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2024 02 Pythagoras Wrong Universal Musical Harmonies

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14 views5 pages

2024 02 Pythagoras Wrong Universal Musical Harmonies

Uploaded by

Arindam Chakraborty
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Pythagoras was wrong: There are no

universal musical harmonies, study finds

February 27 2024

Dyadic consonance for harmonic complex tones (Study 1A, N = 198


participants). Credit: Nature Communications (2024). DOI:
10.1038/s41467-024-45812-z

The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate

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our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings
challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater
experimentation with instruments from different cultures.

According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras,


'consonance'—a pleasant-sounding combination of notes—is produced
by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More
recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these
'integer ratios' are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and
deviation from them is thought to make music 'dissonant,' unpleasant
sounding.

But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the


Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two
key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.

Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that in normal


listening contexts, we do not actually prefer chords to be perfectly in
these mathematical ratios.

"We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection


because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us," said co-
author, Dr. Peter Harrison, from Cambridge's Faculty of Music and
Director of its Center for Music and Science.

The researchers also found that the role played by these mathematical
relationships disappears when you consider certain musical instruments
that are less familiar to Western musicians, audiences and scholars.
These instruments tend to be bells, gongs, types of xylophones and other
kinds of pitched percussion instruments. In particular, they studied the
'bonang,' an instrument from the Javanese gamelan built from a
collection of small gongs.

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"When we use instruments like the bonang, Pythagoras's special numbers
go out the window and we encounter entirely new patterns of consonance
and dissonance," Dr. Harrison said.

"The shape of some percussion instruments means that when you hit
them, and they resonate, their frequency components don't respect those
traditional mathematical relationships. That's when we find interesting
things happening."

"Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral


instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of
their shape and physics, are what we would call 'inharmonic.'"

The researchers created an online laboratory in which over 4,000 people


from the US and South Korea participated in 23 behavioral experiments.
Participants were played chords and invited to give each a numeric
pleasantness rating or to use a slider to adjust particular notes in a chord
to make it sound more pleasant. 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
judge whether they preferred them perfectly tuned, slightly sharp or
slightly flat.

The researchers were surprised to find a significant preference for slight


imperfection, or 'inharmonicity.' Other experiments explored harmony
perception with Western and non-Western musical instruments,
including the bonang.

Instinctive appreciation of new kinds of harmony

The researchers found that the bonang's consonances mapped neatly onto

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the particular musical scale used in the Indonesian culture from which it
comes. These consonances cannot be replicated on a Western piano, for
instance, because they would fall between the cracks of the scale
traditionally used.

"Our findings challenge the traditional idea that harmony can only be
one way, that chords have to reflect these mathematical relationships.
We show that there are many more kinds of harmony out there, and that
there are good reasons why other cultures developed them," Dr. Harrison
said.

Importantly, the study suggests that its participants—not trained


musicians and unfamiliar with Javanese music—were able to appreciate
the new consonances of the bonang's tones instinctively.

"Music creation is all about exploring the creative possibilities of a given


set of qualities, for example, finding out what kinds of melodies can you
play on a flute, or what kinds of sounds can you make with your mouth,"
Harrison said.

"Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can
unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively
appreciate, they don't need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of
experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has
been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures
that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can
help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy."

Exciting opportunities for musicians and producers

Dr. Harrison hopes that the research will encourage musicians to try out
unfamiliar instruments and see if they offer new harmonies and open up
new creative possibilities.

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"Quite a lot of pop music now tries to marry Western harmony with local
melodies from the Middle East, India, and other parts of the world. That
can be more or less successful, but one problem is that notes can sound
dissonant if you play them with Western instruments."

"Musicians and producers might be able to make that marriage work


better if they took account of our findings and considered changing the
'timbre,' the tone quality, by using specially chosen real or synthesized
instruments. Then they really might get the best of both worlds: harmony
and local scale systems."

Harrison and his collaborators are exploring different kinds of


instruments and follow-up studies to test a broader range of cultures. In
particular, they would like to gain insights from musicians who use
'inharmonic' instruments to understand whether they have internalized
different concepts of harmony to the Western participants in this study.

More information: Raja Marjieh et al, Timbral effects on consonance


disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins
for musical scales, Nature Communications (2024). DOI:
10.1038/s41467-024-45812-z

Provided by University of Cambridge

Citation: Pythagoras was wrong: There are no universal musical harmonies, study finds (2024,
February 27) retrieved 28 February 2024 from https://phys.org/news/2024-02-pythagoras-wrong-
universal-musical-harmonies.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private
study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is
provided for information purposes only.

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