PYTHAGORAS WAS WRONG: THERE ARE NO UNIVERSAL MUSICAL HARMONIES, STUDY FINDS.

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The researchers found that the bonang's consonances mapped neatly onto the particular musical scale used in the Indonesian culture from which it comes. These consonances cannot be replicated on a Western piano, for instance, because they would fall between the cracks of the scale traditionally used. "Our findings challenge the traditional idea that harmony can only be one way, that chords have to reflect these mathematical relationships. We show that there are many more kinds of harmony out there, and that there are good reasons why other cultures developed them," Dr Harrison said. Importantly, the study suggests that its participants -- not trained musicians and unfamiliar with Javanese music -- were able to appreciate the new consonances of the bonang's tones instinctively. "Music creation is all about exploring the creative possibilities of a given set of qualities, for example, finding out what kinds of melodies can you play on a flute, or what kinds of sounds can you make with your mouth," Harrison said. "Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don't need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy." Exciting opportunities for musicians and producers Dr Harrison hopes that the research will encourage musicians to try out unfamiliar instruments and see if they offer new harmonies and open up new creative possibilities. "Quite a lot of pop music now tries to marry Western harmony with local melodies from the Middle East, India, and other parts of the world. That can be more or less successful, but one problem is that notes can sound dissonant if you play them with Western instruments. "Musicians and producers might be able to make that marriage work better if they took account of our findings and considered changing the 'timbre', the tone quality, by using specially chosen real or synthesised instruments. Then they really might get the best of both worlds: harmony and local scale systems." Harrison and his collaborators are exploring different kinds of instruments and follow-up studies to test a broader range of cultures. In particular, they would like to gain insights from musicians who use 'inharmonic' instruments to understand whether they have internalised different concepts of harmony to the Western participants in this study. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 States News Service Source Citation (APA 7th Edition) PYTHAGORAS WAS WRONG: THERE ARE NO UNIVERSAL MUSICAL HARMONIES, STUDY FINDS. (2024, March 4). States News Service. https://link-gale-com.access.authkb.kb.nl/apps/doc/A785084578/STND?u=kobibli&sid=bookmarkSTND&xid=8755876b Gale Document Number: GALE|A785084578