Can Someone Explain The Power of Vocal Harmony?
- Thread starter Dubversion
- Start date
souljacker
innit
Spion said:
yes, and hence, we have the power of vocal harmony!
May Kasahara
take me to the feeling
Maybe we should start an Urban choir 
i've always wanted to form a secular gospel choir. And I don't mean the Polyfuckingphonic Twee
I suspect it's biological/psychological quirk, succeptible to no further level of determinate causal explanation. That's just how you're setup.Dubversion said:
Which leads to the upsetting thought that aesthetic appreciation is fairly arbitary in the grand scheme of things.
May Kasahara
take me to the feeling
Idaho said:
GarfieldLeChat
fucking awesome but wrong
it's to do with timbre in essence in tune voices in harmony give greater depths to the note being sung like graphic eq for voices which makes it sound great as it's a more full rounded sound.
that and this
from here which is the easiest non musicality explaintion i have found...
http://www.oursounduniverse.com/faqs.html#touch-us-proven
that and this
from here which is the easiest non musicality explaintion i have found...
http://www.oursounduniverse.com/faqs.html#touch-us-proven
Spion
I hear ya
have a fackin read about itnosos said:
http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/H/how_music_works/
polui's doing work on psychacoustics at the moment I think . . . I wonder if he'll happen upon this thread . . .
(I know fuck all about harmony, I like creating it, changing it being a part of it and feeling it though)
(I know fuck all about harmony, I like creating it, changing it being a part of it and feeling it though)
Dubversion said:
its something that cant be taught, it either is or it isnt...a lot of the sort youre talking about too, lots of these types are related to each other (blood relatives) i mean....i think that has something to do with some of the more 'makes you go whooooooooooooooaaah' harmonies, cause they sound so similar a lot of the time but with different ranges....its a very family oriented genre in a lot of instances, if that makes any sense at all
Some of the stuff posted is a bit ethnocentric IMO. I mean 'bass' is not a generally recognised essential feature of music as a whole at all. Counterpoint has a lowest line, but it's not a 'bass' as such - I reckon you could argue that true bass doesn't arrive until figured bass, Rousseau's treatise on harmony etc.
I reckon music is an emergent phenomenon of other kinds of mental activity, including the warning/affective cries and gestural communication that precede speech in out primate ancestors, the necessity of auditory streaming of an environment (an amazing feat, given that it's all constructed purely out of a single point of pressure variation within the ear), the illusory construction of a single present moment out of the integration of various concurrent perceptual streams, and other random abilities like what I would call the timbral sense - i.e. the knowledge of what kind of thing would make a noise like that (there's a survival advantage in knowing if the thing crashing through the trees is a gazelle or a rhino, and knocking on metal never sounds like knocking on wood).
Mixed in with that you have the added complications of acoustics per se (reflection, absorbtion etc), psychoacoustics (like the 'beating' that you hear when two notes are close together in pitch, which doesn't exist in the outside world but is a product of your brain integrating iinformation from two ears facing in opposite directions). Psychoacoustics is what gives you 'notes' in the first place - apart from pure sine tones all notes are made up of a variety of frequencies, and if you bang on a relatively untuned saucepan you can hear the apparent pitch change as your brain tries to get a single (or multiple) note 'lock' on an essentially unrelated set of overlayed sinusoids. The subsidiary tones in a complex tone also give rise to formants etc, which are essential to voice timbral recognition. This is a huge topic and still not well understood, although there are a few folks on here who are working on the problem (I'll let them 'out' themselves if they want to).
Then you have the higher-order enculturated stuff - like the categorical perception of scale steps (octaves are fairly ubiquitous, but the rest of the scale is learned to a large extent) and topical association (the real basis of musical affect), which is also essentially arbitrary in a semiotic way. For example, death music is slow and sombre in many cultures, but fast and ever-increasingly frenzied in others. Carl Dalhaus complained that the lydian fourth (I think - don't quote me!) was used in the 19th century as an exoticist topic, a historicist one, a religious indication etc etc - which one was approriate being indicated by the surrounding circumstances - like the title of the piece!
I could blether on for hours but I have to do some work. <sigh>
I reckon music is an emergent phenomenon of other kinds of mental activity, including the warning/affective cries and gestural communication that precede speech in out primate ancestors, the necessity of auditory streaming of an environment (an amazing feat, given that it's all constructed purely out of a single point of pressure variation within the ear), the illusory construction of a single present moment out of the integration of various concurrent perceptual streams, and other random abilities like what I would call the timbral sense - i.e. the knowledge of what kind of thing would make a noise like that (there's a survival advantage in knowing if the thing crashing through the trees is a gazelle or a rhino, and knocking on metal never sounds like knocking on wood).
