Recent psychoacoustic discoveries are evaluated through a conventional Eurocentric ear.
As general reviews of this book are available here and here, we will skip to specific passages.
| Location | Author's claim (quote) | Our response |
|---|---|---|
| p59 ¶2 | "You'd meet with only laughter if you requested a copyright on a rhythmic pattern or a harmonic progression." | Is it that easy to trigger the funnybone of a bureaucrat? Can any reader relate a personal experience? (Send anecdotes to aloe@rev.net.) |
| p77 ¶1 | "The obvious argument in favor is that, by encouraging the overlap of overtones, the Pythagorean scale is only one that complements the overtone series." | In music, a complement is generally understood to be "an interval that completes an octave when added to a given interval". Does Pythagorean tuning complete or reinforce overtones?
By halving the octave, Pythagorean tuning favors only dyadic harmony, in decline since the Renaissance. Just intonation extends this courtesy to chords. |
| p80 ¶1 | "The Gestaltists formulated a number of rules describing how we make sense of the world visually, rules that work just as well in explaining how we assemble melodic fragments into whole tunes. For example, the Law of Complements states that our minds prefer complete patterns. Melodic skips interrupt smooth contour, and so there are few of them." | According to Jung's Law of Complements, the presence of any element indicates the presence of its opposite. If preferred adjacent scale steps are opposites, can we assume that pitches separated by a tritone have much in common?
Skips can add interest to a melody without creating the disorienting effect claimed by the author. For example, "Sentimental Journey" (by Bud Green, Les Brown, and Ben Homer) makes heavy use of skips (mi-do-mi-do-mi-do-mi-do-mi-do). Bill Haley made a hit out of "Rock Around the Clock" by changing steps (do-re-mi) to skips (do-mi-sol). |
| p85-86 ¶2 | "What makes a good melody? . . . If you compare these rules to a favorite melody, you'll find they almost always apply." | If rules are inconsistent in their application, then what significance can we attach to them? Does their impirical prevalence merely result from the law of averages? Can bad melodies follow the same rules? |
| p85-86 ¶2 (1) | "Nearly all the notes in the melody are to be chosen from the seven-note scale upon which the melody is based. When any of the remaining five chromatic notes are used, they generally should appear in positions that are unaccented and unemphasized so as not to undermine the prevailing harmony." | What significance is there to unequal incidence of pitches? Even if pitches are chosen at random from a set of twelve, it is almost mathematically certain that the most prevalent seven, falling into a scale of some type, will comprise a majority.
Of course, there is order in the arts. In large parts of the world (China, West Africa, Japan, Andes, Indonesia) pentatonic scales are employed all or part of the time. A melody based on five tones is unlikely to exceed seven. Thus, the vast incidence of pentatonic scales both supports the author's argument in a strict logical sense and undercuts his choice of a number. Limitation to seven has rarely been evident in European music. Even in the Renaissance, minor modes employed a leading 7th tone (as in "Greensleeves"), for a total of eight notes. How do we count glides found in various musical cultures? Are they ornaments of one note or combinations of several? Without a way to classify widespread phenomena, we cannot tell how to apply the rules. Modern popular music has moved beyond satisfaction with seven notes. Blue notes have been a jazz staple for decades. Antonio Carlos Jobim frequently used twelve tones, notably in "Retrato em Branco e Preto (Portrait in Black and White)". |
| p85-86 ¶2 (2) | "Most of a melody's notes should be adjacent scale notes. Jumps should be few, and large jumps rare." | Skips and jumps are featured in numerous popular songs, old and new:
In 48 notes of "Ach! du lieber Augustin", there are only 17 steps to adjacent scale degrees, less than the total of skips and jumps. How does this rule apply to pentatonic scales? When adjacent scale notes are separated by a minor third, is the interval considered a step or a skip? As the author provides inadequate definition, there is no way to verify the applicability of the rule for non-heptatonic scales. |
| p85-86 ¶2 (3) | "To avoid monotony, individual notes should not be repeated too much, particularly at emphasized positions in a melody." | Some popular melodies contain long sequences of repeated notes:
|
| p85-86 ¶2 (4) | "Harmonic resolutions, such as the cadences that we'll consider in the next chapter, should occur at points of rhythmic stress in a melody." | In Latin American music, are downbeats or accented upbeats considered more stressful? |
| p85-86 ¶2 (5) | "Similarly, rhythmic accentuations should highlight the melody's contour. Changes in melodic direction should generally fall at rhythmically important junctures." | In Latin American music, are downbeats or accented upbeats considered more rhythmically important? |
| p85-86 ¶2 (6) | "A melody should have only one instance of its highest tone, and preferably also of its lowest tone. The highest tone should never be a tone that naturally tends toward a higher one (such as the seventh note of the melody's scale)." | We will assume that the author means an upward scale, rather than the ancient Greek downward scales.
