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Date: | Tue, 5 Jan 1999 12:57:01 -0500 |
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Chris Bonds wrote:
>... are you suggesting, as Hindemith did, that harmony is somehow
>inescapable because of the universality of the harmonic series? I think
>Hindemith's theories (and Rameau's before him, as well as numerous others
>in between) were interesting but the fact remains that nobody has ever
>proven that the correspondence between traditional harmonic structures
>(i.e. the triad) and the harmonic series is more than a provocative
>coincidence.
No. I am saying that the mechanism of finding a "harmonic background"
is universal fact of perception. Give people sounds and they will find
a "background". The attempt by the ear to find a related sound pattern.
Since this mode of perception is inescapable - harmony is inescapable. For
those who need things broken down into grunts for them: not necessarily
western harmony.
Different cultures will cultivate those forms of harmonic congruence that
seem most useful to them. In the West much of our music is based on the
sine based overtone series. Other cultures search for percussive harmonic
congruence - drums and so on. The form of these wave fronts is best
described by fractal wavelets rather than by sin waves. While one can
never prove that something is not a coincidence - since as long as it is
possible it is possible by chance - one can show that there is a consistent
pattern in the West of priveledging intstruments which are based on the
vibration of colomns which are much longer than they are wide - which
yields sine based waves which yields an overtone series which makes the
Western description of harmony based on an overtone series useful in that
context. I'm not going to speculate on what the causes of this are, though
the dominance of vocal music over dance music trough much of the
development of Western theory is probably at least part of the reason.
So coincidence - I don'tthink so it is one of the major forms of Harmonic
congruence, and that at least one culture has cultivated it to a high
degree is not particularly startling. That other cultures have not isn't
particular startling either - other cultures that are far less dominated
by sin wave producing instruments, and hence the harmonic backgrounds
the produce are far less oriented towards neat overtone series.
Stirling S Newberry [log in to unmask]
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