Why does music sound bad?

When I hammer on all the pianokeys at the same time it does not sound good, why? Is it because my slow brain can not put together the tones to a logic pattern? Is this the same reason why some people think jazz is awful? Does real disharmonies exist?

Johan

i don’t think you can call any random noises music - there has to be some sort of skill involved.

have a look at this (old school i know)

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=73000&

But Why? What laws are there that must be followed for music to be music? Is it not possible that my hammering on the piano is just too “advanced” for our brain? If I would record 1 minute of my hammering and then let a musician write notes and learn how to play it. Then it would be very skilled but we would not accept it as music.

I play guitar and not piano however. Sometimes when I play a scale I pick a tune outside the scale that I did not intended. It sound wrong because I did not expect it. But if I put in this tone on purpose in the scale I can’t see no exact reason why it can’t stay there. By repeating it it sound more and more right. And arabic music play halftones that we are not used to.

The other thread is very much about music as a trigger for personal memories, I’m more talking about pure harmonies without any other secondary references. To me it seams like simple music with easy harmonies sound good, but becomes boring after a while. Really extreme modern jazz sound like random patterns and become disharmonies to a lot of people but in fact they are playing after notes, or at least follow some kind of logic. I guess they are enjoying what they are playing. Is it not possible that their brains are more advanced in those cases, and can translate those “disharmonies” into music?

Beside music as a trigger for personal memories (culture identity ETC) it’s possible that music have a coherent effect on our brain that is beyond learning. I’m goin to look for some info about this.

I know the mathematical laws of harmony; but I don’t understand why we like them, or why we can’t play with the “numbers” any way we want. For example: If I play a tone on my guitar and sing a second tone, it does not matter what tone I sing, they all have the same value even if it sound different depending on the interval. But after this it’s important what the third tone is. Or is it really? Is it pure taste what the third tone should be; the same as if I just played two tones? The more tones I pick the more important it becomes that I don’t pick the wrong tone. But can I learn to like it if I pick the 7th tone “wrong”? Or is it simply wrong?

Does anybody know if some birds (or other animals) are really tuned; and are able to play exact intervals?

Who decided how an “e” should sound? The right tension of the string? This may sound stupid to a person that is educated in music, but I do not know what it relates to, and what stops it from changing over time. Today you can “lock the tone” with electronic equipment, and the tone have a certain amplitude ETC. But how did they do before this, in history?

Johan

Well i think just like everything in this world we all have our own taste in music,what is noice to you might be art to another,and whats artistic to you might not be for another,its all about preference.Hence when you hammer you piano keys at the same time,that sound might be unpleasent to you,but pleasent to another.Just like HEAVY METAL.i still think thats noice.but then again,kids find it artistic.

Maybe ‘locking the tone’ wasnt being done before?.I personally think that tone is part of music.that music is nothing with out tone…

Johan,

First, I should tell you that I’m no expert on the subject of music. But since I enjoy both music and mathematics I suppose it’s natural that I would wonder how the two might be related.

Visual art presents us with patterns in space. Music is patterns in time. As John Barrow says in an article titled, Musical Cheers and the Beautiful Noise:

“(Music) has a beginning and an end. A painting does not.”

Engineers think of all sound sequences as “noise.” There are different kinds of noise. “White noise” is unpredictable at all frequencies, whereas “brown noise” is quite predictable. In 1975 Richard Voss and John Clarke discovered that music could be approximated by 1/f noise. This 1/f noise is halfway between white and brown noise. In other words, music must be random, but not too random. It must be recognizable, but not too recognizable. This is why simply playing an ascending or descending scale on the piano is not musical. The pattern is far too recognizable. Given one note we can always guess the next note. It’s too boring. But a monkey sitting at the piano would hit the notes at random. Given one note we could never guess what the next note would be. But this is also boring because there is no pattern at all. We want to hear complex patterns, we want to have our brain stimulated. Gottfried Leibnitz wrote:

“Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from doing mathematics without being aware that it is doing mathematics.”

I think we all do mathematics when we listen to music. Well, we also continuously solve differential equations when we walk or throw a ball, but when we listen to music our brain is stimulated to discover patterns in a very unique way.

Music is a mystery to me. I can’t explain why certain sequences of sounds make my spine tingle. Benedick wonders as much in Much Ado About Nothing:

“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?”

Michael

Heavy metal and especially punk rock premiere “musical” function is not about harmonies but about triggering secondary functions like human identity. Today we have hip-hop ETC. I used to listen to such music as well when I were younger. This music also have harmonic elements; especially in the rhythms, but it’s quite simple. When we separate all secondary trigger effects music still have a substance. It’s that substance that I’m interested in. Even classical music have cliches and timestamps that were once modern. I believe there are timeless harmonies as well.

Johan

There’s also the emotional quality to music. When I hear someone screaming I know that there is supposed to be a form of harsh emotion in it. That coupled with the beat or power (power originating from a comparison between one form of music and another softer) invovled with the music gets adrenaline running. Makes for an enjoyable feeling. I like feeling the adrenaline run through my veins.

There’s also the lyrics. Lyrics key off certain thoughts or emotions. Another would be the image that our culture puts on musicians. Or the environment in a show.

As far as why does a certain progression of chords or notes bring pleasure I’d say Polemarchus gave a good description of my thoughts.

I’d kind of figure that communication would play a role as well. Originality is also something. Some languages are prettier than others. I’d assume because we are used to our own.

