As an intro to my Amateur Musical
Analysis series, I think I'll run over some basic theory ideas, to
help you cats at the NSA understand what I'm talking about, and to
test my ability to explain things elegantly. I'm using what I
remember of Carl Seashore's Psychology of Music as a jumping point,
because it gives you what I call a flexible understanding – that
is, an ability to think about a subject in more than one way.
The four basic 'things' in music have
two names each: one subjective, one objective. Objectively, they are
called frequency, amplitude, waveform and duration. These four
describe very precisely the size and shape of a physical soundwave.
Subjectively, these become: pitch, volume, timbre and rhythm.
Our experience of the frequency of a
wave corresponds to what we think of as pitch, because we have
established a system for understanding this that has lasted for
several millenia. It is still a subjective system, however; 'the key
of C' does nothing to describe a soundwave. They meet in the
practical realm where musicians have to tune their instruments so
they can play together, so we have a standard: A=440 Hertz, or cycles
per second, 'cycle' being the time it takes for a waveform to
complete its pattern of peak and valley.
The amplitude of a wave determines how
loud we hear it. This is subjective because different people hear
differently: some can detect frequencies up to 22,000 hz or so, some
can't hear above 16,000. So a loud sound at 20,000 hz may not be
heard at all by some, like a dog whistle.
Waveform, to us timbre, is where it
gets complicated and interesting. Timbre is subjective in the
extreme: as Seashore points out, some of the low notes on a bassoon
don't really sound those notes at all, but a clever combination of
the 'harmonics' of those notes which causes us to 'hear' the low note
that is not really there.
Harmonics is a subject that deserves
its own post. I'll make this thing too long if I don't watch out. But
they are the reason music is our universal language, so I'll be
delving into them quite a bit.
Duration is the essence of rhythm.
Either there is a sound, or there is not. The heart beats, is silent,
then beats again. We hope. Rhythm is about waiting, and I've noticed
that drummers are among the most patient, equable people I've ever
met.
Looked at this way, there is no
separation between tonal and 'atonal' music. All music concerns
tones. Atonal music was an attempt to discover a new paradigm for
music, after some centuries of adherence to a fairly restrictive one.
Between Rameau and Holst, there is only small deviance from the
established primacy of the major and minor scales because folks like
Rameau decided that the best use of music as a language was to
restrict its use to certain simple emotional states: happiness,
sadness, fear, anger, maybe occasionally some longing (Dorian mode)
or mystery (Phrygian mode), but never lust (that would be the
Mixolydian mode, the mode of blues and rock'n'roll). I'll describe
the modes for you at some point; they all have Greek names, thanks to
Pythagoras, whom we thank for much. The musicians of the 20th
century made attempts at discarding all that, with varying success:
music is now much more varied and interesting, but it is still as
tonal as ever. Nothing Stravinsky or Schoenberg or Cage or even Frank
Zappa ever did has changed our response to heard music. We still hear
the language of the spirit in it, our emotions respond as ever.
I'm getting ahead of myself, which is
probably inevitable: the four components I mentioned above describe
music as a static thing. For music that moves, we need more terms,
such as intervals, dynamics, texture and tempo. Interval describes
the distance between two pitches, played successively or in a chord;
dynamics is a word for the changes in volume through a piece; texture
is the overall effect of combined timbres; and tempo is the
subjective 'speed' at which we hear the thing playing.
A series of intervals is a melody.
That's right, not a series of pitches, but intervals. This is because
a pitch means nothing by itself, but an interval means everything. As
in rhythm, it is in the space between the notes that we express
ourselves. Intervals will be examined closely along with harmonics,
as they are in a sense the same thing.
I believe the experience of tempo as
fast or slow is directly related to our heartbeats' tempo. I'm pretty
sure that to a hummingbird, all of our music is impossibly slow, and
to a whale much too fast. So the language is not universal for all
species. Those with heartbeats near to our own in tempo seem to
respond to it much the way we do.
But I won't speculate much; my project
is (eventually) to isolate and identify the musical events that are
globally appreciated in the same way by all humans – and there are
more of such events than you might think. Perhaps a lexicon could be
made, I'm not sure. I'm inhibited by not being able to type actual
music in here, so I'll have to import pictures for my AMA series.
Feedback can be a big problem in music
but it's great medicine for a blog – if any read this and are
interested, please gimme a holler in the comments. I'll sign off for
now, having said less than half of what I was thinking about, but
having written twice as many words as I'd hoped. See you again soon,
to further examine melody. We'll start with one of the greatest
melodies ever written, and I'll tell you why that's so.
For now
just1
No comments:
Post a Comment