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Having posted some small tidbits of info about psychoacoutics, permit me to note in addendum that there's a lot more going on in psychoacoustics research than terminology.
Some people have suggested that it's all just about the words we use to describe muisc.
WRONG.
This is one of the most misconceived and cognitively impaired legacies of the "any scam goes" period of new music from the 1950s through the late 1970s. One of the most glaring examples of this kind of complete failure to understand the human auditory system is a response by one forum subscriber. To wit, that Cage's use of random chance to generate meaningless notes makes some kind of sense because Cage used "indeterminate" rather than random processes.
This is a statement so breathtakingly silly as to beggar the imagination.
Think about it...
What this exercise in twixted logic says is that it makes some sort of difference that Cage generated notes which SOUND random, ACT random, SEEM random, and are statistically distributed in a manner IDENTICAL to random numbers..just as long as the notes aren't ACTUALLY random, but "indeterminate." So long as there's some causal process at work generating random-sounding notes, according to this wacky reasoning, the notes won't actually sound random.
Please.
This is obvious nonsense. It's like saying that it doesn't matter if there's something in the punchbowl that smells like a turd, looks like a turd, feels like a turd and tastes like a turd--just as long as it isn't ACTUALLY a turd... As long as it's just imitation fecal matter, there's no problem.
Gimme a break.
Yet another classic and glaring example of theory ueber alles. What you hear doesn't matter--the only thing that counts is the arcane *theory* that generated the notes. Carried to extremes, as in Cage's music or the warped reasoning described above, the actual sound becomes an annoying waste product which an elite cadre of listeners force themelves to endure in order to get to the REAL event... namely, the THEORY.
On this forum, however, we're concerned with something *more* than gibberish & b.s. This forum exists presumably because most of us have discovered from hard experience that the pitches we use ACTUALLLY MATTER.
The sound of the music perceptibly changes (so we've come to understand) depending on the tuning. Choosing different tunings actually has an auditory effect. If we didn't agree on this, we wouldn't be subscribing to and contributing to this forum. Mind you--this isn't just a matter of semantics, as James Tenney's amusing and fundamentally ill-conceived "A History Of Consonance and DIssonance" implies. Tenney, like his idol John Cage, basically imagines that consonance and dissonance doesn't really exist except as a mass delusion in people's minds. It all depends on your point of view (so the twisted logic goes), so why worry about it? Any note is basically as good as any other note, because--after all--*anything* you hear is music.
This bizarre notion fundamentally conflicts with 150 years of lab data about the human auditory system. In fact, the history of psychoacoustics shows that there IS a clearly audible difference between consonance and dissonance.
It's not all just a point of view--it's not just a matter of semantics. A jet plane takeoff sounds painful when heard up close no matter who listens to it, while very soft white noise (like surf at night) sounds soothing no matter who listens to it.
This isn't open to debate--galvanic skin response, heart rate, breath rate and a host of other measurements demonstrate the basic properties of the human auditory system regardless of which culture you belong to, or how hard you try to hear "any sound as music." Saying that consonance and dissonance is not just a matter of semantics, however, is very different from saying that everyone hears the same vertical structures as equally dissonant or equally consonant. Mathews', Pierce's and Roberts' article "Harmony and New Scales," in Sundberg's 1986 compilation volume "Harmony and Tonality" adduces convincing evidence that two perceptually distinct classes of listeners differ strongly about what constitutes the most desirable or consonant vertical structures. As Cage's reign of error fades into oblivion, this basic dichotomy between listeners emerges as a significant compositional issue. Unlike the weird delusion that "everything is music" and "all notes are equal" (the first expounded by Cage, the second by the serialists), the current diversity in the new music scene is a healthy sign rather than a symptom of senescence. This forum allows both "rich" and "pure" listeners to coexist and discuss their differences in a reasonable way. By contrast, the attempts by Cage and other con artists to conjure away the audible differences between perceived structure in music vs. random chance, and the attempt to talk out of existence with smoke and mirrors the perceptual differences between various vertical intervals were *always* doomed to end in failure.
Endless reams of words cannot prestidigitate away the hard-wired properties of the human nervous system. No amount of theory and diagrams can change the reality that it's a WHOLE lot harder to hear minor seconds (whether just or equal tempered or meantone tuned) as points of acoustic rest than fifths (regardless of whether you're talking about 701.955-cent just fifths or 720-cent 15-tone fifths). What's interesting about the Mathews/Pierce/ Roberts finding is that for folks like myself, who compose in a wide & ecumenical variety of just intonations, equal tempered non-12 scales, and non-just non-equal-tempered scales, these results tell us that there's excellent justification for composing in all three classes of tunings. Because there's a class of listeners who will find at least some of that music perceptible in the same sense in which it was composed. "Rich" listeners will tend to gravitate toward n-j n-e-t compositions and various spiky, thorny-sounding equal temperant compositions which revel in beats... while "pure" listners will tend to be drawn towward those few ETs which well approximate a lot of the harmonic series, and just intonation compositions. So there's something for both classes of listeners.
--mclaren
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