I also think Polemarchus explanation is good. But this also means that there might not be anything like disharmonies; but just a limitation in our brain to arrange it to creative patterns. This creative point lays somewhere between order and chaos and is a relative point depending on our capacity. It also seams that ur “musical mind” requires more and more complex challanges just like Polemarchus matimathical mind requires new levels of matematical problems to solve. But in the case of the distorted guitar sound in “heavy metal” we are not talking about a complex soundpicture that is transformed in our mind into a logic pattern. Those sounds are disharmonies to our mind and the artistic expression is based on secondary triggering in our mind, the same as screaming.

A pattern might seam totally random and chaotic if you take out a part of the whole. I can play a long string of information and after a while I bring it together by adding a repeating attribute, or adding something that was missing in the pattern that bring it together. I guess this is what the people that are listening out in space for ET does. They seek creativity in the chaos. But the “background noice” we hear when we listen to space is actually not chaotic; it’s the sound of the universes processes that we hear a part of. It’s just too complex to be called creative from our point of view.

I also realize that the music genre involves a lot of artistical elements and those should not be denied. But I see them as separate elements coming together. They triggers memories, emotions, personal identification ETC. But under this whole spectrum of expressions we have those harmonies as well that play with our mind.

Yesterday I was dancing for 4 hours without taking any breaks. In the middle of this trance I told my friend that “everything is music”. It felt like that, and maybe I had some kind of point. When you dance for a long time you stop to think how to dance, and the music start to dance for you. Today however I can’t recall this. Maybe everything that exist “dance” after some kind of universal music. This also happens when I play guitar. It’s a big difference between playing the guitar and letting the music play through the guitar. It does not happen that often, but when it does I ask myself “- hey, where did that come from!?”

Johan

I guess you may be aware of this already, but the harmonic dissonance results from combining notes of two different frequencies which are very distantly related in the harmonic series. Two notes which are closely related in the harmonic series are considered to be consonant. For example, an octave is a highly consonant interval, since it is the first harmonic to be produced above the fundamental note. The interval of a 5th is the next most consonant, since it is the second harmonic. On the guitar, you can try this yourself by playing the harmonic on the 12th fret (1st harmonic - exactly 1/2 way), and then on the 7th fret (2nd harmonic - 1/3).

I guess the reason why some intervals sound so dissonant that they are unmusical (not all “dissonant” harmonies are “bad”, they’re a necessary part of music) is that they are far too unpredictable. Take the suspension chord for example; although it is a dischord, the listener “knows” where the music is heading, and so this expectation creates tension which is then released at the resolution of the chord. If there can be no expectation, there can be no fulfilment of this expectation.

I have found that in most (tonal) music, and especially in classical music, “tension and release” is the major factor in creating its effects. Perhaps I’m biased, but I would say that fans of heavy-metal music are not sensitive enough to the aural phenomena, such as harmonic dischords and their resolution, to appreciate their effects in classical music. Now, this is particularly important for the players, because knowing where to build up tension, and when to release them (or “letting the music play through the guitar”, to quote the post above), is the key to pleasurable performance.

I hope that made some sense. Tired. Must go. Me come back later.

(P.S. who is Polemarchus, and what does he reckon? Thanks)

To answer your original question. Not All Sounds are pleasurable or are meant to be.

Infact its like Smelling something Really bad. Its only bad because something in you doesnt like it, or you are not used to it. BUT over time your almost alergic reaction to the smell will be reduced so as that you will not be annoyed by the smell.

eventually you will get used to the sound and possibly like it.

Something I find enjoyable is walking in on songs when you don’t know what they are or what’s going on or anything. I love when you’re off a beat it makes for a nice version of a sound. I’d right songs like it if I didn’t forget it once I realized what song it was. Every time I try to remember I end up going back to the right way.

CBA sorta like a image you cant make out and see things in.

Like a picture of a elephant to you untill you realize its an elephant looks like a dog by this dark pond. And the Dark pond image looks better than the elephant but you willl never see that pond again because now you see the elephant.

…right

I know what you mean though. There’s an email that floats around with a link to a bunch of them. You’ve probably seen it.

I don’t think I can add too much to what Polemarchus and fimwat said, but I’ll give it a go anyway. :smiley:

I think Polemarchus took the words out of my mouth when he mentioned the importance of “patterns” in our appreciation of all forms of art (be they music, paintings or anything else). Essentially, our minds are geared towards examining patterns in all things we experience, and it is our identification of patterns in the things we perceive (whether these patterns exist in and of the objects themselves or whether they are merely a convenient way for humans to impose a false sense of organisation upon them) that allows us to effectively comprehend the world, and pave the way for all systems of science, art, philosophy and so on.

Put simply, if our minds can interpret a comprehensible pattern or structure in the music being played (in the tonality and the rhythm and so forth), then we are more likely to appreciate it as genuine “music” rather than merely random “noise”. By arbitrarily and continually striking keys on a piano, it becomes impossible for our minds to decipher a comprehensible pattern from the noise being made, and therefore difficult to conceptualise any sort of structure, and to appreciate the “piece” on any musical level. Perhaps if we were to record the key-banging and fed it through to a computer, it may be able to identify some rhythmatic pattern (perhaps in something crazy like 76/53 time) or tonal pattern (that goes well beyond the westernised system of dividing the conventional octave into 12 parts) but sadly our brains are not so adept at identifying such complex patterns. Therefore, what you said about our appreciation of music being linked to its intelligibility, Johan, is most likely true. Our appreciation of music goes only as far as our ability to identify patterns in it - even if there are patterns in the piece of music, if they cannot be identified by the listener, then they are not likely to be considered music.

I guess the comparison between “music” and “noise” can be likened to a true “painting” and random scribble. The random scribble has no structure, no methodology, and thus no way of being comprehended in the same way that a Rembrandt painting can be for instance. It’s a fine line, I agree, between art and entropy, but I suppose that’s what makes it so interesting to appreciate in the first place. :slight_smile: