Drunk/stoned questions thead

[NoSleep]

That is fuckign amazing. In a sense he set the 'taste' of everyone who came after him, by inventing it. Some sort of genetic mutation allowed him to hear things in a different way, and he then comunicated that to everyone else through the environment, and their ideas, and genetic understanding of music changed and was passed on as a result. He was a minituare future human race listening inside his head.

He didn't invent anything, he observed a phenomenon and followed it up. Most definitely a discovery.

[momatt]

it suddenly struck me that our brains simply can't fathom how many people there really are in the world, countries of a million people are out there and idiots like me have no idea they even exist

I thought pretty much exactly the same thing while on recent trips to Hungary and Nigeria.  Countries I know pretty much nothing about, full of people with lives and stories and families and jobs.  Milling about doing their thing, millions of them that I hadn't previously ever thought about.  That's just two countries, where there are hundreds more.
So many people, and this is just the ones in my lifetime!  There's going to be so many more and there's been so many in the past too.
Hurts my brain.

How do vinyl records work? I mean, really. A needle scraping across plastic sounds the same as a musical performance.

This is also an absolute marvel.  I sort of know what's going on, with magnets, coils and vibrations, but it's bloody magical all the same.  Great that such old technology is still valid and used today.

[pancreas]

That Pythagoras stuff is probably entirely apocryphal. I looked into this a while ago so far as to try to get a handle on his mathematics. There are no first hand accounts of the Pythagoreans. There are barely any second hand accounts. At least some of them followed the akousma. Stuff like

Abstain from beans. Eat only the flesh of animals that may be sacrificed. Do not step over the beam of a balance. On rising, straighten the bedclothes and smooth out the place where you lay. Spit on your hair clippings and nail parings. Destroy the marks of a pot in the ashes. Do not piss towards the sun. Do not use a pine-torch to wipe a chair clean. Do not look in a mirror by lamplight. On a journey do not turn around at the border, for the Furies are following you. Do not make a detour on your way to the temple, for the god should not come second. Do not help a person to unload, only to load up. Do not dip your hand into holy water. Do not kill a louse in the temple. Do not stir the fire with a knife. One should not have children by a woman who wears gold jewellery. One should put on the right shoe first, but when washing do the left foot first. One should not pass by where an ass is lying.

Voltaire thought these were probably idioms---I tend to agree. Other historians have thought they genuinely believed this stuff.

Plus the idea that Pythagoras invented the perfect fifth is patently absurd. The pentatonic scale (racist notes on a piano) contains a perfect fifth (yes---discounting well-tempering) and is Pythagoras to be credited for the existence of oriental music based on it? Wikipedia claims the Ancient Egyptians had lutes. They would have discovered a perfect fifth.

Also, you know better than this NoSleep, because you know that there are fractional relationships on the intervals concerned. If you believe that the natural numbers 1,2,3,... are natural, then you probably believe the fractions 1/2 (octave) 2/3 (fifth) etc are natural. You can't really invent/discover a perfect fifth here, without inventing/discovering 2/3.

There's more about the Pythagoreans here, though I would take that article with a large pinch of salt.

[NoSleep]

As I said, he didn't invent anything, he discovered it. And, as you say, other cultures made the same discovery (which is why I confined the Pythagorean story to western music).

It doesn't really matter if it was Pythagoras or somebody else from that line, which is why the semi-legendary status of Pythagoras wasn't mentioned. There may well have been such a figure or maybe several individuals.

Harmony exists in nature, it wasn't invented. It was utilised rather than created by us.

[momatt]

Harmony exists in nature, it wasn't invented. It was utilised rather than created by us.

This is a very lovely sentence.

I like the story with the anvils.  Like Archimedes in the bath, it doesn't really matter if it's true of not, just a nice story.

[Dr Syntax Head]

As I said, he didn't invent anything, he discovered it. And, as you say, other cultures made the same discovery (which is why I confined the Pythagorean story to western music).

