How is music possible

They are often songs that are attached to important emotional events in my life, sure, but there are also songs that come out of nowhere and still give me goosebumps. Some things are just that moving!

If goosebumps are only "mildly to moderately pleasurable", I really need to know what kind of music the author listens to!

It's weird cause there's this whole set of things (favorite bands/live shows/albums/etc) that most people are really into and care a lot about and it's a big absence in my life.

Cann't say something more, but it just made me a bit sad, and feel some nostalgia, and find how times flies over the years

Share the link below:

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=sD115Li2Jl8&si=reD6a3Cjvt3...

Bridge of Waves: What music is and how listening to it changes the world, by W.A. Mathieu, is a sound book about how music is possible.

> Major chords (which is what people who grew up hearing Western music tend to rate as positive), the Kalash instead describe as “strange,” rating them as less pleasant to listen to than “the most dissonant [of] all the possible tetrachords possible within the octave”.

The quote is not calling a major chords a tetrachord; it's comparing major chords to the set of tetrachords (whatever the quoted person has in mind; the linked paper isn't immediately accessible to me), despite not being a member.

For the harmonic convention of chords based on stacked fourths, I've always heard it called "quartal" harmony, but my knowledge doesn't go very deep there.

In any case, wikipedia disagrees.

> In music theory, a tetrachord (Greek: τετράχορδoν; Latin: tetrachordum) is a series of four notes separated by three intervals

They meant (like Wikipedia says) that traditionally a tetrachord spans a perfect fourth (i.e., that's the interval between the first and last notes), not that it's a stack of perfect fourths.

As to the original point, any discussion about dissonance of chords is meaningless without mention of temperament: in the modern tuning system (equal temperament[1]) both major and minor triads are pretty dissonant, look at the thirds at the table in the section named "Comparison with just intonation" in that Wikipedia page.

We have been dealing with the tension between keeping thirds and fifths pleasant for centuries: very roughly, people used meantone temperaments[2] in the Renaissance (which had perfectly tuned thirds), then came the era of well temperament[3], and eventually we settled for the simpler equal temperament we use today with its nasty thirds (it has several other advantages, but "having pleasant major and minor triads" is not one of them).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meantone_temperament

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament

It's explained in the article, but I want to emphasize that "well temperament" was not a single thing, but various separate attempts at compromise. Bach wrote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tempered_Clavier seemingly to celebrate the idea of tunings that sound acceptable in every key (without the wolf fifths of meantone temperaments), but it's not at all clear what specific tuning he had in mind, if any:

> During much of the 20th century it was presumed, possibly mistakenly, that Bach intended equal temperament, which after Bach's death became popular as the standard keyboard tuning, and had been described by theorists and musicians for at least a century before Bach's birth. Accounts of Bach's own tuning practice are few and inexact. …Despite the presumption of equal temperament, research has continued into various unequal systems contemporary with Bach's career; there is debate whether Bach might have meant a range of similar temperaments, perhaps altered slightly in practice from piece to piece, or possibly some single, specific, "well-tempered" solution for all purposes…

Personally, while I know on some academic level that our 12edo minor and major thirds are off by something like 14 cents, they don't sound unpleasant to me. I think it takes a specific sort of ear training to become really, er, attuned to purely consonant intervals and to notice dissonance on that level (which only produces real clashes in the higher harmonics).

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/03/15/writers-on-music/

Indeed, we might say music moves our senses and through them shifts our passions; our intellects through expressed order and pattern which we abstract from it; and our wills by appealing to our desire for beauty. Accordingly, we can rank music based on where the effect is greatest. Does it appeal more to the carnal or to the higher faculties?

That neurons play a role is not at odds with the above. It is fallacious to lump the existence of neurons and their role in human apprehension of reality with some kind of intellectually poor metaphysical stance like materialism.

My thoughts:

> Music has objective properties communicated via audible medium, and what's more, of a quantitative nature.

I would argue that this is probably a western-classical view of music. Music can be quantified/measured, but those numbers are just a tiny part of the listening experience.

> It expresses order.

Sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean that "maximum order" is the most pleasing one. Expectation/resolution etc. may be important, but what if for example a tune does not resolve to expectations? Is it automatically "bad music"?

> The more beautiful music is, the more integrity, proportion, and clarity it has.

Beauty is in the eye (or maybe better in this case - the ear) of the beholder. And for me personally beauty isn't necessarily clarity. I like dissonance in music, maybe some atonality, quarter tones/microtonality, irregular rhythms and polyrhythms etc. These things somewhat violate the aesthetic value (beauty) and that is what makes it more interesting, at least to me.

Just my 2p, I'd be happy to hear your point of view :)

Actually in practice, stuff that goes outside the "list of numbers" is a huge part of learning to play western music, including classical. It was emphasized by my teachers, going practically all the way back to my first lesson.

Your theory about maximizing harmony doesn't work either, most blues music deliberately breaks certain considerations of order while death metal is generally much more ordered but there are far more blues fan than death metal fans If you want to say there is anything to music than subjective preference with some guidelines then prove it,.prove what this absolute measure is and how if any it has any benefit over other models.

That's part of the premise of the movie "The History of Future Folk".

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2245195/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2oKGSmr9oo

Even traditional art often tries to do more than compress concepts, it tries to express the inexpressible.

Linguistic determinism/relativity (Sapir-Worf, etc) explains some of it. People can FEEL that their thoughts are being constrained by language, but they don't know how to express that and maybe don't even consciously realize that it's their real problem. They just figure out that art makes it feel a little better so they do art.

