c.f. surf music and spongebob’s sound cues

Did our ancestors find God playing the electric guitar standing next to the ocean or something?

  • @[email protected]
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    7 months ago

    There’s so much variability in tonal systems, I don’t think we can make any kind of claim about “natural”.

    Western Europeans are used to an 8 tone system that’s been even tempered. Move away from that at all and it sounds weird to most people. Even what most people think of as classical would sound odd to them in their original un-tempered forms with contemporaneous instruments.

    Hell, most people don’t know what to make of minor chords, let alone something like pentatonic systems or even more “weird” to us tonal systems.

    Professor Greenburg discusses this in “How to Understand Great Music” (if I remember right), which is in many libraries (It’s a Teaching Company production, which are university courses on DVD). He’s a fantastic presenter, very honest and direct about how music has developed.

    • AatubeOP
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      17 months ago

      “Oh, Susana” has 5-tone verses. Or, did you mean temperament (which I assume means the “distance” between the tones) when you said “move away”.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        Yea, temperament. Even though we use the same 8-note system that was used during the “classical” period, the distance (in frequency) between certain pitches isn’t the same as then, because we now (generally) use even-tempering.

        Re:move away

        Move away from today’s temperament in pop music (or even how classical is played with modern instruments) and most people would probably be confused because of these slight frequency changes.

        I’ve heard classical played with historically accurate temperament using instruments adjusted to try to reflect the sounds of the time - very different.

        Check out prof Greenburg - pretty sure he does it in one of his lecture series.