Re: [-empyre-] [extreme] voice root of 12-tone scale?



hi alan,

The proper answer to the q probably lies in Curtis Roads' _Microsound_,
which the ".microsound book club" is in fact currently reading (with
discussions on the microsound hotline server). However, in practice,
.microsound refers to a number of aesthetics, including extreme minimalism
(to the point of barely audible work), maximalism (Kim Cascone's sonic
density structures), the investigation of an aesthetics of failure (glitch),
clicks and cuts (areferential, parasitical sound), and various applications
of granular synthesis (slivers of sounds). I'd say all the practices engage
a level of molecular/ atomic if not quantum sonic production, with varying
degrees of adherance to rhythmic, musical, or conceptual structures,
including phonography (field recordings), ambience, musique concrete,
electroacoustic, IDM, and so on.

Most microsound is computer-based in its composition, dissemination, and
performance / playback (although the number of practictioners utilising
acoustic / electric-acoustic instruments is increasing -- perhaps because of
better laptop / instrument interfaces, speeds, technologies -- or at least
the North Americans are becoming increasingly influenced by the noise
experiments of the Mego label, and artists such as Fennesz -- for example,
Mitchell Akiyama's new album with Joshua Treble, under Desormais, is a
microsound/granular/post-rock hybrid).

best, tobias

> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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tobias c. van Veen -----------
http://www.quadrantcrossing.org
http://www.thisistheonlyart.com
------------- tobias@rhizome.org
---McGill Communications------
ICQ: 18766209 | AIM: thesaibot





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