[HN Gopher] What Makes Music Sound Good? (2010) [pdf]
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What Makes Music Sound Good? (2010) [pdf]
Author : lopespm
Score : 41 points
Date : 2023-08-11 06:28 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu)
| cousin_it wrote:
| > _Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short
| distances from note to note. Large leaps sound inherently
| unmelodic._
|
| I wonder about this. Many folk musics have independently arrived
| at the pentatonic, and music in pentatonic is really quite jumpy.
| Listen to some jigs or reels and you'll be startled by how much
| the melody jumps around. In contrast, if you want to find very
| smooth melodic motion with long scale passages, approaches by
| semitone and so on, you'll find it much more in Bach than in folk
| or modern pop. So smooth melody might be more of a minority
| taste.
|
| Or consider the song Axel F. It's pretty much the perfect pop
| hook, all producers dream of creating something like it and all
| listeners can instantly latch onto it. Yet it consists mostly of
| jumps, including a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and an
| octave.
| codeulike wrote:
| I find this much more useful because it talks about _why_
| intervals like the octave and fifth sound 'right' and then
| explains how that influenced the evolution of the western scales
| (colloquially: why is the pattern of white/black keys on a piano
| that particular pattern?)
|
| https://eev.ee/blog/2016/09/15/music-theory-for-nerds/
|
| (posted to hn 7 years ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12528144 )
| scrozier wrote:
| As a musician and a computer scientist, I'm always interested
| when music stuff gets posted here. I looked this guy up; he's a
| bona fide composer, apparently. He looks at music in a very
| technical way that doesn't sound much (to me) like how musicians
| talk about music. He also says some wrong things. For example,
| "We cannot identify the interval between two notes just by
| listening." Um, yes, you bloody well can. In fact, "ear training"
| is a core skill in music theory education.
|
| And he counts rhythms starting with zero. If you did this with
| any group of musicians, they would shout you out of the room.
| Imagine Mick Jagger yelling, "Zero, one, two, three!"
|
| I'm not saying he doesn't have his reasons, but these sorts of
| things incline me to think he's not in the mainstream of musical
| culture. Which is fine, of course, but may be misleading to
| readers who think they're getting traditional musical
| information.
| DavidWoof wrote:
| > We cannot identify the interval between two notes just by
| listening
|
| He's being (purposely?)confusing here, but in context what he's
| saying is that you can't determine the _names_ of intervals
| just by listening: i.e., you can 't distinguish between an
| augmented fifth and a minor sixth just by listening to the two
| pitches.
|
| > If you did this with any group of musicians
|
| I think you mean any group of musicians in the modern western
| tradition. Not all traditions count the same way, or even treat
| numbers as a standard way of marking rhythm. I suspect that if
| you counted 1-2-3-4 to Sappho she'd just look at you funny and
| throw her lyre at you or something.
|
| I'd like to be gracious and assume the author is using this
| weird phrasing to emphasize this universality of his points,
| but I honestly suspect he's being purposely obscure to
| emphasize his professorship.
| bjourne wrote:
| > And he counts rhythms starting with zero. If you did this
| with any group of musicians, they would shout you out of the
| room. Imagine Mick Jagger yelling, "Zero, one, two, three!"
|
| Of course this makes way more sense because it drives home the
| connection between rhythm and modular arithmetic.
| pxc wrote:
| Probably better to use 'aught' than 'zero', so they can still
| be single-syllable.
| esafak wrote:
| He is a theorist:
| https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html
|
| See his work on orbifolds:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbifold#Music_theory
| benoliver999 wrote:
| I don't understand the interval thing. Anyone who knows what
| 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' sounds like knows what an octave
| sounds like, and anyone who has seen 'Star Wars' knows a
| perfect fifth.
|
| Does he mean two notes played at the same time?
| scrozier wrote:
| I think _maybe_ he meant that you can't tell that you heard a
| C and an F, only that you heard a perfect fourth. Even that's
| not 100% true: some people can tell. And it's certainly not
| what he said.
