source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 21 Oct 1995 17:04:40 -0700 Subject: McLaren & stretched intervals From: bf250@freenet.carleton.ca (John Sankey) Thanks, Brian McLaren, for a most impressive collection of well-annotated references. I suspect that, over the next few months, the NRC librarians will think I've never retired! However, as I read your posts, you consider that the preference of musicians for stretched intervals shows a failure of psychoacoustic theory. I disagree. "If music sounds dead, it isn't music" is a maxim that all musicians keep forefront in mind. We don't want our sounds to be dull=pure, so we deliberately skirt the edges of consonance at stases, and go beyond them at regular intervals to give our phrases shape. We are limited in our ability to do this with simultaneous intervals when we want a tonality to our sound, but even then can treat sequential intervals much more freely. Is not masking theory consistent with higher pitches sounding more prominent than lower, hence being preferable for this purpose? And, acceptable pitch change, not just consonance, is very dependent upon timbre and pitch as I hear it. The considerable variations in interval stretching that you cite may be more consistent than you believe. I am certain that musical language speaks to very different parts of our brain than consonance and tonality do, and it seems to me that psychoacousticians knowingly focus on the latter because it is obvious that the former is so much an artefact of learned culture and less productive of scientifically-describable results. Such a focus is not a failure - "theories of everything" are illusions (or delusions) even in high-energy physics, and ludicrous in the context of the complexity of living things. After all, our ears evolved to aid us in the complex job of survival, not so we could enjoy music! Musicians choose instruments, then audiences choose musicians. I consider the widespread assumption that trained musicians must be eliminated from psychoacoustic studies to be the opposite of the truth if results are to be applicable to real-life music. For example, musicians make bass sounds with far more harmonics in timbre than they select for treble sounds. I submit that a major reason for this is so that acceptable changes in pitch produce equivalent dissonance across the gamut of the instrument. Instruments that did not do this (and there are many) have been selected out of the repertoire by musicians' choice. This is a testable hypothesis (BTW, if this hasn't already been studied and anyone is interested in collaboration, email me) whereas the character of the desire for such dissonance is probably a much more elusive quantity. The preference of the musically naive for "boom boxes" stands in notable contrast. This might turn out to be solely because musicians concentrate on musical language more than on consonance - we do seem to keep very different areas of the brain active during listening than naive listeners. And, when considering pitch in ensembles, don't forget the role of competition. Everyone wants their sound to stand out from others but still sound professional. The perennial jockeying for leading pitch in ensembles arises from very different brain centers than those studied by psychoacousticians! -- John Sankey bf250@freenet.carleton.ca Music is Beauty, Beauty is Truth, Truth is Freedom Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 22 Oct 1995 16:43 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id HAA28370; Sun, 22 Oct 1995 07:42:36 -0700 Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 07:42:36 -0700 Message-Id: <9510220741.aa05395@cyber.cyber.net> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu