[lbo-talk] Chuck's Cassirer posts

[Charles Brown]

To make the point on the objective nature of musical sounds, somebody
who knows the physics might want to discuss how the vibration rates of
the air molecules corresponding to certain sounds , and a couple of
other aspects of the physics of sound are the same for all cultures,
even as different cultures use different frequency segments.

Phonetics discovers objective sound ranges similarly.

(Isn't music a derivative of human speech , voices ?)

Charles


>>> Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> 06/18/2008 3:31 PM >>>

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Dennis Claxton wrote:


>> The orderliness of nature is a reality proven by Pythagoras when he


>> discovered that the musical scale (a fact of nature) is structured 
>> according to simple numerical ratios.
>
> What is _the_ musical scale?

The one defined by those ratios, 2:1 (octave) 3:2 (fifth) 4:3 (fourth).

AFAIK, you find them in independently discovered all over the world and
at 
the basis of every musical tradition.  What makes Chinese, middle
eastern, 
Indian, Western and Balkan music sound so different is (a) how they
deal 
with the problems that result from trying to keep different instruments
in 
tune once you go beyond a single octave, and (b) what they build on
this 
starting foundation.

You are quite right though that this results in many different musical

scales or modes.  The ancient Greek pentatonic scale, for example, is
one 
no one uses today.  But the universality point still holds, even if it

would take a little work to express it properly.

Michael
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