| superpope99 wrote:
| I believe what he is referring to is the idea that you
| can't tell the difference between eg. an "augmented second"
| and a "minor third". One is written e.g. C-D#, one C-Eb.
| I've always found the distinction between these two types
| of interval largely pointless - for exactly his reasoning.
| They sound the same.
|
| _Potentially_ they are useful in discussing theory in
| writing, _potentially_ they are relevant when tuning using
| non-equal temperament. But knowing this distinction doesn
| 't help you make music that sounds good. An ear trained
| pianist, for example, would not distinguish these two
| intervals, and I would argue that would not be a limiting
| factor to the quality of music they could produce.
| 21echoes wrote:
| the reason they are named differently and are notated
| differently is that they serve different functions.
| they're more or less homophones.
|
| or, perhaps to keep it within the artistic sphere,
| they're like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion and
| other "same color" illusions -- they are technically the
| same, but taken in context they signify different things.
|
| you would build different chords around them, you would
| play different melodies around them, etc. in other words,
| it's not just when writing them out in english that we
| treat those two intervals differently -- we treat them
| differently while using them during music
|
| you are, of course, correct that many very competent
| musicians would not correctly _name_ this distinction
| using the official theory terms. but that doesn 't mean
| that they don't understand the distinction when using
| them in musical contexts, or that the distinction is not
| meaningful. plenty of professionals are experts at
| something without being able to describe it perfectly in
| words
| DavidWoof wrote:
| This statement appears in the section on _naming_ intervals.
| Does "Greensleeves" start with a minor third or an augmented
| second?
|
| Strictly speaking, you can't actually know the name of the
| interval until you see the written notes, although obviously
| you can make some educated guesses based on the standard
| practice of the music style.
| scrozier wrote:
| I listened to his Rockdots on YouTube. Pretty interesting, and
| done well by the Third Coast Percussion Quartet.
| default-kramer wrote:
| > Strictly speaking, this system is defined only for notated
| music. We cannot identify the interval between two notes just
| by listening. However, there are a set of common conventions
| for notating music that typically make it possible to guess the
| correct letter-name interval, merely by listening.
|
| I think he means that when you hear a tritone you cannot say
| for sure whether it's an augmented fourth or a diminished fifth
| - the notation could technically be written either way. But
| usually, the "set of common conventions" that he mentions will
| make one "more correct" than the other.
| esafak wrote:
| The short version:
| https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/whatmakesmusicsoundgoo...
| diimdeep wrote:
| Even though one understands everything about what makes music
| sound good, this knowledge does not guarantee producing music
| that sounds good. (I looked at music produced by author of this
| pdf)
| jusujusu wrote:
| Also, music that sounds good isn't neccessarily good.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > Most Western instruments produce "harmonic" sounds that, when
| analyzed as Fourier described, have relatively strong lower
| overtones f, 2f, 3f, 4f. The overtones of several of these sounds
| will match when their fundamental frequencies are related by
| simple whole-number ratios.
|
| I've always had problems with existing consonance theories along
| these lines, probably out of ignorance. I believe that consonance
| probably has something to do with partial relationships. But it
| always has seemed the existing theory regarding consonance and
| partials is half baked at best.
|
| Harmonic sounds have partials at f, 2f, 3f, 4f, and so on. So
| let's take C and G, a perfect fifth. Will say f = C. So C's
| sawtooth has partials of
|
| f 2f 3f 4f 5f 6f ...
|
| G, at a perfect fifth, is 3/2 the frequency of C. So it has
| partials at
|
| 3/2f 3f 9/2f 6f 15/2f 9f 21/2f 12f ...
|
| The only overlaps are 3f, 6f, 9f, 12f. That's pretty thin gruel
| given how fast these partials drop of in amplitude (for a
| sawtooth, a partial at xf drops off as 1/x)
|
| Now consider E, a major 3 and also considered highly consonant.
| This is 5/4. So we have
|
| 5/4 5/2 15/4 5 25/4 15/2 35/4 10 ...
