Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XuAaf | Excerpts:
According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’—a pleasant-sounding combination of notes—is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these ‘integer ratios’ are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music ‘dissonant,’ unpleasant sounding.
But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.
First: “We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.”
Second:
“Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of their shape and physics, are what we would call ‘inharmonic.’”
“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.”
I think perfect music starts to approach the uncanny valley just like a perfect human face does. Where it’s just missing some piece that you can’t quite figure out. Also distortion/saturation makes music sound better, pretty much always.
Sooo… more Jimi Hendrix, less Sousa Marching Band, eh? What about stuff like Kraftwerk? Their stuff is intentionally ‘robotic’ so I’m wondering if you find it either boring or disagreeable – or if instead it becomes pleasing for achieving its goal. I am in the last camp for that, but I have to be in the mood.
Regardless, I think most musicians intuitively know audiences prefer variation (or just have that preference themselves). I mean, for decades now drum machines/software has had a “human drummer” option to make beats come in slightly off-beat (but don’t tell that to the characters in “Whiplash”).
This applies to all music. Sousa is Sousa, but Ragtime was once as radical as Hendrix.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=eHGiXSLkrNg
Stravinsky’s first performance of The Rites of Spring was so disruptive it inspired exaggerations that riots broke out immediately.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KzVDpdKgLS4
One of the things that I think is probably about Kraftwerk and other electronic music is that often their synths are very slightly detuned so that intervals aren’t perfect and sounds that aren’t perfectly consonant. This gives it a “crunchier”, more complex sound that is more pleasing than sounds that are perfectly in tune/in phase with each other.
Those aren’t perfect though, there’s still distortion and unsteadyness. As an audio engineer, even when an instrument is super clean, I add a little saturation to make it come to life. And yes much electronic music is perfect rhythm wise, but they often mess with more complexity to make it feel off or lean into the uncanny nature of it’s perfection.
Just because it’s in the uncanny valley doesn’t make it bad.
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