The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the facility to control our appreciation of harmony, recent research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures.
In keeping with the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’ — a pleasant-sounding combination of notes — is produced by special relationships between easy numbers equivalent to 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to search out psychological explanations, but these ‘integer ratios’ are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is assumed to make music ‘dissonant’, unpleasant sounding.
But researchers from Cambridge University, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways wherein Pythagoras was improper.
Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that in normal listening contexts, we don’t actually prefer chords to be perfectly in these mathematical ratios.
“We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little bit imperfection because this offers life to the sounds, and that’s attractive to us,” said co-author, Dr Peter Harrison, from Cambridge University’s Faculty of Music and Director of its Centre for Music and Science.
The researchers also found that the role played by these mathematical relationships disappears whenever you consider certain musical instruments which can be less familiar to Western musicians, audiences and students. These instruments are likely to be bells, gongs, varieties of xylophones and other forms of pitched percussion instruments. Specifically, they studied the ‘bonang’, an instrument from the Javanese gamelan built from a set of small gongs.
“Once we use instruments just like the bonang, Pythagoras’s special numbers exit the window and we encounter entirely recent patterns of consonance and dissonance,” Dr Harrison said.
“The form of some percussion instruments signifies that whenever you hit them, and so they resonate, their frequency components don’t respect those traditional mathematical relationships. That is after we find interesting things happening.”
“Western research has focused a lot on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, due to their shape and physics, are what we’d call ‘inharmonic’.
The researchers created a web based laboratory wherein over 4,000 people from the US and South Korea participated in 23 behavioural experiments. Participants were played chords and invited to provide each a numeric pleasantness rating or to make use of a slider to regulate particular notes in a chord to make it sound more nice. The experiments produced over 235,000 human judgments.
The experiments explored musical chords from different perspectives. Some zoomed in on particular musical intervals and asked participants to guage whether or not they preferred them perfectly tuned, barely sharp or barely flat. The researchers were surprised to search out a major preference for slight imperfection, or ‘inharmonicity’. Other experiments explored harmony perception with Western and non-Western musical instruments, including the bonang.
Instinctive appreciation of latest sorts of harmony
The researchers found that the bonang’s consonances mapped neatly onto the actual musical scale utilized in the Indonesian culture from which it comes. These consonances can’t be replicated on a Western piano, as an example, because they’d fall between the cracks of the size traditionally used.
“Our findings challenge the normal concept that harmony can only be a technique, that chords must reflect these mathematical relationships. We show that there are a lot of more sorts of harmony on the market, and that there are good the explanation why other cultures developed them,” Dr Harrison said.
Importantly, the study suggests that its participants — not trained musicians and unfamiliar with Javanese music — were capable of appreciate the brand new consonances of the bonang’s tones instinctively.
“Music creation is all about exploring the creative possibilities of a given set of qualities, for instance, checking out what sorts of melodies are you able to play on a flute, or what sorts of sounds are you able to make together with your mouth,” Harrison said.
“Our findings suggest that for those who use different instruments, you’ll be able to unlock an entire recent harmonic language that individuals intuitively appreciate, they need not study it to understand it. A whole lot of experimental music within the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners since it involves highly abstract structures which can be hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours may also help stimulate recent music that listeners intuitively enjoy.”
Exciting opportunities for musicians and producers
Dr Harrison hopes that the research will encourage musicians to check out unfamiliar instruments and see in the event that they offer recent harmonies and open up recent creative possibilities.
“Quite numerous pop music now tries to marry Western harmony with local melodies from the Middle East, India, and other parts of the world. That may be kind of successful, but one problem is that notes can sound dissonant for those who play them with Western instruments.
“Musicians and producers might have the opportunity to make that marriage work higher in the event that they took account of our findings and thought of changing the ‘timbre’, the tone quality, through the use of specially chosen real or synthesised instruments. Then they really might get one of the best of each worlds: harmony and native scale systems.”
Harrison and his collaborators are exploring different sorts of instruments and follow-up studies to check a broader range of cultures. Specifically, they would love to achieve insights from musicians who use ‘inharmonic’ instruments to grasp whether or not they have internalised different concepts of harmony to the Western participants on this study.