It doesn't really matter if it was Pythagoras or somebody else from that line, which is why the semi-legendary status of Pythagoras wasn't mentioned. There may well have been such a figure or maybe several individuals.

Harmony exists in nature, it wasn't invented. It was utilised rather than created by us.

Truth.

[Dex Sawash]

Messiaen's organ music is the most gothic music ever written, and the organ is the most gothic instrument. These are not good or bad evaluative judgements, they are simply plain facts, which we can chose to accept.

Messiaen finds ecstasy in the most profound despair. All his emotional moods are of a piece, and each stunningly different.

He explores every single shade of grey in the universe.

Too bad he wastes all that time on football

[Kane Jones]

If the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square on the other two sides, why is a mouse when it spins?

[Hangthebuggers]

Regarding the music theory. The Indian study of harmony predates the Greek stuff - some say by hundreds (maybe thousands) of years.

The Vedic period defined what would become the first form of music (and then grammar, linguistics, maths etc).

All based around chanting from one note to two notes to three notes (or high, low and level/balance) - it also related to meditative harmony and how (they believed) external sound could affect the individual and the individuals consciousness. This was based on pre-vedic beliefs that chanting out of tune so to speak could create disharmony in nature and humanity and subsequently the spirit realms.  They say these initial chants were mankind's way of trying match the hum of bees and birds and the wind and such (and even the direction they faced, north, south, east, west and heavenward was important to keeping a balance). From those three chanted notes (over hundreds of years) eventually evolved into the recognition and use of seven notes and then further complex scales.

So regarding Pythagoras, his studies were considered rekindling of such beliefs much later with a belief in three types of 'music' (the music we cannot hear or the music of the spheres or the constant static that would ONLY be noticeable if all the heavenly bodies would stop spinning), also the music of the body and also the music of instruments.

But yeah it all comes from chanting and nature essentially, but the Hindus were some of the first to really apply it in any real substance.

Edit: I think Pythagoras's discoveries mainly lay in stuff like the measurement of string based sounds and how they could be constantly measured by length and material to produce certain frequencies as a constant, although Eastern wonders were apparently way ahead in regards to at least recognising such tuning.

I'm crap at explaining it, but it's something I've skimmed over a few years ago. In short it was spiritual before it became philosophical and scientifical.

[Rolf Lundgren]

Was anyone ever correctly sold PPI?

[Bobtoo]

Yes, me.

I had an inkling that my job was on the line when we took out a consolidation loan in 2001. My redundancy was announced about two days after the PPI kicked in. After six months I got another job, only to be made redundant again less than a year later. I think I got 18 payments out of them.

I wasn't really sold it though, I chose to buy it.

[Howj Begg]

John Oliver just isn't funny. I refuse to believe that anyone thinks he's funny.

[Johnny Yesno]

That is fuckign amazing. In a sense he set the 'taste' of everyone who came after him, by inventing it.

I'd be cautious about calling the description and formalising of an idea as 'inventing' it. I'm pretty sure people had been making polyphonic music before Pythagoras made this discovery, and he certainly wasn't the only person to shape the chord system we have today.

Edit: Doh! Note to self: read rest of thread before replying

[touchingcloth]

The discussion about music theory reminds me of a drunk/stoned observation, not question, which I had last night. For several centuries, there have been people who have been able to write and perform the most complex, stirring and challenging music using nothing more than some marks on pieces of paper.

Music theory is something which, despite having learned the flute aged ten and been in several hobbying rock bands over the years, I just do not fucking get, so the above fact fills me with nothing but awe and admiration for people at the top of their musical game. Time signatures? What's all that about!

This came to me while listening to "I Am So Proud" from The Mikado which is, while not especially highbrow, an extraordinary bit of composition and lyricism.

[Howj Begg]

What the FUCK is the song Yellow Submarine about?

Seriously what?

[Howj Begg]

This came to me while listening to "I Am So Proud" from The Mikado which is, while not especially highbrow, an extraordinary bit of composition and lyricism.

Nice, i'll check that out.

I think I might listen to a Nielsen symphony tonight.

