New research shows cultural experiences can shape your perception of beautiful music, but your appreciation can evolve. And there are benefits to having broad musical taste.
Theories that claim music is a universal language have been proposed as far back as the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras .These three notes are the start of the diatonic scale. Combining certain notes, such as do-mi-sol, turns the sound into a harmonic chord.
So, what's the big deal with consonance and dissonance, and what's it got to do with an ancient Greek mathematician?You might remember Pythagoras and his triangle from your high school maths class, but he also theorised that beautiful harmony is a matter of calculation."Each note you hear is the result of a vibration," explains Professor Emery Schubert, a music researcher at the University of NSW.
The study found that in examples from non-Western cultures such as Javanese gamelan, Pythagoras's neat calculation falls apart.Gamelan musical traditions originate in the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, on the other side of the world from the Greek islands where Pythagoras lived. But in Java, "you can sing which has diatonic tuning, accompanied by the gamelan in a different tuning and they tolerate the mismatched tunings," Lim says.
Harmony Research Pythagoras Gamelan Javanese Gamelan Vi King Lim Emery Schubert
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