Music Theory
Beautiful music one the greatest achievement of humans. The sense of musical
beauty is elusive and does not require complexity or even great skill, although
beautiful music is more likely to occur when the composer and performers are
accomplished and devoted to their art.
Music describes a remarkable variety of human activities that involve making
sounds. Musical sounds convey meaning without the decoding required for language
sounds. Some musical phrases are copies or facsimiles of alarm cries, bird songs
or human shouts and cries that attract attention, signal danger and express
emotion. Bird songs are most easily identified with musical melodies and
composers have copied a bird song as a theme for a musical composition.
Music comes in all shapes and sizes. Some music is spontaneous and easy to
make. A folk singer may be quite charming, strumming simple chords on a guitar,
singing a plain song in a spontaneous and undisciplined manner. Other music
requires years of disciplined study and practice and involves complex concepts
and notation systems. Musical expression begins with and is usually associated
with body movement. Music begins with rhythm, repeated vocal sounds and stylized
body movements. Dance is an elaboration of gestures and body movements
associated with both performing and enjoying music. Children will spontaneously
dance and sing and raise their arms above their head and sway from side to side
creating a momentary ecstasy that is repeated at all ages and many difference
contexts from temples to discotheques.
 Musical instruments are variations on tools used for other purposes
and all you need to begin a music composition is your own voice and body
movements. If you strike two sticks together, you are beginning to play music.
Rhythm is essential to music and originates in nature before and aside from
musical sounds. A musical phrase obtains meaning when it finds a compatible
brain receptor and activates an emotional or behavior response. Humans respond
emotionally to music and experience a range of emotions from elation to despair.
I respond to beautiful music with tears. This a version of crying in response to
the sadness or joy expressed by the music; the intense emotional response also
feels like admiration and gratitude for the beauty of the composition and the
skill of the performers. I am most likely to cry when I hear a female singer who
expresses herself in a strong, clear voice with sincerity and passion.
Musical information consists of pitch, loudness, timbre, location, and
movement of the sound source. A combination of sounds of different pitches
produces harmony and a sequence of pitches becomes melody. Timbre describes the
harmonics in a sound that give it recognizable qualities. A range of timbres in
human voices provides for the sound identification of individuals. You can
identify who is talking from voice timbre and intonation, just as you can
identify a trumpet, an oboe or a violin. Formal music is assembled into
language-equivalent structures, suggesting phonemes, syntax and semantics.
Music performance involves many agreements about instrument design, pitch
assignment, the meaning of notation so that groups of people can produce
harmonious sounds with compatible rhythms. One musical agreement is about the
pitch interpretation of notes. The standard concert pitch, A, for example
denotes a sound with the principle frequency of 440 cycles per second. When an
orchestral assembles, each instrument is tuned to the standard pitch.
Other agreements determine the pitch meaning of other notes. The piano is the
reference instrument; its keyboard represents a standard for the pitch meaning
of each note. Scales are standard sequences of intervals that are used in
orchestral and popular music. The Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, determined that
if you divided a vibrating string in half, you would hear an octave at double
the fundamental vibration frequency. The octave interval sounds like the same
note is being played, but at a higher pitch. Since we hear intervals differently
as the pitch increases, a well-tempered tuning has been adopted that adjusts the
wave frequency difference of intervals, which decrease as the pitch increases.
While classical music written in Europe is appreciated as high art and
performed by skilled musicians, musical styles and forms in the 20th century
proliferated and incorporated sounds from all over the planet. At the same time
electronics advanced so that recorded music became the most popular way to
experience music. The science and technology of sound physics and the
neuroscience of sound perception advanced remarkably.
I have enjoyed many different expressions of this technology and continue to
learn about sound synthesis, instrument modeling, recording and editing sound.
All these activities inform about the way our brain processes sound. The main
distinction in the world of sound is between music which is intelligent and
pleasing and noise which is neither.
Humans have a strong tendency to bond to sounds early in life and prefer to
hear or sing simple songs they learned earlier. Popular songs can be repeated
throughout their life with the same strong feelings of identity and comfort.
Simple melodies have the greatest appeal and widest audience, because they are
easy to remember and resemble the simple phrases of ancient animal
communication. Songs, of course, combine words and music and are potent in
eliciting emotional responses. The combination of words and sounds reveals the
relationship between music and spoken language. Without music, religious
meetings would be boring and movies would be disappointing.
A singer communicates emotionally with the audience, using gesture to
emphasize the emotional values of a song. I must admit that singers who indulge
in exaggerated and strenuous gesturing and frantic dance often offend me. In
contrast, I am enchanted to hear and watch Andrea Bocelli, the blind and
eloquent Italian tenor. He stands motionless on the stage
with his eyes closed. Bocelli sings with a perfect composure that is consistent
with the mastery of his art. He is a Buddha.
Chanting is soothing to humans and group chanting can induce euphoria that
some humans call a “religious” or “mystical” or “spiritual” feeling. The
benefits of chanting are independent of the meaning of the words, although
meaning can enhance the experience of chanting. Words used in chants are simple
and often have a musical quality of their own. Repeating the same phrase rhythmically has a trance-inducing power. If you
combine chanting with dancing or just holding you arms in the air, swaying back
and forth, you become euphoric and feel bonded with others in your group. Music
induced trances work at Woodstock, folk concerts, rock concerts, support groups,
churches, all night voodoo dances and on camping trips, sitting around a camp
fire. The latest version of chanting is rap, a monotonous monologue accompanied
by rhythm that combines simple narratives and repeating phrases.
Musical sounds are processed in the temporal lobes in humans, especially in
the left planum temporale. Pitch recognition is a built-in talent that is not
uniformly inherited. Some humans are described as “tone deaf” when they cannot
identify or reproduce pitches they hear. Pitch like, color is a subjective
experience that correlates more or less with the wave frequency of the source.
Sounds have a fundamental frequency with timbral harmonics as multiples of the
fundamental. The same pitched note played on a trumpet and piano can be readily
identified even though the waveforms on an oscilloscope are quite different.
Bendor and Wang discovered neurons near the anterolateral border of the primary
auditory cortex in marmoset monkeys that respond to both pure tones, providing a
neural correlate for pitch constancy. They stated: “Pitch perception is critical
for identifying auditory objects, in music and speech. Pitch is the subjective
attribute of a sound's fundamental frequency (f0) determined by the temporal
regularity and average repetition rate of its waveform. Spectrally dissimilar
sounds can have the same pitch if they share a common f0.
Platel et al used PET scanning to study the cerebral activation of volunteers
performing 4 tasks: selective attention to pitch, timbre and rhythm and semantic
familiarity with tunes. They observed that the left hemisphere was more active
for familiarity, pitch and rhythm determination. The right hemisphere was more
active for the timbre task. The familiarity task activated the left inferior
frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. The pitch task activations were
observed in the left cuneus/precuneus. The rhythm task activated left inferior
Broca's area with extension into the neighboring insula, suggesting the
processing of sequential sounds similar to word recognition processing.
Stephen Gislason
- Persona Digital publishes a series of books on current topics in
music, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy. eBooks can be downloaded to any
destination on the planet.
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