How true is this rule? (Send comments to aloe@rev.net.) |
| p85-86 ¶2 (7) | "Jumps should always land on on of the seven scale tones, not on one of the five chromatic tones. The ear always hears a jump as emphasized (that is, the brain is more attentive to jumps, since they define the boundaries of submelodies), so jumping to a chromatic tone violates the rule about never emphasizing these tones." | (Send illustrative examples to aloe@rev.net.) |
| p85-86 ¶2 (8) | "Conversely, a melody should never leap from a chromatic tone. The dissonance of a chromatic tone creates tension in need of release. Yet jumps increase tension, and so contradict this need." | Doesn't a jump to the tonic relieve tension? |
| p123 | There is a kind of rhythm we generate all day long, the rhythm of organic movement. . . . For want of a standard term, call it phrasing. | By definition, motives are grouped into phrases, phrases into periods, periods into movements. |
| p130 | "One reason that a Baroque composer like Vivaldi has such popularity among those who otherwise reject classical music is that the phrasing of his music is completely obvious, and so it is easy for a brain to spot its component parts. Beethoven is harder, and Wagner much harder still." | The basis of the premise is not convincing. Wagner's "Wedding March" and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" are more popular than any of Vivaldi's works, including "The Four Seasons" and many violin concerti. |
| p176 ¶1 | "The piano is the ideal instrument for a composer, letting him play several voices at once, and offering a magnificent repertoire for study and experimentation." | Although useful, pianos can't do everything. Organs have greater range and the ability to hold a note indefinitely without decay. Strings permit glides, microtones, doubling, and a smooth crescendo on a held note. |
| p208 ¶2 | "But our bodies display a far more complex geometry, with limbs sticking out, and sublimbs (fingers and toes and various unmentionables) jutting out further still." | Because the author has chosen to be photographed from the shoulders up, we see no evidence of unmentionables that protrude beyond his arms and legs. |
| p208 ¶3 | "The motor system doesn't exist to twitch individual muscles; it's there to carry out complete movements encompassing many muscles. This fact is demonstrated by a simple experiment. With palms turned upward, wiggle a finger and watch how muscles and tendons move throughout your forearm. This means that for the motor cortex, a finger is as large and elaborate as a forelimb." | The muscles the author observes may be the only ones involved. For lack of room, there are few in the hand. Tendons pass through the wrist and hand, connecting muscles in the forearm to bones in the fingers. |
| p255 ¶1 | "Listening to cool jazz as if it were country and western is a big mistake. But we're more likely to muddle through than we are with Indian or Chinese music; hardly anyone crosses the abyss to full appreciation of the music of a distant culture." | Many Chinese and Japanese musicians seem to have straddled this divide. Some folk tunes they bring from their own cultures are well received in others. The music in between is not all that abysmal; Borodin and Khachaturian used Central Asian and Transcaucasian folk music as source material for some familiar works. |
| p260 ¶1 | "For instance, each successive note in a scale is readily anticipated and provides no new information, so scales are boring. In contrast, a sudden shift to a remote key is full of surprises and gives the listener something to respond to, increasing the information a composition conveys." | Scales with augmented intervals give melodies an exotic sound.
