Legend holds that ancient Greek philosopher and polymath Pythagoras discovered the laws of harmonics fundamental to much of Western music by listening to blacksmith apprentices at work. As the legend goes, by divine will, Pythagoras happened to pass a blacksmith shop, from which he heard a cacophony of hammering, some of which sounded beautiful. He decided to investigate and found that certain ratios of the weights of two hammers playing together formed the most beautiful sounds: Two-to-one created the harmony of the octave, three-to-two the major fifth, and four-to-three the perfect fourth. story Whether the legend is true or not, simple ratios between tones, known as harmonics, underlie the 12-note chromatic scale and most of the chords and melodies we hear on the radio and in concert halls in the Western world today. But outside of the West, some musical styles rely on very different voicings, patterns, and sequencing, many of which are considered “inharmonic,” which simply means they don’t obey the math of whole number ratios. Indian classical songs known as ragas, for example, are based on 72 different melodic scales with combinations of half tones that are often inharmonic.
And Javanese gamelan music tends to feature a harmonic instrument or voice in combination with an inharmonic melody played by a bonang, a collection of small gongs. The gamelan songs follow one of two unique musical scales, including the
, which divides the octave into five roughly equidistant notes. In recent decades, some studies suggest that how beautiful, or consonant, different kinds of tonal combinations sound to different listeners will be shaped by their personal cultural experiences with music. slendropublished last month, Peter Harrison at the University of Cambridge and colleagues found that perceptions of musical pleasantness may also vary significantly depending on the timbre—or tone quality—of the musical instrument playing it. For example, the timbre of a violin may be smooth or strident, depending on how the player pulls the bow across the strings. The timbre of a Gamelan bonang is often described as brassy or bright. The new study found that listeners from both the United States and Korea liked some chords and combinations of notes considered inharmonic when played by certain instruments, even when these combinations were unfamiliar. The results, they say, provide evidence that cultural variation in musical styles and scales may be driven in part by the properties of the musical instruments used by different cultures. research has suggested “If you change the instrument you’re playing your tones on, you can actually end up producing pleasant harmonies that have none of these special mathematical relationships that Pythagoras is talking about,” Harrison says. “You end up finding new patterns of pleasantness and unpleasantness.” Many percussion instruments, including bells and gongs, are always inharmonic, for example, because the way they are built results in overtones whose relationship with the underlying notes violates simple mathematical relationships.
You end up finding new patterns of pleasantness and unpleasantness.
But in a Nature study Harrison and his colleagues gathered online responses from 23 large behavioral studies involving 4,272 participants to assess different tones and chords. The participants rated the pleasantness of sound combinations and sometimes adjusted the tone to make it more appealing.
The data they collected provides a detailed understanding of musical harmony, addressing a long-standing paradox according to Harrison. Previous studies in psychoacoustics had suggested that the type of instrument played could impact the pleasantness of musical notes, but actual experiments with people had yielded inconclusive results. The new study took a further step by testing sounds between Western 12-tone scales and systematically adjusting the tone quality.
Imre Lahdelma, a postdoctoral researcher in music psychology at Durham University, who was not involved in the research, praised the study for its well-conducted approach and large sample size. He mentioned that it gives credibility to the conclusions drawn from the results.
, Lahdelma and colleagues had also described the importance of timbre to the perception of consonance.
The researchers not only discovered that the tone quality of an instrument impacts the perception of musical pleasantness, but they also found that study participants generally preferred slightly inharmonic tonal combinations, known as dissonance. This contrast between consonance and dissonance plays a significant role in the emotional experience of music according to Harrison. studyHarrison anticipates conducting further research to better comprehend how consonance and dissonance collaborate to influence music perception and appreciation, particularly in resolving unsettling musical phrases with satisfying harmonies. He emphasized the need to first understand the fundamental components before progressing further.
Lead image: untungsubagyo / Shutterstock
The tone quality of instruments like the violin or sitar can impact how dissonant music is perceived.
Lead image: untungsubagyo / Shutterstock
