, that give resolution almost by convention.
american bandstand theory (Score:2)
It's simple, really (Score:3)
Various tonalities are associated with the specific emotions that we find either enjoyable or displeasureable, and music provokes these emotions involuntarily.
As described in the summary, clashing tones create a vibration or beating (this is empirically known by anyone who tunes musical instruments by ear) and cause a sense of disresolution and unrest.
Yeah, a lot of modern music is just random, manufactured crap, but truely talented artists select their musical tones, both deliberately and subconsciously, to tie in very closely with the lyrics (if applicable) and the emotions they intent to provoke.
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.
Re:Consonance (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, there _is_ such a thing as perfect consonance in music, but _not_ on an instrument with restricted frequency generation!
If you sing, or play a flute, or a violin, you're able to generate a much larger range of frequencies than when you play a piano. That way, you can, and should, create 'perfect consonance'. Note that this is a lot harder than 'hitting the right key on the piano'! And if you get it wrong, the beatings get annoying very quickly.
I've been told that 'the only way to get two flautists to play together nicely is to shoot one of them'.
Evolutionary artifact in hearing vs vision? (Score:2)
Many predators see their prey based on movement, like cats. Perhaps dissonance in hearing is some evolutionary equivalent to this. The beating of wings, the trampling of feet, the clucking of the tongue of angry wives...
Satie, for example (Score:3)
It's funny, because I've always thought of Satie's use of the occasional dissonant notes as what makes the music "human". Check his Danses de Travers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x6nuiNN3JI) at 0:38, 0:52, 1:02, and so on and so forth... the dissonant elements are what breathe real life into an already impeccably beautiful piece.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing of music theory but know a lot of music.)
This was explained in 1911 (Score:2)
in the Theory of Harmony by (guess who)... Arnold Schoenberg, before he started experimenting with atonal composition.
I don't think it was a particularly new idea, even then.
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in the Theory of Harmony by (guess who)... Arnold Schoenberg, before he started experimenting with atonal composition.
I don't think it was a particularly new idea, even then.
I would be surprised if Helmholtz didn't mention it in his 1863 book On The Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. I don't have my copy handy right now, so I can't check for sure.
What, not why (Score:3)
As I understand it (from 'reading' the article very quickly), they are inching closer to knowing (scientifically, that is) *what* it is with unpleasant sounds that is unpleasant, not really why that is the case.
My best guess so far, having done several seconds of research into the matter, is that these sounds are commonly associated with 'alarm sounds' - things breaking, distress calls etc. Things that should make you afraid and run away from danger.
Harmonious sounds normally require things like voice control - they require a more relaxed environment, thus they are learned to be soothing.
Wish people would RTFA (Score:2)
This article is not claiming to know anything about consonance, if anything it's opening up the field to more questions.
It's comparing musical and amusical listeners to debunk the notion that constructive/destructive interference patterns (beats) are how we neurologically perceive consonance and dissonance. Nothing more. It's making no value judgements as to what consonance or dissonance is. If anything it goes out of its way to demonstrate how complex it is to make judgements regarding that. As others h
Critical band and other real explanations (Score:2)
The article features Diana Deutsch. I have her book from 1982, The Psychology of Music, and it has much deeper explanations, though they can be found in other sources too.
The fundamental idea here is the critical band, related to the spectral resolution limit of human hearing. Basically, if two tones are close enough, they are perceived as equal, and far enough, they are separate. However, there is a grey area where the ear cannot decide if the tones are the same or different. The usual explanation for d
Relevant Tune (Score:2)
Mr. Oizo - Pee Hurts [youtube.com]
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It could just be bad music, dissonant or not. Try Pat Metheny's Zero Tolerance For Silence. Parts 3 and 4 are the best ones (1 and 2 are a bit boring).
Re:News! people don't like music they don't like.. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's one part I find has some interest and the rest just sound like he's noodling idly while watching TV. My tracks aren't numbered properly so not sure which one it is. I wouldn't classify it as dissonant, though, not in the same sense as Schoenberg.
Musical taste is a moving target. Dissonance has somewhat been absorbed into our collective musical vocabulary. Witness the 'stab-scene' music from Psycho. We accept it has it's place and the mood it invokes, however audiences literally walked out of the initial microtonal performances.
