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0 pointsmorshu90018mo ago0 comments

I'm not saying I was right, but the teacher's explanation was not what you said. It was that the correct answer is the inoffensive one.

I'm also still not sure about the answer. A lot of unrelated cultures developed music independently and ended up with some kind of rhythm beaten from something. I didn't say they had tuning forks or scales, and ofc 12 tones or 8 notes per scale isn't universal, but there's still the thing about octave equivalence. I did some searching back then and found some scientific papers on this that didn't show a definite conclusion.

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UncleMeat8mo ago· 2 in thread

Consonance and dissonance between pitches are physical properties. How they relate to the enjoyability of music is culturally constructed.

morshu9001OP8mo ago

Right. The thing is, I don't know if there's any culture that enjoys completely dissonant music and doesn't enjoy consonance. I like Arabic classical and pop a lot, they use disonance a bit more and also don't always use the 12-ET tuning. But anyone who's developed any kind of tuning, it still divides up an octave, ie the notes reset when the frequency doubles.

UncleMeat8mo ago

So? We have different degrees of dissonance, different uses for dissonance, and different reactions to dissonance across many different musical traditions. I don't see why there would need to be some musical tradition that refuses to ever have octaves in order for us to say that our relationship with consonance and dissonance is culturally constructed.

Gamelan music might be a good example of one where microtonal dissonance is expected basically continuously through a piece.

There is also music that is completely without traditional pitch information (all sorts of percussion traditions).

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