Pythagoras was wrong: There are no universal musical harmonies, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Pythagoras was wrong: There are no universal musical harmonies, study finds

phys.org

11 points_justinfunk6 comments

Woah woah, slow down there. Pythagoras applied his aesthetic desire for pure ratios to an idealized model for musical intervals. Funny enough, this ended up being the reason that the west discovered that such an approach does not scale (figuratively and literally). We literally call this delta between the ideal tuning and the limits of a fixed-pitch tuning a “Pythagorean comma”. This comma became the basis for a lot of tuning systems (meantone, etc) developed by the west. It’s only in the last hundred years that, in my opinion, forces of industrialization and mass production erased all such effort and replaced it with the boring compromise that is 12 tone equal temperament.

Other, far older, musical cultures took things in a different direction and ended up building systems on pure ratios that just become more complex in their relationships (Indian shruti, Turkish makam, etc).

This does not mean that Pythagorean ratios are irrelevant. They remain a great tool for analysis of universal human experience of music. The authors of this paper are literally doing just that.

Birds generate pure ratios in their songs. Smacking a metal anvil (as Pythagoras discovered) naturally generates pure ratios. They’re everywhere. If anything we need MORE of this understanding in Western music, which is missing out on some really tasty (low integer) intervals like 7/4, 8/5, 10/9, 7/5, many of which have naturally emerged in the West via genres like Blues.

I also recall reading there was a group of people where even the interval of an octave wasn't notable.

You mean Tsimane’ people?

My hypothesis is that they don't have preference toward harmonic intervals, because they are not able to hear them.

Similar to the fact that absolute pitch is more common in musicians. Just possessing necessary genes for perfect pitch is not enough. You also need to develop it at a young age, presumably through exposure to pitched sounds repetition.

The first paper you mention is this one: Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

The hypothesis that Tsimane people "are not able to hear them" is refuted in this paper: Perceptual fusion of musical notes by native Amazonians suggests universal representations of musical intervals https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16448-6

Thanks, I'll have a look

> The hypothesis that Tsimane people "are not able to hear them" is refuted in this paper

I have now read this paper and I cannot agree that it refutes this hypothesis. Testing for fusion/segregation concurrent sounds does not test, if a person is able to detect ratios of frequencies.

One big issue with methodology of this study is that they assumed that liking/disliking an interval translates to consonance/dissonance. In some contexts (like horror film for example or certain music genres) I like dissonance more that consonance, since it better fits the theme. Liking something is influenced by a variety of factors. Another example: people generally like pretty things, but many people will dislike things, if they look too pretty. Culture can also influence what is likable.

It's an interesting study, but IMO, more research is needed before we can reach any conclusions.

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