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Published online 13 June 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.883
Column: Muse
A sound theory?
A new theory suggests a natural basis for our preference for musical consonance. But does such a preference exist at all, wonders Philip Ball.
What was avant-garde yesterday is often blandly mainstream today. But this normalization doesn’t seem to have happened to experiments in atonalism in Western music.
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The neurophysiology definitely supports the notion that we can intrinsically distinguish small number frequency ratios that we call consonant, but whether or not this is heard as "pleasant," while more complex frequency combinations are "jarring," is demonstrably totally cultural. Ball brings up Javanese music, a great example. Gamelan musicians certainly know consonant intervals when they hear them...but to them they sound boring or even insipid. What is pleasing and rich are the complex melodic interactions (harmony is less of a feature of the music) that result from the interaction of sets of pitches over time, and layers of timbre. As a neuroscientist and musician who has been studying gamelan for 3 years, I've been fascinated in observing the shifts in my own perception of what sounds "good" and "bad" in a vastly different musical tradition. A piece that sounded almost dirge-like to my untrained ear is now tranquil, moving, and beautiful. We learn early, and can always relearn, how to hear music. The hammering dissonance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was so ugly it caused a riot at it's premier--within a few years (and today) it sounds propulsive and exciting, but beautifully so. The Beatles were meaningless noise to anyone over 30 in 1965, punk in 1975, hard rock in 1985, electronica in 1995. Granted, these genres are mostly changes in timbral and not harmonic features of music, but globally the analogy applies to tonal systems as well. What conveys meaning, emotion, and significance in musical sound is wholly malleable and purely cultural.
Dear Miko. As a neuroscientist and musician, could you perhaps shed some light on a few questions I have: 1. Two children in the same family are raised in the same general environment. Both are children of an accomplished musician. One of the children is able to hear a musical phrase, then repeat the phrase with the voice in perfect pitch. The other child finds it frustrating if not impossible to try the same thing. Why? 2. Does the child that comprehends and repeats the perfect pitch have the same standards for what constitutes a "pleasant" harmony as the other child? 3. Will the emotional reaction of each child to a particular passage of music be somewhat dependent on comprehension of the pitch?
Gary, If you really do mean perfect pitch - that this child has a precise memory for pitch - then this is an ability that a small but significant proportion of the population possesses that is, strange as it may seem, more or less independent of genuine musical ability (though it can sometimes be useful for musicians). But if you mean simply that the child can repeat a musical phrase accurately, retaining the correct pitch intervals, that's simply a good musical memory - which is actually potentially a more useful attribute in musical terms. However, the other child probably has no genuine musical deficit - most people without musical training don't remember musical phrases perfectly, but just recall the general contour of the melody. (It's only if the second child couldn't even approximate the melodic contour that there's a possibility of real tone deafness - but this is rarer than is commonly believed). The chances are that both children will soon enough assimilate the 'rules' that govern tonal melodies, and be able to distinguish notes that 'fit' with notes that don't - they've no doubt begun to do that already. The ability to do this doesn't depend on an ability to accurately sing music back on first hearing. I suspect that in this sense the children's responses to music may not be very different, although it sounds as though the first may have more innate affinity for making it. But most musical ability comes from training and practice, not from some mysterious gift. A great book for exploring these issues is John Sloboda's The Musical Mind (1985), as well as his follow-on volume Exploring the Musical Mind (2005).
Perfect pitch may have a genetic component, but it is clearly also environmental. In cultures with tonal languages, the incidence of perfect pitch is many times higher than in non-tonal linguistic environments. Presumably, children pay much more attention to pitch during language acquistion (http://www.aip.org/148th/deutsch.html). In the case of the two kids... perfect pitch occurs very rarely in our cultural context, so it would be much more surprising if they both had this ability than otherwise. How having perfect pitch affects the phenomenal/aesthetic aspects of hearing music is an interesting question, I don't know if anyone has looked at this. Perfect pitch seems a useful but ultimately unnecessary skill for being an accomplished musician or musicologist, as most people can learn to effortlessly identify relative pitches, which are what usually count in melody and harmony. That said, musical "geniuses" often have perfect pitch.