source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 24 Sep 1995 09:55:13 -0700 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: Tuning & Psychoacoustics - Post 1 of 25 --- The rules of Western harmony, to paraphrase Voltaire, are a lie commonly agreed upon. Ultimately, the music we choose to make is limited (or liberated) by our understanding of what our ears hear, and how. Over the course of more than a year various forum subscribers have treated us to a Mount Everest of misinformation about what the ear hears, how the brain interprets it, and how sounds change during the complex and surprising process we call listening. These fairy tales and "just so" stories about hearing and the ear are common currency. They are the misinformation about the ear/brain system that "everyone knows." And, like giant alligators in the sewers and detectives photographing an image of a murderer in a corpse's pupils, these tall tales never seem to go away. This post is the first of a series which will examine the evidence about what the ear actually hears and how. These posts will discuss some of the *facts* of the ear/brain system, as opposed to the fantasies and canards that "everyone knows are true." --- First, it's important to understand that some subscribers will react violently to this series of posts. Many composers, musicians and performers will angrily attempt to refute the facts listed here. These violent reactions will arise partly out of surprise, partly from an unwillingness to relinquish long-held beliefs, and partly because the facts of the ear/brain system are not yet widely known outside the realm of psychoacoustics and psychophysics. In fact, the majority of today's composers and music theorists exist in a blissful state of ignorance about the ear/brain system--a state similar to that which characterized clerics in the days when Galileo first pointed his telescope at the moon. Back then, "everyone knew" that the stars were fixed in Aristotle's crystal spheres; "everyone knew" that the moon and sun belonged to a celestial sphere unchanging and perfect; "everyone knew" that the planets rotated around the earth, and that no satellites circled (say) Jupiter or Saturn; "everyone knew" that Aristotle was the beginning and the end of all knowledge, and "everyone knew" that there remained only the tiniest crumbs of knowledge yet to be gleaned about a universe which was perfectly ordered, perfectly simple, and-- by and large--perfectly understood. --- When Galileo turned his lens to the moon and discovered that it had mountains, and when he observed satellites around Jupiter, and when he saw new stars in the sky, he was called, alternately, "ignorant," "a charlatan," "an imposter," "well- meaning but ignorant of Aristotle's teachings," "too stupid to properly interperet what he saw through his telescope," and so on. Many of the best-educated men and women of Galileo's time refused to look through his telescope at the sky, because they *knew* that his claims could not possibly be true. It's sadly easy to deduce that all of the above antics will be duplicated in the course of this or that subscriber's reaction to this series of posts. --- This sounds shocking. It is. In saying this, I assert that most musicians and composers today are ignorant of how the ear hears and how the brain interprets sound. More: I assert that they are not only ignorant, but actively and perversely misinformed. Lastly, I assert that much of this misinformation hampers the progress of music and interferes with our ability even to conceive new universes of harmony and melody. What we cannot perceive, we cannot explore; and when we cannot explore, we stagnate. Much of the myth and fantasy which fills musicians' heads is promulgated by so-called "modern" academia using so-called "modern" music theory textbooks (the content of which actually hails from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries). The next post will present some of the surprising characteristics of the ear/ brain system, and some recommendations for references. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 25 Sep 1995 01:56 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id QAA13589; Sun, 24 Sep 1995 16:56:38 -0700 Date: Sun, 24 Sep 1995 16:56:38 -0700 Message-Id: <950924235355_71670.2576_HHB53-1@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu