Folium: Dissonant Tones Sound Fine to People Not Raised in Western Music via ArsTechnica
Folium: Dissonant Tones Sound Fine to People Not Raised in Western Music via ArsTechnica
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Bobby McFerrin is an American jazz vocalist and conductor. A ten-time Grammy Award winner, he is known for his unique vocal techniques. In this article Cathleen tells us about his theory and how he tested it. Bobby went around to a variety of different audiences and tested a theory: the relationships between pitches is culturally universal. Bobby would demonstrate this while jumping around the stage as a musical instrument. The audience would guess what note would come next after playing dissonant tones. Bobby says that all people seem to experience them the notes the same way, regardless of where they’re from or whether they have musical training. His reasoning behind all of this? To find out how music perception determines how much of our perception is shaped by culture and how much by biology.
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The United States National Library of Medicine proves his theory correct suggesting that music, like language, is both a biological predisposition and culturally universal. While humans naturally process many of the psychophysical cues present in musical information, there is a great – and often culture-specific – diversity of musical practices differentiated in part by form, timbre, pitch, rhythm, and other structural elements. But many try to debate this theory stating that there are different musical traditions have different rules about which melodic and harmonic relationships are permissible.
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Music is present in every culture, but the degree to which it is shaped by biology remains debated. One widely discussed phenomenon is that some combinations of notes are perceived by Westerners as pleasant, or consonant, whereas others are perceived as unpleasant, or dissonant. The contrast between consonance and dissonance is central to Western music and its origins have fascinated scholars since the ancient Greeks. Scientists in contrast, have argued that consonance is a creation of Western musical. The issue has remained unresolved, partly because little is known about the extent of cross-cultural variation in consonance preferences. To begin with, the idea of a “key” or a “chord” is itself culturally specific. Western tonality is about 400 years old, and while it has had global dissemination and is widely understood as a musical system globally, there are other tonal and modal systems.
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Folium: Dissonant Tones Sound Fine to People Not Raised in Western Music via ArsTechnica
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“In Western music, certain harmonic combinations sound pleasant, or “consonant,” while “dissonant” combinations are unpleasant. Composers sometimes use dissonance (for example, in jazz or the Jaws theme tune) to create emotional, textural, or other artistic effects. The perception of consonance as pleasant and dissonance as unpleasant seems to hold true regardless of whether someone has musical training.” – ArsTechnica
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Across cultures, the diversity of music has shaped the lives of many, including those who live in the most secluded places in the Amazonian forest in Bolivia. Studies were done with the native Tsimane people to test whether or not they were predisposed to enjoying consonant or dissonant tones. In their native music of the Tsimanis, it primarily consists of no harmonic substance whatsoever and so when presented with western music, they preferred it the same as they did their own music. There still needs be more research conducted to really tell the cross-cultural differences that Bobby McFerrin strives to find.
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Julie Martin
LEAF Editor & Contributor
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