[-empyre-] [extreme] voice root of 12-tone scale? (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

And a question - could someone give a definition of microsound in terms of
length - i.e. in reference to the 'molecular'? Does this imply an atomic?

I'm also interested because I play a number of instruments, and one of the
things I've been involved with is speed - the faster the notes, the
greater the 'noise' (i.e. sound of keypads, etc.) ratio.

- Alan


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 16:24:33 -0400
From: Tom Ritchford <tom@swirly.com>
Reply-To: extreme@topica.com
To: extreme@topica.com
Subject: [extreme] voice root of 12-tone scale?

To: "forteana" <forteana@yahoogroups.com>
From: "Rachel Carthy" <rachel@rofocale.fsnet.co.uk>

<http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994031>

Musical roots may lie in human voice
13:28 06 August 03

Key universal features in world music may have their roots in the
ever-present sound of the human voice during the course of evolution,
suggests a new study.

The analysis of thousands of recorded speech samples found peaks in
acoustic energy that precisely mirror the distances between important
notes in the twelve-tone scale, the system that forms the foundation of
almost all music.

"The mysteries of music have a biologically principled explanation,"
says Dale Purves, at Duke University, North Carolina, and lead author of
the study. "A reasonable speculation is that we hear these tonal
relationships because they are involved in our interpretation of each
other's speech."

As a slide whistle shows, it is possible to change seamlessly the pitch
of a sound from low to high and back again. But for making music, human
cultures have sliced the pitch dimension into twelve distinct tones.

This twelve-tone "chromatic scale" can be heard by starting at any piano
key and then playing the next dozen white and black keys in succession.
On the thirteenth note, the scale begins again, one octave higher.

Pythagoras's theorem

Different musical traditions have characteristic sound because many
cultures have devised scales from a subset of the full chromatic scale,
with different distances, or "intervals," between the tones. Chinese
music is based on five-tone scales, while scales common in Western music
have seven tones.

But all cultures favour certain intervals from the chromatic scale, and
listeners judge these same intervals to create the most harmonious
combinations of two tones. Pythagoras proposed that such preferences
could be predicted from mathematical relationships between tones, but
these approaches have yet to provide a complete explanation.

The Duke researchers randomly extracted over 100,000 speech samples,
each 0.1 second long, from recordings of thousands of English sentences.
Acoustic analysis of the combined samples revealed 10 frequency peaks
that match the most significant intervals used in musical scales
worldwide.

Mandarin and Farsi

Moreover, the relative heights of the peaks backed numerous studies in
which listeners ranked the harmoniousness of intervals. Speech in other
languages - Mandarin, Farsi, and Tamil - also displayed the same
pattern.

The frequency peaks are caused when a sound wave from the vocal cords is
shaped by resonances of the throat and oral cavity. The researchers say
that, aside from animal calls, speech emanating from oscillations of the
human vocal cords is virtually the only natural sound that we hear as
tones.

This fact, combined with the new finding that preferred musical
intervals are better predicted by the acoustic quirks of the human vocal
tract than by mathematics, leads the scientists to argue that the
structure of music is rooted in our long exposure to the human voice
over evolutionary time.

Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience (vol 23, p 7160)


Peter Farley






------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for Your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark
Printer at Myinks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US &
Canada. http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511
http://us.click.yahoo.com/l.m7sD/LIdGAA/qnsNAA/7gSolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
forteana-unsubscribe@egroups.com



Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
-- 

http://loopNY.com ......................An "open loop": shows every Saturday!
http://extremeNY.com/calendar .................................. the calendar.
http://extremeNY.com/submit .......................... submit to the calendar.

-------------------------

-----------------------------

extreme NY calendar: <http://extremeNY.com/calendar>
extreme NY radio:    <http://extremeNY.com/radio>

unsubscribe:         extreme-unsubscribe@topica.com
extreme calendar:    extremeNY-subscribe@topica.com

--^----------------------------------------------------------------
This email was sent to: sondheim@panix.com

EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?aaP7Si.bVXjTc.c29uZGhl
Or send an email to: extreme-unsubscribe@topica.com

TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE!
http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html
--^----------------------------------------------------------------