Mixed in with that you have the added complications of acoustics per se (reflection, absorbtion etc), psychoacoustics (like the 'beating' that you hear when two notes are close together in pitch, which doesn't exist in the outside world but is a product of your brain integrating iinformation from two ears facing in opposite directions). Psychoacoustics is what gives you 'notes' in the first place - apart from pure sine tones all notes are made up of a variety of frequencies, and if you bang on a relatively untuned saucepan you can hear the apparent pitch change as your brain tries to get a single (or multiple) note 'lock' on an essentially unrelated set of overlayed sinusoids. The subsidiary tones in a complex tone also give rise to formants etc, which are essential to voice timbral recognition. This is a huge topic and still not well understood, although there are a few folks on here who are working on the problem (I'll let them 'out' themselves if they want to).
Then you have the higher-order enculturated stuff - like the categorical perception of scale steps (octaves are fairly ubiquitous, but the rest of the scale is learned to a large extent) and topical association (the real basis of musical affect), which is also essentially arbitrary in a semiotic way. For example, death music is slow and sombre in many cultures, but fast and ever-increasingly frenzied in others. Carl Dalhaus complained that the lydian fourth (I think - don't quote me!) was used in the 19th century as an exoticist topic, a historicist one, a religious indication etc etc - which one was approriate being indicated by the surrounding circumstances - like the title of the piece!
I could blether on for hours but I have to do some work. <sigh>
There's a fascinating problem that the Greeks discovered with tunings based on pure consonances - that they don't add up! Equal temperament is a pretty recent solution to this (Bach was showing off a bit with the Well-tempered Clavier - the 48 preludes and fugues - because formerly it would have been very difficult to play something in every key on the same instrument). Look up the 'pythagorean gap' or similar if you're interested.
beesonthewhatnow
going deaf for a living
I've got a fairly reasonable knowledge of the technical ins and outs of music theory/acoustics, so I know how these things are created, how they interact etc etc.
As to why they work in the way they do - do you know what? I don't want to know. There are some things in life I'm just happy to accept that simply, well, just are.
Music IMHO is possibly the single greatest thing humans have ever produced or can experience, and I'm quite happy for it to retain a certain degree of mystery, it's about the one thing on earth that would sadden me if reduced to a simple* formula.
*or more likely, not so simple
As to why they work in the way they do - do you know what? I don't want to know. There are some things in life I'm just happy to accept that simply, well, just are.
Music IMHO is possibly the single greatest thing humans have ever produced or can experience, and I'm quite happy for it to retain a certain degree of mystery, it's about the one thing on earth that would sadden me if reduced to a simple* formula.
*or more likely, not so simple
beesonthewhatnow said:There are some things in life I'm just happy to accept that simply, well, just are.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Spion said:
I missed most of those and was GUTTED about it - are they aroundon public torrents or private type stuff only?
Oh, and for me medieval plainsong always makes me shiver and feel all 'spiritual'...
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Sweet.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
beesonthewhatnow said:I've got a fairly reasonable knowledge of the technical ins and outs of music theory/acoustics, so I know how these things are created, how they interact etc etc.
As to why they work in the way they do - do you know what? I don't want to know. There are some things in life I'm just happy to accept that simply, well, just are.
Music IMHO is possibly the single greatest thing humans have ever produced or can experience, and I'm quite happy for it to retain a certain degree of mystery, it's about the one thing on earth that would sadden me if reduced to a simple* formula.
*or more likely, not so simple
Well in some ways it has - there are well known (and known for a few centuries now) harmonies, certain types of tune structure etc that will always get an emotional reaction from the listener - the KLFs 'How to have a no.1 hit record' and SAW in the 80s are both examples of it (and even if you hated 99% of their output, there's probably at least one of their tunes that will make you smile, get your foot tapping etc). As you get further into more obscure Euroclassical much of it becomes spectaculary samey - partly because every Hans, Friedrich and Pyotr wanted to be the next Bach/Mozart/Beethoven (which also shows that very little changes when it comes to music), but also because if you want to tell a story in music that has a happy bit, a sad bit, a happy and sad bit and finally a rapturously happy/suicidally sad ending unless you're really talented there are constraining rules of how you can musically 'talk' to people's feelings.
Or something. Top posts BTW fruits
Macabre
digiratti
He's done another doc you'll like Dub http://www.mininova.org/tor/624155
E2A: The only public torrent of this I can find is this one http://www.mininova.org/tor/816819 but its got a bad tracker, or something. Anyone else found it?
E2A: The only public torrent of this I can find is this one http://www.mininova.org/tor/816819 but its got a bad tracker, or something. Anyone else found it?
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