Re:News! people don't like music they don't like.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not about music taste. "Zero Tolerance For Silence" speaks for itself by the title alone. You can describe it as a direct rebuttal of John Cage's 4â33â - and possibly evidence that Cage did not suffer tinnitus, and Metheny to some extent does. But that last bit is only as an example of what one might learn.
I have "Secret Story" (1992) among others. To know that he did this just 2 years later is just mind-boggling. When a coworker plays Pat Metheny, I don't know what song or album it is, or if he's a guest on someone else's recording, like with Anna Maria Jopek. I can instantly recognize the sound. Through headphones, which are tinny, or an iPhone played at low volume.
He had a certain mindset when recording this, especially since it is overdubbed so he had to do multiple takes. If he heard something on the first track he didn't like, he would have overdubbed. But he didn't.
To watch Metheny improvise is like watching a Rembrandt being painted, if you know about jazz. To some, maybe Van Gogh, to others maybe Dali is more appropriate. In the context of his career, this is like watching Rembrandt invent pointillism, and then abandon it. Even his characteristic sound isn't there. It is much like he decided to take something and dissect it, live, with everyone allowed to watch.
Certainly it is not the same as Schoenberg, since Schoenberg allowed an element of restriction into his music. In fact, if you take Schoenberg's idea of the tone-row, this is completely the opposite. I have not analyzed it to be sure, but I don't sense the rigor of that limiting factor.
Pat Metheny was playing to something he heard, or felt, as an affront to silence. You can appreciate it for what it is, without musical taste being involved. As a statement against silence, it certainly doesn't specify what it is for
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I've read various explanations for Zero Tolerance. The difficulty is that it is radically different from his body of work both before and after, even his attempts at free jazz. Possibly it makes sense in the reactionary theory of music but I don't think that's what he was trying to achieve. The problem is that, as a piece of music, it doesn't stand alone from it's artist's statement, much like a simple black square on a white canvas. I feel bad for saying it but it barely works as entertainment and only
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Such an excellent post, I'd mod you up if I could. I'd wager a heavy majority of music listeners do weigh what you mentioned, whether the music stands alone without the artists statement, whether they realize they are or not. I mostly prefer music that moves me simply through the sound, without understanding the message or the lyrics behind it, so the article makes perfect sense to me. Some others can't separate that from the philosophy and intellectual searching that can be associated with music, and th
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Anyone going to a zombie horror flick will hear dissonant music piped at them for an hour and a half at a time.
Also, true story. Go check out raves and you'll find it is not unusual to hear a lot of wildly dissonant synth pads and glissandos while people are jumping up and down and having a good time.
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.
Re:News! people don't like music they don't like.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It probably requires some getting used to, stretching the limits of what you listen to, to appreciate it.
Alternatively, you could just listen to stuff you like. It seems kind of backwards to go through effort just to make yourself like something, and then spend the time liking it with your new preferences?
If you're going to modify your preferences at all, why not modify them in a way that's actually useful, like making chores more enjoyable or something.
What would you think of someone who played World of Warcraft and decided he didn't like it, but make sure to play to level 20 anyway, just to make sure he got the full experience? Same idea.
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Problem is priorities, sir. People work through learning a sport and relationship struggles because they want something they can see further down the line. I listen to music to enjoy it and relax, unwind. Suffering through dissonant music when I'm trying to relax isn't my idea of enjoyment.
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your comment is wrong in too many levels. It's like deciding that you don't like sport because the first day you have pain in your muscles.
But it's a lot *more* like deciding you're not going to spend significant effort to *modify* your preferences, once you've *already* tried something, several times, and found it not to your liking.
Seriously dude, you probably don't have a large enough budget that you've exhausted all the things you like, and now have to create new things to like.
But even if that were the case, and you've indeed decided to go down the road of "I will hammer my preferences to go in a certain direction", it's unclear that the
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Alternatively, you could just listen to stuff you like. It seems kind of backwards to go through effort just to make yourself like something, and then spend the time liking it with your new preferences?
