Music has charms to soothe a savage beast, especially if the music is by Insane Clown
Posse and the beast is a Juggalo.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, I’m Jules here for DNews.
Why do we like the music we like?
I’m not talking about genre; there’s no scientific explanation for why people like
yodelling, at least not in this episode.
No I mean something more fundamental.
Why do we like the very sounds that make up all the different genres?
What is it about certain combinations of notes that strike a chord with us?
Well, for hundreds of years it was thought that the answer was: physics.
Sound waves from musical notes that are certain intervals apart interfere with each other,
and depending on the interval the new wave form they create will have a distinct pattern.
Notes a 5th apart like C to G create a nice repeating pattern and we call this consonance.1
But lower that G just a half step to an F sharp and suddenly the new waveform pattern
goes crazy: dodging, dipping, diving, ducking and dodging all over the place.
And this is called dissonance.2
If a dissonant chord uses two notes that are close together, like C and C sharp, then the
waveform they generate will be confusing in your brain.
The frequencies are too close together for your auditory nerves to distinguish, and the
wave interference will make it sound like it’s one weird note that’s rapidly getting
louder and softer, this is known as beating.1
19th century German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz pointed at the beating
effect and said that it was the reason we find dissonant chords ugly and don’t use
them in our music.
The idea has a nice ring to it, but lately it’s been turned on its ear.
In 2012 Marion Cousineau of the University of Montreal and Josh McDermott of New York
University teamed up to test if beating was the reason that people are averse to dissonance.
They gathered a group of people who couldn’t distinguish pitch, melody, or sing in tune,
which is a “musical disorder” called “amusia”.
They played them and a control group, consonant and dissonant chords, and sounds with and
without beating.
As expected, the amusics couldn’t distinguish consonant from dissonant chords, and weren’t
put off by them like the control group was.
Surprisingly though, the group with amusia disliked the beating just as much as their
karaoke capable counterparts.3 This suggests that, yes, while beating may play a part in
our dislike of dissonant sounds, it’s not the only factor at play.
McDermott reasoned that maybe we’re conditioned to like the sounds we do by the music we’re
exposed to.3 In order to study this though, he’d have to find a group of people who
had never heard western music, and that wasn't easy.
Our music is ubiquitous, it’s impossible to escape Taylor Swift, musically or otherwise-
we used to date.
But McDermott managed to find 12,000 people who had never dated or heard the dulcet tones
of T-dawg Swift.
As an assistant professor at MIT7, Mcdermott teamed up with Ricardo Godoy of Brandeis University
to study a remote Amazonian tribe called the Tsimane . The Tsimane are a farming and foraging
society with limited exposure to western culture.
McDermott and Godoy played a variety of sounds to 100 of them, as well as nearby Bolivian
farmers, city dwellers in Bolivia’s capital La Paz, and American musicians and nonmusicians.
They found that across the 4 of the 5 groups, the preference of consonant chords to dissonant
ones was always there to some degree.
Except within the Tsimane tribespeople.
They showed no preference for one sound over the other whatsoever.
McDermott and Godoy made sure that they weren’t dealing with an entire tribe of amusics, they
responded to what is called “acoustic roughness”, or rapidly modulating unpleasant tones, the
same as anyone in the other test groups.
This lead the researchers to conclude that we learn to like the sounds we’re exposed
to, and preference for chords is not something hard wired.
So, when you hear a song on the radio for the first time and hate it, but then can’t
stop bumping your head to it the next time you hear it… feel free to blame science
for your new Katy Perry addiction.
If you’re an avant garde musician out to change the world’s perception of music,
it’d help if you had a website to spread your sound.
Yoko Ono dot com is still available.
No domain extension will help you tell your story like a DOT COM or DOT NET domain name.
And because you watch DNews, you can get 15% off Domain Dot Com’s names and web hosting
by using the code DNews when you check out.
The four right chords can make me cry, especially if they’re played loud enough to burst my
eardrums.
To learn how sounds can physically break you, check out Julian’s video here.
Do you think you could ever learn to like the sound of a cat walking on a piano?