Timbre can affect what harmony is music to our ears

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The acoustic qualities of instruments may have influenced variations in musical scales and preferred harmonies.

Western music theory traditionally holds that chords sound most pleasant when they contain). Namely, intervals where the notes’ frequencies have simple ratios — like 2:1 or 3:2 .. Timbre is the distinct flavor of sound produced by specific instruments — the reason that the same note played at the same volume sounds different on the piano, guitar or gong., show that the recipe for a beautiful harmony is more nuanced than a simple set of mathematical relationships.

In one experiment, 196 U.S. participants judged the pleasantness of octaves played with synthetic musical notes. The video tracks how people’s ratings for chord pleasantness as the interval between the notes changes. As the interval approaches 12 — a supposedly perfect octave marked with a blue vertical line— pleasantness ratings spike. But they actually peak just before and after this “ideal” octave interval, when sound pulsates slightly.

In another experiment, 170 U.S. participants listened to synthetic musical notes with timbres modeled after the bonang — a collection of small gongs played in a Javanese gamelan. The video tracks people’s pleasantness ratings for chords with these artificial bonang notes.

The idea that timbre influences people’s preference for “perfect” versus “imperfect” ratios in musical intervals matches the experience of tuning and playing gamelan instruments, says Ki Midiyanto, a Central Javanese musician and expert in gamelan music at the University of California, Berkeley.

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

 

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