[NoSleep]

The discussion about music theory reminds me of a drunk/stoned observation, not question, which I had last night. For several centuries, there have been people who have been able to write and perform the most complex, stirring and challenging music using nothing more than some marks on pieces of paper.

Music theory is something which, despite having learned the flute aged ten and been in several hobbying rock bands over the years, I just do not fucking get, so the above fact fills me with nothing but awe and admiration for people at the top of their musical game. Time signatures? What's all that about!

This came to me while listening to "I Am So Proud" from The Mikado which is, while not especially highbrow, an extraordinary bit of composition and lyricism.

It should be borne in mind that some of the major composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) were great improvisers as well as composers. They could spontaneously compose on the spot and often some of these improvisations were turned into dots for posterity. Beethoven for one was more well-known as a performer of improvisations than as a composer in his own time. Unfortunately he never made a single recording.

[Bingo Fury]

I'd be cautious about calling the description and formalising of an idea as 'inventing' it. I'm pretty sure people had been making polyphonic music before Pythagoras made this discovery, and he certainly wasn't the only person to shape the chord system we have today.

Edit: Doh! Note to self: read rest of thread before replying

I saw a Howard Goodall "history of music"-type programme a few years ago which seemed to be claiming that nobody even thought of polyphony until about the 10th Century, and that before then everyone just sang in unison. What, no harmonies? If true, I think that's pretty mind-blowing.

[touchingcloth]

Improvisation makes my head spin slightly. I can barely get my head around people being able to compose and read music, so seeing someone just make something up on the spot is incomprehensible to me, basically magic. I don't enjoy the extended improvisational jazz that Stewart Lee pretends to love, but I can definitely marvel at the skill involved.

I know it's probably close to entirely fabricated, but that scene in Amadeus where Mozart takes the welcoming march of Salieri's that the Emperor has played for him and just riffs on it is delightful[nb]Court composer.[/nb].

[Depressed Beyond Tables]

Improvisation makes my head spin slightly. I can barely get my head around people being able to compose and read music, so seeing someone just make something up on the spot is incomprehensible to me, basically magic. I don't enjoy the extended improvisational jazz that Stewart Lee pretends to love, but I can definitely marvel at the skill involved.

I know it's probably close to entirely fabricated, but that scene in Amadeus where Mozart takes the welcoming march of Salieri's that the Emperor has played for him and just riffs on it is delightful[nb]Court composer.[/nb].

It's no different to the improvised sentence you've just posted.

Learn the words, form sentences and waffle a bit. Throw in a few quotes if you like. Music is no different to any other language.

[NoSleep]

I saw a Howard Goodall "history of music"-type programme a few years ago which seemed to be claiming that nobody even thought of polyphony until about the 10th Century, and that before then everyone just sang in unison. What, no harmonies? If true, I think that's pretty mind-blowing.

I've watched that particular Howard Goodall presentation and it's not particularly informative, sometimes even getting major points wrong. It's OK but a bit of a gloss and all in the name of justifying the 12-note equal temperament scale that is now used in western music. He reckons that Bach was the first to use equal temperament and Bach never used equal temperament; opting, as the title of his famed book proclaims; well-temperament, which as bit of an art in itself.

If you're interested there's a good (accurate) essay about the history of tuning in western music here:

http://www.kylegann.com/histune.html

...and never trust a word Howard Goodall utters.

[NoSleep]

Improvisation makes my head spin slightly. I can barely get my head around people being able to compose and read music, so seeing someone just make something up on the spot is incomprehensible to me, basically magic. I don't enjoy the extended improvisational jazz that Stewart Lee pretends to love, but I can definitely marvel at the skill involved.

I know it's probably close to entirely fabricated, but that scene in Amadeus where Mozart takes the welcoming march of Salieri's that the Emperor has played for him and just riffs on it is delightful[nb]Court composer.[/nb].

Improvisation is the beginning of music, without it there would be no dots on paper.

