McLaren & stretched intervals

Thanks, Brian McLaren, for a most impressive collection of
well-annotated references. I suspect that, over the next few
months, the NRC librarians will think I've never retired!

However, as I read your posts, you consider that the preference
of musicians for stretched intervals shows a failure of
psychoacoustic theory. I disagree.

"If music sounds dead, it isn't music" is a maxim that all
musicians keep forefront in mind. We don't want our sounds to
be dull=pure, so we deliberately skirt the edges of consonance
at stases, and go beyond them at regular intervals to give our
phrases shape. We are limited in our ability to do this with
simultaneous intervals when we want a tonality to our sound,
but even then can treat sequential intervals much more freely.
Is not masking theory consistent with higher pitches sounding
more prominent than lower, hence being preferable for this
purpose? And, acceptable pitch change, not just consonance, is
very dependent upon timbre and pitch as I hear it. The
considerable variations in interval stretching that you cite
may be more consistent than you believe.

I am certain that musical language speaks to very different
parts of our brain than consonance and tonality do, and it
seems to me that psychoacousticians knowingly focus on the
latter because it is obvious that the former is so much an
artefact of learned culture and less productive of
scientifically-describable results. Such a focus is not a
failure - "theories of everything" are illusions (or
delusions) even in high-energy physics, and ludicrous in the
context of the complexity of living things. After all, our
ears evolved to aid us in the complex job of survival, not so
we could enjoy music!

Musicians choose instruments, then audiences choose musicians. I
consider the widespread assumption that trained musicians must
be eliminated from psychoacoustic studies to be the opposite
of the truth if results are to be applicable to real-life
music. For example, musicians make bass sounds with far more
harmonics in timbre than they select for treble sounds. I
submit that a major reason for this is so that acceptable
changes in pitch produce equivalent dissonance across the
gamut of the instrument. Instruments that did not do this (and
there are many) have been selected out of the repertoire by
musicians' choice. This is a testable hypothesis (BTW, if this
hasn't already been studied and anyone is interested in
collaboration, email me) whereas the character of the desire
for such dissonance is probably a much more elusive quantity.
The preference of the musically naive for "boom boxes" stands
in notable contrast. This might turn out to be solely because
musicians concentrate on musical language more than on
consonance - we do seem to keep very different areas of the
brain active during listening than naive listeners.

And, when considering pitch in ensembles, don't forget the role
of competition. Everyone wants their sound to stand out from
others but still sound professional. The perennial jockeying
for leading pitch in ensembles arises from very different
brain centers than those studied by psychoacousticians!


--
John Sankey bf250@freenet.carleton.ca
Music is Beauty, Beauty is Truth, Truth is Freedom

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