You learn to like it because of what it communicates. Pop music covers such a narrow range of human emotion, Beethoven was the great philosopher composer who wrote philosophy into music. Of course not all music is worth listening to, (I would say Schoenberg is not, he's incredibly boring once you understand him, he has nothing to say).
It can be an incredibly exciting experience to expand your taste, and then finally get it. Moreso than just staying where you are. And it opens new horizons of meaning and e
Re:Why mention Schoenberg? (Score:4, Interesting)
Over the last century, we have found he is right, as more and more music is dissonant enough to horribly irritate people of a hundred years ago (think heavy metal or a lot of Jazz music). As a result it is very likely people didn't like his music because it's boring (not because of dissonance), a theory I fully subscribe to.
Re:Why mention Schoenberg? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, he was only about half right. Used tastefully and in moderation, dissonance can create mood in ways that consonance cannot easily match. As with nearly all of the musical techniques that he argued were historically dissonant (with the exception of basic polyphony), however, used in excess, it sounds like crap.
IMO, the key to the tasteful use of dissonance is to make sure that the dissonance is not the focus. On the one extreme, you might have the subtle use of dissonant suspension and release in secondary parts of a complex orchestral work to set the mood. On the other extreme, you might have a highly dissonant piece of music used as the background sound behind a Civil War battle. In both cases, the listener is focused on something else, whether that something else is a traditional melodic line or a bunch of people shooting each other in a horrible, bloody battle.
Incidentally, most folks (statistically) don't like heavy metal, highly dissonant jazz, bebop, etc. even to this day. Those genres and subgenres all serve a useful purpose when it comes to expanding the musical universe, and over time, those experimental ideas will get incorporated into more mainstream music in much more subtle and toned-down ways, but that doesn't mean that most people will ever find the experimental music itself enjoyable to listen to.
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Dissonance can be percussive, it can connote tension, but it can also be a modulation as heard of a root note or sound. That modulation "beats" on the fundamental note, not so much damaging it, but giving it difficult to perceive pitch.
Silky textures of music are somewhat easy to make. The modulations aren't heard much in nature or in voice/vocals. When pronounced, dissonant modulation becomes punctuation, percussion.
Dissonance as modulation, and the "beating" discerned, can give character, or in contrast,
Re:Why mention Schoenberg? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most heavy metal is regular chords and melodies, played fast and hard on distorted guitars, with thrumming bass lines and staccato drums.
No dissonances there, strictly speaking.
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That's true of the basics. It depends on the sub-genre but a lot of metal uses dissonant intervals as part of the aggressive feel, like thumping on a piano. The common dissonant intervals - minor second, tritone, minor sixth and major seventh - are all used extensively (compared to pop and rock), and also as notes in riffs or roots of chord progressions (where the chord itself is still a harmonious fifth).
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The more noise (e.g. fuzz) on your instruments, the less fat chords you can use, because the overtones becomes a jumble. Conversely, women's choir sung plainly (and without vibrato, not classical or jazz style) can support really fat chords without even sounding dissonant, because it has so few overtones. We're probably biased to discern overtones typical of voices, too.
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Used tastefully and in moderation, dissonance can create mood in ways that consonance cannot easily match.
That's where the problem lies ...
How "moderate" is the moderation?
And how to make it "tasteful" without going overboard?
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That would not make him halfway right, because it was romantic composers believed before him. What they thought was that there was a (Hegel-style) historical law that led to ever greater dissonance in music. This was of course a self-fulfilling idea, since everyone wanted to make music that would be popular in the future - the more ahead of your time you are, the
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And he's absolutely right.
There's a big part of dissonance that has to do with acculturation. I don't hear any dissonance in LaMont Young's piano music, but other people say it's extremely dissonant. I think it's just harmonics based on a fundamental that is way subsonic, and Young's writings seem to suggest that's the case.
I don'
Re:Why mention Schoenberg? (Score:5, Insightful)
Strangely enough, I'm reading Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony right now. I recommend the opening chapter to everyone interested in this topic, because it's one of the most well-written rants in all of music theory.
What Schoenberg opposed was the idea, which he claimed to be prevalent among music theorists in the late 19th and early 20th century, that we could discover "laws of beauty" which could be applied to make beautiful art. Schoenberg argued that when you propose "rules" of making art (be it writing, drawing or music composition), those "rules" tend to be mostly exceptions. Moreover, these "rules" are almost always proposed by theorists, not art creators.