Have a listen to some of Keith Jarrett's live solo piano recordings and you may be surprised. It's probably the closest thing we have today to what Beethoven was doing in his improvised performances. There's also Charles Mingus' album "Mingus Plays Piano" that is also based mainly on "spontaneous composition"; at least one of which was transcribed to full jazz orchestra a few years later, to give an idea of how structured improvisation can be.

Myself When I Am Real - Mingus

Keith Jarrett gets funky at Bregenz (listen out for his parrot)

[Howj Begg]

2001: A Space Odyssey is actually a satire on Nietzsche, isn't it? Didn't realise that until this moment.

I think lack of understanding of this fact is what gives its its fearsome rep. It's seen as more 'serious' than it is, like it has a deep philosophical message. It's good enoguh without that! But it's actually havin g a good laugh with Neitzche's ubermensch and untermensch ideas. In space. With horror, death, madness, and creepy gods.

[Howj Begg]

Actually, follow up to this: the ending with the baby-god in space is still the most mindblowing thing I've ever seen in a film, ever. Saw it age 9, it restructured my brain.

Does telling people about this bit count as giving a massive Spoiler, like The Sixth Sense or another well-worn example? Is it the point of the film? Or is it another excessive joke, which this film is packed full of?

[Gurke and Hare]

Why are our prisons full of legal highs? Shouldn't it be the other way round?  Why are they reforming in this way?

I tried spice once but ended up tearing an entire multi-bag of Frazzles in half like a strong-man and yelling 'RAaaaaaaaaaaa' which woke up Fiona Bruce who then called the cops.

Is the Spice that they have in prison the same stuff that was sold as a weed alternative under that brand name before it got banned about 8 years ago? I bought it once or twice, and the effect was very weed-like, without the making-you-insanely-violent effect that the stuff in prison apparently has. It was a good alternative if I couldn't get hold of weed, but it was bloody expensive.

[Howj Begg]

In what sense is development of music a discovery, rather than an invention? Some factors on each side:

Music is a discovery of processes existing in nature because:

- It is based on mathematics, which is one of the few processes we know exists in the universe, independent of human thought/perception

- Bird song, and other natural sounds such as plants/trees in the wind, are the basis of our percpetion of what is 'musical'. The fact that birds and other creatures sing or call suggests that some sounds and sound conjunctions might be pleasing to the ear, because they are 'naturally' pleasing. Also suggest that evolution has brought about our perception of and understanding of music. Thus: a natural process.

- Animals do make 'music', not just communicative sounds, to enjoy for themselves or to entertain other animals. Animals have been observed enjoying and dancing to human-made music.

- Whale song!

Music is something that has to be invented because it doesn't exist in nature:

- Only man has done it, to a level of sophistication which suggesting an actual discipline, rather than basic communication. In this sense music could be compared to literature and cinema, art forms that do not exist in nature, and which had to be invented, whatever their evolution from much simpler forms.

- Musical harmonics and styles differ amongst cultures, the best examples being the 'alien' soundworld of Chinese and other far eastern soundworlds to European ears of several hundred years ago. This suggests that, after the initial genesis of music, the way it 'sounds' had to be developed by humans thinking independently, with their own environmental pressures.

- The distinction is between music' (the composed/performed synthesis of many sounds in a developmental whole that makes cognitive sense to us) and natural sounds. The latter are all that exists in nature. This is taking a stricter definition of music than many artists like to emply these days, but I'm trying to pin down a scientific, operationalised definition.

- Whilst elephants and other mammals/birds have been observed enjoying music, they enjoy it in a more rudimentary level than humans do, and they prefer beats and sounds, rather than say, the thematic development across a long Beethoven or Mahler symphony. This suggests there may something categorically different about 'music' that pertains to human perception/cognition, and was thus developed by human subjective processes.

- Humans certainly have the intellectual and artistic capacity to develop art forms that have ben observed nowhere in nature.

[NoSleep]

There are some musical apes who have collective chants (so, rhythmic vocals rather than sung melodies); I saw these apes in a documentary about music a few years back (and I've forgotten which species).

