Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

>There is of course a questionable degree of dissonance that can be tolerated, but the most obvious fact is that the brain can well be conditioned to accept and even enjoy these dissonances, as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced.

I disagree. I have listened to a fair amount of music in just intonation, and I am capable of hearing the tuning flaws of 12 equal temperament, but I am still capable of enjoying dissonance, and of appreciating the artistic flexibility that those tuning flaws give you.

This article presents a very limited view of music. Just intonation does have artistic merit (check out the works of Harry Partch), but it's not the only valid form of music. The human brain doesn't count frequencies, and integer ratios are not fundamental to perception of consonance. They just happen to work well with a common class of timbres. But for other timbres, e.g. tuned percussion, other tuning systems can sound more consonant. You can even hear this in Western classical music: pianos are tuned with non-integer octaves to compensate for the inharmonicity of their strings. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning

William Sethares published a more general model of consonance perception that handles all these cases:

https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf

I previously posted about this on HN with some more background and references:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638307

I accidentally abandoned many of my preferences (likes/dislikes) and automated judgments. I took this newfound perspective into music, embodying the idea of "there are no wrong notes." I find deep joy in sitting at a 120+ year old pump organ, holding a mishmash of dissonant notes, including some out of tune ones, and wiggling one of the keys to learn to spot it in the mashup. It gives me a chance to witness the internalized feelings conditioned from classical musical training and listening to a ton of western music throughout my life, as well as to watch those feelings fade away into the joy.

We can learnjoy anything, which is why choosing to do anything without joy doesn't make sense to me anymore.

> I accidentally abandoned...

It sounds like you made a conscious and intentional decision. How does one drop their preconceived judgements by accident?

Psychedelics, perhaps?

I was aiming to abandon judgments of things and had no idea it meant how my body reacts to things would change, that I'd effectively disable disgust in myself, that country music would become rockin (and that I'd enjoy all other forms of music, food, smells, drinks, and people...children went from obnoxious to adorable in weeks).

The intention was to try something very broad that would likely cover moral judgments. I did make a conscious decision, but the side effects were for sure happy accidents.

+1 for Harry Parch. Here's a good introduction for new people [1]. I'd add in Lou Harrison [2] and Tristan Murail [3]

Lou Harrison was heavily influenced by Gamelan music, and Tristan Murail is one of the founders of spectralism, which uses spectrograms of individual instruments to build distinct harmonies by having orchestral instruments play the harmonic series as shown on the spectrogram. They stretch this idea even further by adding in "harmonics/overtones" that are not shown on the spectrogram to create dissonance.

[1] https://youtu.be/kCuYcS_Lcro?t=372

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7IwH01YFAI

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6WXzOIsBuQ

And Gerard Grisey.

Sethares and Tymoczko are the go-tos on this.

But there's a lot more to creating interesting musical structures than creating chords out of mathematical structures that are based on the harmonic series.

The more time I spend trying to understand music, the less I understand it.

That's what makes it so endlessly fascinating.

I've read quite a bit on this, but not Sethares, do you have a recommendation for starting on his work? thanks!

I'm not the parent, but I think they are referring to William Sethares' book "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale": https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781852337971

It's a fascinating take on how those concepts relate to each other. You can find some of the papers that were synthesized into that book on his web page: https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/pubs.html

I based my bachelor's graduation project on Setahres' work.

The one thing I wish we could find is the drum version of this. As in instead of starting from a string (which leads to harmonic series), start from a circular membrane (which leads to a very complicated mathematical result based on bessel functions ircc).

I like to think that in an alternate world, somebody wrote:

> There is of course a questionable degree of consonance that can be tolerated, but the most obvious fact is that the brain can well be conditioned to accept and even enjoy these consonances, as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced.

That's right. If you spend too much time eating sweet chocolate you might start enjoying something more savory, too.

I am learning to play Irish trad on Irish flute and I have learned some time ago that dissonance is a real tool that can be used to create certain kind of moods, especially in slow airs.

> as long as they are part of the only music it has ever experienced.

So noise music is only enjoyable if listened to from birth in isolation?

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