|
| That's an overlap of just 5, 10, ... with a super fast dropoff.
|
| Now consider Eb, a minor 3 and also consonant. This is, wait, Eb
| can't be approximated in rational values at all, um....
|
| And if you just have sine waves, rather than sawtooth or whatnot,
| they consist of a single partial so there's never any overlap --
| you're back to the pythagorean square 1.
| codeulike wrote:
| As well as overtones from an instrument, there are also
| combination tones that manifest in the cilia (tiny vibrating
| hairs) in our ears.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combination_tone ... So even if
| you play two pure sine waves with no overtones, say C and G,
| the cilia in your ears will still generate a bunch of other
| tones based on the relationships between the two notes, and I
| think a lot of the 'pleasing' nature of 'pairs of notes with
| simple frequency rations' (Octaves and Fifths etc) comes from
| that.
| tzs wrote:
| There is also interaction of different notes somewhere in the
| processing in the brain.
|
| On speakers play a sine wave in the left channel and a sine
| wave of a slightly different frequency in the right channel.
| You'll hear a beat frequency due to the actual physical
| interaction of the two waves in the air.
|
| Then do the same thing except using headphones with good
| isolation so each ear only hears one of the sine waves. You
| still hear a beat frequency even though the two waves are no
| longer interacting in their air.
| pcc wrote:
| With acoustic instruments, sympathetic resonance can play a big
| role in the overall colour, because eg unplayed undamped
| strings also respond according to their harmonic likeness to
| the presence of other excited frequencies.
|
| For example, on a piano if you undamp but don't sound one C, by
| setting the key down gently and holding it, then strike the C
| an octave below, the higher C will start ringing quite audibly
| and add its own partials, the same happens also of course to a
| lesser degree if you say undamp the G an octave + 5th above the
| C you're striking. This happens all the time during normal
| piano playing, because pianists purposefully hold long-duration
| keys down, and the sustain pedal keeps undamped the notes
| already played.
|
| It can also work in the "downward" direction for example on the
| violin where the open strings are E A D G with E the highest,
| the well known Vivaldi A minor concerto (eg Suzuki book 4)
| opens with shifting on that E string to eg 3rd position to play
| the A which is an octave higher than the open A string. To the
| extent you get this perfectly in tune, presuming a properly
| tuned violin of sufficient quality, the open A string ie an
| octave lower will start "ringing" as will the D below that to a
| lesser degree; and if you then subsequently damp those open
| strings, it changes the sound significantly. This "ringing"
| effect is quite important to violinists in developing their
| sense of tuning and calibrating exactly where to set their
| fingers.
| [deleted]
| dspig wrote:
| I think what's going on with consonance is that there is an
| implied lower pitch that all the partials are harmonics of -
| that also works when there are just sine waves.
| whiddershins wrote:
| It doesn't stop with are these partials the same as other
| partials on a different note.
|
| The ratio of the partials creates waves of differing complexity
| and periodicity.
|
| This makes the wave easier or harder to comprehend by the
| auditory system.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Another interesting aspect of this question is if you approach it
| from a human evolutionary perspective. The technical aspects of
| music are certainly interesting as well, but why have our brains
| been hard wired to respond to it?
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Music scientist Phillip Dorrell has argued for the existence of
| currently hypothetical "strong music," a class of musical stimuli
| presumably discoverable by strong AI.
|
| Any property, in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic
| stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist
| patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact
| on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. So
| through a really powerful search and optimization process that
| can more efficiently explore remote, undiscovered regions of
| music-space, we could get musical stimuli more intense than
| anything previously imagined.
|
| What these songs would sound like is the real mystery. Would they
| sound anything like the music we're familiar with? Would they
| lead to musical wireheading?
|
| It also seems a bad idea to measure musical goodness by, say, how
| many times humans will replay a certain audio file. If you use
| this measure, I don't think you'll end up with what you want at
| all.
| tempaway25755 wrote:
| sounds like the Colundi Sequence
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