There's a connection between speech and music; certainly the conveying of emotion by raising and lowering the pitch of the voice.

The above could explain why there's a particular part of the brain that processes music, as opposed to general sound in the environment. It's likely that this special processing would have to exist before music as such (far less likely that we evolved musical perception before music existed).

The connection between speech and music can also explain the difference in music from population to population; even area to area. There is a test, known as the tritone paradox where a series of paired tones are played in succession and the participant has to say whether they hear a rise in pitch or a fall from the first to the second tone. The pitch difference is a tritone (the pitch exactly at the middle of an octave) and the sound used to generate the pitches is of a kind where you can hear all octaves at once, so there is ambiguity about whether the notes pitch up or down; they actually do neither. However, the listener will always pick "up" or "down" (sometimes someone will hear one go both up and down, but even then there will be a "preference"). So there is a bias in all our hearing. But here's the thing - when results are collated for several individuals, it's found that people who speak the same dialect will often hear the tones the same way, as if they are tuned into the voices from their locality (or the people they grew up with).

Some stuff about the tritone paradox and Diana Deutsch, the researcher: http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=206

And here's the test: http://philomel.com/mp3/musical_illusions/Tritone_paradox.mp3 (I hear hear up, up, down, down - the last two pairs being slightly ambiguous for my ears)

There's also a composer (again seen in a documentary mostly forgotten) who analysed birdsong by recording it and pitching it down to the series of clicks it actually is. The perception of "musical notes" we hear is probably not what birds are perceiving from the same material, as their sense of the passage of time is much faster than ours. What he found was that the birds were structuring their "songs" in ways similar to forms used in classical music; that somehow these forms are reflected in nature; that composers are falling in with a natural order rather than these forms being purely an invention.

[pancreas]

NoSleep makes some good points.

I'd go with 90% of the most important aspects of music socially is 90% invented. Even if there are some intrinsic commonalities across cultures one can point to---octaves, perfect fifths, beats vs heartbeats, bird song etc.---that goes very little way towards explaining the narrative that we expect a piece of music to have. Classical tends to be the source of the most intricate and long narratives but they exist in most music---most popular music certainly. People talking about 'when the beat drops' is them explaining an aspect of a narrative structure.

Relationships between harmonies and melodies, counterpoints, sonorities, and so on, can all be draughted into the narrative. It's probably why Jazz and Classical are so alien to many people, because the tropes they rely on for their narratives can be very specialised.

Here's an example of a recent trope which helps create a piece of narrative: Why does an A flat major chord (or even E flat) feel so much like a 'space' chord (in the sense of a sci-fi films) when it comes in the middle of some C major harmony? It's *seems like* a fairly obvious example of musical convention that has stuck, precisely because of its otherness.

Anyway, I'm sure that for most people, the reason that they love certain pieces of music have very little to do with the intrinsic stuff and very much to do with the narrative and convention stuff.

This probably could have been a better post but I'm on the wine.

[touchingcloth]

What's an example of something with a "space chord" in it?

[pancreas]

What's an example of something with a "space chord" in it?

I've looked. The C major/A flat major thing is in the ET theme tune. 27 seconds into this, just as the melody is descending.

In the Back to The Future theme at 15s you get C, E-flat (space chord), F, G, which is pretty archetypal. (The first three notes are (going up in tone) C, G, C, then goes down by a notch to a B flat note, which is where the E-flat harmony is---at about 18s.)  [EDIT Actually that's a semitone out, but otherwise right.]

I'll try and remember some more.

---

It's somewhat difficult to discern from the recording but I find from a PDF that the C / Ab thing (Or rather Bb / Gb, in this instance) are the first two chords in the Star Trek tune, 26 and 29s, respectively.

---

The middle section of the Star Trek Voyager theme. (First bit doesn't have it---all quite vanilla, harmony wise.) But at 56 seconds, you have an ascending scale starting in (I think) F# major and then hitting a D major chord at 1:03, which is another transposition of the C major/Ab major 'space chord'---and it does sound like a space chord.