Now he may have been right about this view being common in the music theory community at the time. Today, we know better.
For a start, we now understand the role of culture.
We can only imagine what Palestrina sounded like to people brought up on Gregorian chant. Today, it still sounds beautiful, but it also sounds very old. We can't imagine what was in the minds of the people who rioted at the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Hell, most of us can't even imagine what the big deal was about Elvis Presley! Why did anyone think that old music was shocking and an affront to civilization?
And, of course, music theorists discovered traditions other than the European one, which sound odd to us, but normal to someone brought up in India or China or Indonesia or wherever the music comes from.
Secondly, we now understand that music theory, and the "rules" therein, are descriptive, not prescriptive. They are a language for understanding and talking about music in the tradition of the European common practice era.
In that sense, it's like category theory in mathematics or design patterns in software engineering. they're not recipes on how to write programs or do maths, they are a vocabulary for understanding, reasoning about and talking about programs or mathematical structure.
Schoenberg was a pioneer. Like all pioneers, he was wrong about quite a lot. But he did have a very good point to make, which in the modern context is moot.
Incidentally, in his book on counterpoint, Schoenberg also railed against modal tonality, judging it to be a poor imitation of the modern major and minor keys. If you haven't yet had your recommended daily intake of irony, you're welcome.
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Some thoughts (because I like to argue): it's been said that people wouldn't have been so scandalized by Elvis if it weren't for his dancing (pelvis gyrations and such). His stuff wasn't particularly more exciting than say, Chuck Barry. Musically Elvis fit right into the trend of his era.
Similarly, with rite of spring, a lot of the rage was directed at the choreography of the ballet, and it's likely that's why the fight started at the
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Similarly, it could be argued that the scandal over Elvis had quite a bit to do with him singing "negro music".
Radiolab did an episode a few years ago [radiolab.org] which told the story of The Rite of Spring but also a very interesting one about a guy who listened to a lot of Gregorian Chant and... well, I won't spoil it for you, but it's a very thought-provoking story.
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Strangely enough, I'm reading Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony right now. I recommend the opening chapter to everyone interested in this topic, because it's one of the most well-written rants in all of music theory.
What Schoenberg opposed was the idea, which he claimed to be prevalent among music theorists in the late 19th and early 20th century, that we could discover "laws of beauty" which could be applied to make beautiful art.
Well, yes and no. Schoenberg certainly admits that certain intervals are more pleasing than others, and that perception was based on how closely they conform to the harmonic series. (Which, to stay on-topic, happens to be exactly what the researchers in this study contend). Schoenberg's argument was that "consonant" and "dissonant" tones are not opposites, as the words imply, but differ only by a matter of degree--how far out the series you go.
We can't imagine what was in the minds of the people who rioted at the premiere of The Rite of Spring.
Most reports, other than Stravinsky's self-aggrandizing story
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You raise good points. Especially the last one; I realised after I posted that the book on counterpoint was indeed written later, and that he was allowed to change his mind, even if he was ultimately wrong about that.
Having said that, I get the impression that Schoenberg saw Bach-style chorale harmony exercises almost as a necessary evil, whereas he saw Palestrina-style strict counterpoint exercises as useful. Now I'm wondering if that was a change of mind, too.
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Schoenberg also lays out a theory of the development of the major scale based on "harmonicity" of overtones (as TFA puts it), in one of the first chapters of this book. He defines dissonance as combinations of tones which deviate from the natural pattern of overtones. This is interesting because it derives an aesthetic preference (consonance) from a natural phenomenon (the overtone series); this study appears to support his hypothesis. As the first commenter has already noted, this hypothesis goes back a
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European composers have known for a long time (I think Fux was the first music theorist to point it out in 1725) that a perfect fourth is more "dissonant" than a major sixth, even though the harmonic series would suggest otherwise. Similarly, this theory doesn't explain the near-ubiquity of the major pentatonic scale.
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music is dissonant enough to horribly irritate people of a hundred years ago (think heavy metal or a lot of Jazz music)
Heavy Metal tends to be noisy, but later Jazz has a special place in music in that it plays partially in the mind.
