locussolus - The problem is interpretation

November 17, 2003

Some researches have an interesting take on the question of where the 12 note musical scale comes from:

Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analyzed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.

This is a bizarre result, and I wish there were more detail about the data. It seems to suggest that in the aggregate humans have some kind of perfect pitch - otherwise you wouldn't expect peaks at certain frequencies. My guess is they're actually talking (imprecisely) about the relationships between frequencies rather than the frequencies themselves - if this is true, it means functional tonality has some basis in speech, or vice versa.

Either way the main problem with this research - and it's only touched on briefly in the article - is that there's no reason our music shouldn't have affected our speech, rather than the other way around. It would be interesting to see data from a culture whose music has a different harmonic framework... would speech from middle ages Europe reflect the fifths and octaves that dominated the music of the time?

Comments

BigOldGeek {November 18, 2003}

I've heard that crowds at sporting events will always sing or chant in the same key, no matter what they are vocalizing.

I've also noticed you cannot get a group fo three or more people to start Happy Birthday spontaneously on the same note.

PG {November 18, 2003}

V. sorry to be off-topic, but as the person who first brought "flashmobbing" to my attention, I thought you might be interested in a politically-useful attempt at the phenomenon.

Marcia Ellen {November 18, 2003}

Very interesting article. Thank you!

That Happy Chica, :)
Marcia Ellen

Marcia Ellen {November 18, 2003}

Very interesting article. Thank you!!

That Happy Chica, :)
Marcia Ellen

skimble {November 19, 2003}

This is a case of retrofitting evidence to your theory.

"For example, in virtually all cultures sound is divided into some or all of the 12 intervals that make up the chromatic scale -- that is, the scale represented by the keys on a piano."

The 12-tone equally tempered chromatic scale as represented by the keys on the piano is entirely unnatural. It's a forced and artificial but useful system for creating tunings among lots of kinds of instruments.

The chromatic scale is not really represented in Indonesian music or even, for that matter, American blues music. Both musics employ a substantial use of microtones -- the infinite number of notes between the 12 sanctioned notes -- that don't allow for neuroscientists to get grants based on shoddy extrapolations of their lazy theories.

Maybe you can tell from this that I don't much care for scientific "explanations" of art. Some neuroscientists telling me music is "more of a necessity than we realize" is just patronizing claptrap. I don't feel the need to validate my artistic interests, but they apparently need to validate their funding.