[lbo-talk] For LBO's music theory crowd

[Miles Jackson]

Chuck Grimes wrote:
> Okay, for Miles, Shane, Michael Smith and other skeptics, I located the
> original article that Kenneally cites in the brief description I
> gave---which seems to have created some apparently universal assurances
> that this idea was all hogwash. Here is the article:
> 
> http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/23/18/7160
> 

I read it.  Two comments:

1.  The premise that the 12-tone system is universal is just empirically 
wrong.  An amazing variety of tone systems are used in different 
societies at different times.  Just to focus on Western European music 
for a moment: intervals that were considered dissonant in the 1600s were 
considered consonant and musical in the 1800s, because composers used 
the new intervals more and people got used to hearing them.

2.  The fact that we see big "bumps" in the frequency spectrum at 
specific frequency ratios is a necessary consequence of the acoustics of 
the human vocal apparatus.  Any sound-making "tube" will generate 
overtones, at the fifth and the octave in particular.  This only shows 
that the human voice must abide by the laws of acoustics, just as any 
sound-making apparatus does.  (In methodological terms, a correlation 
between the frequency spectrum of the human voice and the frequency 
spectrum of a musical scale does not provide us with evidence that the 
former is the cause of the latter.)

Miles