I once told a fellow learner, "when I'm playing this piece, my hand wants to naturally reach for this chord, but in jazz, it's just the opposite." He smiled and said, "ah, now you finally understand." It's only because I understood early 20th century Jazz (say ragtime into big
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Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg0mDyelSrA [youtube.com]
Love it.
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I like Boards of Canada (wherever did they disappear to anyway?), but to be honest I like Autechre [youtube.com] even more...
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He's full of himself. People will like what people will like. If they are doing something for pleasure and you play them something they don't like, they won't listen to it. It's like telling someone that if they eat shit long enough they'll like it, when there is steak potatoes and peas on the plate beside that. They'll tell you to fuck off and eat the steak potatoes and peas.
By now a lot of us have heard the Pachabelbel's Canon Rant [youtube.com] in one form or another [youtube.com] (this last one a complete rip of the first in my op
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I find it odd that you would suggest music like heavy metal and jazz, when dubstep better suits the bill.
I like to call dubstep "anti-music" because to me, it seems as though the musicians are intentionally trying to decouple the rhythm and melody. It's not just the sweeping, noisy sounds that annoy me, but the whole idea that there seem to be multiple tempos all fighting with each other. Now that is truly confusing music.
Dubstep has one tempo (Score:2)
I like to call dubstep "anti-music" because to me, it seems as though the musicians are intentionally trying to decouple the rhythm and melody. It's not just the sweeping, noisy sounds that annoy me, but the whole idea that there seem to be multiple tempos all fighting with each other.
Like reggae, dubstep is in 2/2 cut time. Its tempo has been described as 140 quarter notes or 70 half notes per minute. Sure, the bass's wobble frequency may at times sound decoupled from the piece's tempo, but look for the changes in pitch and wobble frequency; those tend to happen on the half note or the quarter note.
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In other words, he though harmony was just an arbitrary social convention.
Over the last century, he has been proven conclusively wrong: despite a century of institutional reverence for his ideas, even the most total classical music nuts listen to fifty times as much tonal music as twelve-tone. And in turn, the institutions going all-in on atonal theories has reduced all classical music to a tiny niche. Nice job, Schoenberg.
If that wasn't enough, you could look at ethnographic data. Every single music system
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And in turn, the institutions going all-in on atonal theories has reduced all classical music to a tiny niche.
No it hasn't, it's because classical musicians don't understand that music is about how you feel. Schoenberg's music isn't ugly, it's boring as hell.
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And then on the flip side of dissonance, you have Charles Ives, whose music often has a tonal center. In fact, quite often, it has three or four.
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And then on the flip side of dissonance, you have Charles Ives, whose music often has a tonal center. In fact, quite often, it has three or four.
And sometimes none. For example, see (well, hear) several of his piano studies.
I don't think you could describe Ives' music as the "flip side" of dissonance. A good deal of his music could in fact be considered dissonant, but just in a different way than the music of Schoenberg. (BTW, I greatly admire the music of both men.)
Obligatory Ives quote:
Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair.
- Charles Ives
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I cannot find any mention of him using text search on the whole article.
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So does cutting. Your point?
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I was actually talking about self-mutilation. Kids and stunted adults self-destruct in many, many ways, turning their heads into an echo chamber for garbage is one pillar of that, and that something is popular is no argument for anything -- much less that it merely exists. Was that any clearer?
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As I often say after tuning my horn, "Close enough for jazz."
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Could be a parallel headline. Seriously. Dissonance is like pepper. Pepper is an irritant, but done properly, is quite tasty.
This! Mod parent up.
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Agreed, I looked into 'cleaning up beating' in my dissertation and found that Sethares' book Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale had the design space pretty well covered.
IIRC the only suggestion I added was doctoring the sound spectrum to remove beating right where it occurs, which works regardless of the choice of scale and timbre.
For the current discussion, the takeaway from the book is that excessive beating/roughness, excessive dissonance, and perceived unpleasantness really are the same thing.
This explains
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So is dubstep...and as strange as that genre may sound to some, at least it has a beat by comparison.
Believe it or not, not all people measure music based on how much of a beat it has. In fact, I tend to find music "with a beat" dull, repetitive, and uninspiring.