The amount of information perceived by the listener can vary depending on the attention and familiarity brought to the process. One need not perceive the structural complexity of a Bach fugue to enjoy the immediate harmonic progression. |
| p260 ¶3 | "But research shows that it takes hard rock to drive out rats (as General Noriega learned when the U.S. Army dislodged him from his hiding place by blasting heavy metal)." | Calling a Central American potentate a rodent is a gratuitous insult (to both the general and rats) that lowers the level of discourse and distracts the reader. The editor should have omitted this cheap shot. |
| p261 ¶3 | "We "take" a certain kind of music to steer our central nervous systems toward a particular condition: hard rock as the frenzied rush of cocaine; easy-listening genres as a martini; cheery supermarket Muzak as a pick-me-up cup of coffee; cool jazz as a laid-back marijuana high; the far-flung landscapes of classical music as the fantasy realm of psychedelics." | If they desire a psychedelics experience, then why do so many classical music fans choose only to imbibe of wine or brandy? Why has LSD been associated with acid rock and Deadheads? While there may be parallels between art and drugs as lenses for viewing the world, the specific analogies need refinement. |
| p262 ¶2 | "Some social critics have judged the symphony orchestra to be the epitome of capitalist oppression. . . . As ruling aristocrat, the conductor leads compliant musicians, who in turn lead a compliant audience." | A capitalist economy is run by the bourgeoisie (middle class), not the hereditary aristocracy (upper class). Perhaps a symphony orchestra represents the imperial rococo society of its 18th-century origin. Yet the height of aristocracy should be the medieval period, which left us churchly chants and folk music. |
| p264 ¶2 | "If an audience leaves a movie with clashing impressions, think how much wider must be the gulf left by a concert." | Cinema is a conceptual art, portraying ideas; interpretation of a film will vary depending on the knowledge and experience of the individual viewer. Music is non-conceptual, involving minimal reference to the real world. It would be interesting to compare the effect of various genres of music upon children of different cultures. |
| p286 ¶2 | "Nonetheless, nature cruelly provides neuroscience with unwilling human subjects. Every year, millions of human beings lose fragments of cortex through strokes or accidents or gunshot wounds (trench warfare was an especial boon to neuroscience)." | Why did nature wait until the invention of firearms to produce gunshot wounds? |
| p316 ¶2 | "Opposite every kind of pleasure is a kind of pain: the body's agonies against the body's raptures, biting cold against caressing warmth, bitterness against deliciousness, stenches against fragrances, ugliness against beauty, grief and anxiety against joy and serenity." | Extremes of either hot or cold tend to be unpleasant. It is possible to get too much of a good thing. |
| p318 ¶0 | "Conversely, perfectly fulfilled anticipations are resolved without friction, and this resolution is what we call pleasure." | Humor arises from surprise. The eruption of laughter is stronger if you haven't heard the punchline. |
| p327 ¶1 | "However our bodily representations of music are achieved, they may be responsible for boosting our pleasure all the more by causing our brains to churn out the opiate-like endorphins we considered earlier." | Does the author mean to say that pleasure-inducing endorphins can only be produced by the subject's physical activity? That would make passive enjoyment difficult. Despite being expected to remain still for an hour at a time, audiences around the world derive pleasure from symphony concerts. |
| p330 ¶3 | "A flock of squawking birds produces all of the individual notes of symphony, but not in an ordered hierarchy of groupings." | A flock usually consists of single species of bird, unlikely to produce an orchestra's range. |
| p331 ¶4 | "New technology has always played a role in propelling music toward innovation, and we live in a period of rapid change in music technology, change that follows a century-long lull." | When was this alleged lull? We are unable to find so much as a 30-year gap between these inventions:
|
| p332 ¶1 | "Could the music of the future be based on yet-undiscovred constructs? In terms of our traditional conception of music, probably not. Countless thousands of composers have spent their lives searching for new devices, and the rate of innovation has slowed to the point where it is almost impossible to concoct a worthwhile harmonic progression or metrical pattern that has not been heard before." | Adding notes to the scale increases the harmonic palette. In Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media (1980), Easley Blackwood explores the previously untapped harmonic properties of equal-temperament scales of from 13 to 24 notes. |
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