Jakarta – Pythagoras is known as a Greek philosopher who was a genius in the world of mathematics. However, it turns out he was wrong when he used mathematics for the beauty of music.
Reporting from detikInetPythagoras thought that the combination of harmonious tones known as musical consonance relied on simple ‘integer ratios’ in frequency or pitch.
The combination produces an interesting sounding tune. Pythagoras thought that harmonization could be applied to all types of instruments.
However, Pythagoras’s assumption was denied by researchers. An international research team asked 4,272 volunteers to find out how they reacted to certain tones.
These reactions indicate a preference for music with less mathematical imperfections.
“We prefer a bit of deviation,” says music psychologist Peter Harrison, of the University of Cambridge.
“We like a little imperfection because it gives life to the sound, and that appeals to us,” he continued.
The team found that Pythagoras’ favored whole number ratios could be ignored when it came to instruments less familiar to western listeners. Some of them include gongs, gambang or bonang.
The researchers responded to the instrument from Indonesia. They considered the consonant and dissonance patterns of the musical instrument to be completely new.
Researchers think these patterns match the musical scales used in Indonesian culture. Not suitable for the scales preferred in countries such as America and Europe.
In other words, timbre also influences consonants. These results suggest that listeners can recognize sounds even if they are not musicians or familiar with the instrument.
This relationship between timbre and consonant is the reason why some cultures have a different tone scaling system than what we know in western countries.
“These results provide an empirical basis for the idea that cultural variations in scale systems may be driven in part by the spectral properties of musical instruments used by different cultures,” the researchers wrote in their paper. This research has been published in Nature Communications.
This article has appeared on detikInet, read in full here
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2024-03-10 15:30:38
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