Here are some example 21st century painters: https://medium.com/@John_Dalton/living-masters-the-top-13-re...

Especially with the less progressive forms of rock that I enjoy more than the "pedantic" stuff (like various flavors of progressive metal), it gets hard to make "the thing" based off of a reduction of the music to a form.

Like, you can play the fully-notated versions of metallica songs and pull them off, but without a whole lot of notation and rehearsal you're going to have a hard time getting "the thing".

And you're really going to have a hard time pulling off the noisy parts of Neutral Milk Hotel I loved so much without notating a whole lot of that noise which becomes important to the work- so much so that in those generas people don't even bother to play other peoples' work because you only get into an uncanny valley around the artist's affective presentation and personality. That might be the excess you're describing as "more than"- I'd point you to Georges Bataille if you're actually interested in that kind of thing.

What I enjoy about that noisy music is the noise, which is difficult to notate and compress and transmit to other musicians; from where I stand as a musician, noise is what is lost when the art is compressed to its formal notation.

With all the older blues and jazz forms I enjoy (Django or Louis Armstrong or Danny Barker) I can get on stage and perform fairly complex music with minimal or no rehearsal- as long as someone knows the melody the tunes are playable. The "essential" parts of the music are not simple, but there is a lot of history and education in the players about how to properly rehydrate the music.

I wouldn't say that old jazz music or the musicians are "good-er" than the rock and metal folks, though most of the jazz musicians I know also do play pop gigs while pop musicians might have a harder time sitting in.

But it's just not as fun to solo over the changes to Iggy Pop's "I wanna Be Your Dog" or the Ramones "I wanna be sedated" and the skill sets for being able to come up with a part on the fly are different than they are for prodigiously performing a piece note-for-note (which is the same in classically oriented music as it is in indy rock bands, though the memo-ization methods are much different).

While I can't say the music is better, I personally find the chord progressions of older jazz forms easier to solo over because they have more interesting (to me) features. Lately I have a harder and harder time finding engaging-to-me things to play over a 2 chord funk jam or a 3 chord country song, whereas I really enjoy blowing over stuff like Basin St. Blues or Nuages.

My point being that the decoders for these improvisational forms often are doing a lot more interpretive work in decompressing a lead sheet out into music-in-the-world than the folks who are playing note-for-note parts that they've worked out from recordings and that are specific to the tune.

Since the decoders are doing more work, the music becomes quite a bit more "compressible" while retaining a lot of its complexity. "Autumn Leaves" is not "simpler" than "I Wanna Be Sedated", but it more easily compresses into a transmittable form without losing that essential excess that makes me like the Ramones.

With the jazz or blues or bluegrass or old-time or older country dance music or folk, the decoders only need someone in the band who knows (most of) the chords and the lyrics and the complexity of the resulting music is largely up to how the folks playing it decide to play it.

Tonight I am playing pedal steel at a dance and have never played with the band, and that's not big deal because a) I have stored reduced versions of the tunes in my body and b) I have a bunch of strategies for quickly decoding what the other musicians are doing and responding appropriately.

But the music itself isn't simple. "Friends in Low Places" (and much of country and western swing) has more in common with older jazz than with modern rock, and I have worked with a lot of truly bad musicians who think that because a lot of the songs are 3-chord tunes the music doesn't require some attention to play idiomatically.

So with music, it's easy and fun to add the noise back in if you know what to add, but it's not (in my opinion) the case that "simple" music is easily compressed: the "simpler" the music is (at least in the west) the more it relies on the specifics of the noise it produces in order to create its artistic effects, and thus simpler music less compressible.

So from my standpoint, it's very difficult to compress good, "simple" and "noisy" rock music, whereas the more specific designs of stuff like jazz is much easier to compress and transmit.

As an example, EDM music is highly predictable, and highly popular.

African tribal drum music is also highly predictable, while also being complex in poly-rhythmic ways.

Yet it's way more fun if the music evolves and takes twists you don't expected. I actually get quite aggressive from to predictable music, basically most modern pop music, but I guess that's highly subjective. For me good music must be intellectual exhaustive.

It is also possible that people are listening to the music for reasons other than the music itself (community, feelings of superiority, etc.)

Either way, it sure does explain the popularity. If you consider it as predictability instead of compression, it might make more sense. Listeners have an expectation on what music sounds like and popular music is going to ride that line between the listeners expectations and something more original and stray from those expectations.

I think this could also be why AI music is so bad, because it can hit the listener's expectations, but the ways that it strays from them are seemingly random, which is why a big reason to why it is so uncanny.

(Collins dictionary, noun 'theory')

If you could hear music on the surface of Mars without a space suit, I’m pretty sure it would sound quite different.

In that sense, I think any form of atmosphere, it will have its own music but it would probably not sound great in other atmospheres.

Also, any atmosphere can carry any sound wave for at least some distance. It takes more or less energy to do so, and if the medium attenuates rapidly, you have to start with higher frequencies so that the right frequency reaches your audience, but that's it. You need different instruments to play in different atmospheres, sure, but not different music. And electrical instruments actually work exactly the same regardless of the medium.

It is mind-bending to watch a liquid's meniscus simply… fade away without moving or boiling.

Of course, the sound that non-electrical instruments make is indeed dependent on the atmosphere in which they are played, assuming the same motions etc. You could probably make a violin produce the exact same sounds that it does on Earth playing it on Mars, but you'd have to play it differently than you do here. But even this doesn't apply to electrical instruments - Jimi Hendrix would sound the same if he could somehow play on the surface of Mars.