On Fri, 20 Jun 2008, shag wrote:
> this is way out of my technical competence, but I was wondering: is there
> anything that is determined (too strong a word, but ...) by the octave
> thingaroo you're discussing? IOW, given what is apparently a universal
> somethingorother about music, does it actually matter to anything for
> which we are often seeking answers, having debates, etc. etc.
If you mean inside music -- i.e., are the many very different ways the octave is divided in different cultures affected and influenced by the same forces that determine that it's always an octave they are dividing? -- that could be true and is worth debating. Although even if you succeed in making the strongest possible case (that all scales in all cultures have been influenced by the overtone series as a starting point, and by the problems it creates of multiple instruments staying in tune), you still won't have explained much, because from that starting point they end up in hugely different places. It's kind of like positing proto-indo-European as the common starting point of 100 languages. We have good reasons to think it's true, it's kind of neat, but it really has zero to do with our contemporary experience of those different languages. It doesn't make them any less different.
If you mean does that fact that we found a universal here have any bearing on the search for universals in culture, I'd have to say no, it has no bearing it at all.
> aside: in the latest New Yorker, there's an article about an
> installation in Alaska that is set up to project sounds for things
> happening on earth such as volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tides, as
> well as with the sun, moon, planets, stars.
>
> Some people go, listen, and leave rather terrified/apalled.
On a smaller scale, David Byrne just set something like this up in new york where an organ is connected to all the noise making properties of a building, and you can sit down and "play the building"
http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/art_projects/playing_the_building/
It's up through August 24th.
Michael