Posted by surprisetalk 6 hours ago
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…except when it comes to science as a basis for an argument from authority.
Like all music, people like what they like.
You don’t get the perfect fourth until you go all the way around the circle of fifths.
You cannot stack perfect fifths and get a major scale.
My general issue with things like these is the simple fact, that as a lifelong musician I find the "less worse" harmonic combinations (to quote the abstract) often very boring. Aside from great composers like Bach et al I find the harmonic relationship of the notes played one of the least interesting aspects of the music, and expression, timbre, rhythm, phrasing much more important and noteworthy. A set of great musicians can play a single note for minutes and get it to sound amazing, this has always fascinated me more.
Music theory IMO has historically a too strong focus on the harmony (or the lack thereof) between notes. Not that it isn't important, but with some texts you get the feeling it wouldn't matter to the authors whether the piece was heard expressively played on a grand piano or cut together from equal leveled sine waves.
In my experience harmonies are greatly influenced by the relative levels of the notes and the overtone content within each note, to a degree you can make a supposed "harmonic" chord sound bad and a supposed disharmonic one sound good.
And dissonance has cultural and physiological components...
And other traditions focus on rhythm over harmony...
That said this looks like a good introduction.
Also, other traditions focus on melody over harmony (e.g. Carnatic and Hindustani), although they have to consider harmony as a by-product of polyphonic music (i.e. more than 1 instrument).
Like Western electronic music written after 1960, for example. :)
(And electronic music is, like, basically all we have today.)
Firstly, "western electronic music" covers an enormous range, from still, wall-of-sound ambient to four-on-the-floor EDM to music that sounds like any other but is generated using electronic/digital instruments.
Secondly, I could give you tons of examples of western electronic music that is almost entirely about harmony and not melody. The first one that springs to mind is any of Steve Roach's "immersion" series, or even more so "Mystic Chords and Sacred Spaces". But basically anything that might get played on SomaFM's "Drone Zone" channel is in the same category.
So, I suspect you have a much more specific idea of what you actually meant by "western electronic music", and you should likely lay it out more precisely.
You can have a whole set developing motifs, then multiple minutes of a single note being played in the middle, and somehow that sounds awesome (if you’re into it)
Try it yourself - play one note on repeat and start twirling the cutoff knob.
Maybe go on Youtube and listen to music that you might not be familiar with?
Cage, Schaffer, Stockhousen, Boulez are some composers in the tradition of European classical music.
If you go outside that tradition, there’s even more. Endlessly more.
All of the many parts of western music serve the harmonic progression. This is because human emotion attaches itself most strongly to harmonic progression, and music is the art of manipulating human emotion through sound.
>A set of great musicians can play a single note for minutes and get it to sound amazing, this has always fascinated me more.
Someone already asked, but give me an example.
I suppose that is literally true but I think of timbre (especially after reading Sethares who I mentioned earlier) as telling me about the notes that are brought along for the ride but aren't shown on the sheet music. It's well known that a distorted powerchord introduces a major 3rd (and not the 12TET major third) as well as a phantom or missing bass note and other higher notes which may or may not be perceptible in a given piece. Quite a bit different from what two flutes playing a root and fifth will give you.
The cuties with cooties
Corporate duties and African rubies
It's the doobies and boobies
That see K's like Louie
Shake out the loogies
And K-shape the Louis
Here's a statistical mechanics paper that I don't quite understand yet, but seems more aligned with the physics of harmony.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav8490
Harmony isn't just the chords made, though. It's about the progression between chords,too.