Thinking Beyond Science

Pitch is a purely psychological construct, related both to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale. It provides the answer to the question “What note is that?” (“It’s a C-sharp.”) (When a trumpet player blows in his instrument and makes a single sound, he makes what most of us call a note, and what scientists call a tone. The two terms, tone and note, refer to the same entity in the abstract, but we reserve the word tone for what you hear, and the word note for what you see written on a musical score.) In the nursery rhymes “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Are You Sleeping?” pitch is the only thing that varies in the first seven notes-the rhythm stays the same. This demonstrates the power-and fundamentality-of pitch in defining a melody or song.

~Rhythm refers to the durations of a series of notes, and to the way that they group together into units. For example, in the “Alphabet Song” (the same as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”) the first six notes of the song are all equal in duration as we sing the names of the letters A B C D E F and then we hold the letter G for twice the duration. Then we’re back to the standard duration for HIJ K, and then the following four letters are sung with half the duration, or twice as fast per letter: L M N 0 and then ending on a held P (leading generations of schoolchildren to spend several early months believing that there was a letter in the English alphabet called ellemmenno).

Tempo refers to the overall speed or pace of the piece. If you were tapping your foot, dancing, or marching to the piece, it’s how fast or slow these regular movements would be.

Contour describes the overall shape of a melody, taking into account only the pattern of “up” and “down” (whether a note goes up or down, not the amount by which it goes up or down).

Timbre (rhymes with amber) distinguishes one instrument from another-say, trumpet from piano when both are playing the same written note. It is a kind of tonal color that is produced in part by overtones from the instrument’s vibrations (more on that later). It also describes the way that a single instrument can change sound as it moves across its range say the warm sound of a trumpet low in its range versus the piercing sound of that same trumpet playing its highest note.

Loudness is a purely psychological construct that relates (nonlin-early and in poorly understood ways) to how much energy an instrument creates, how much air it displaces and what an acoustician would call the amplitude of a tone.

Reverberation refers to the perception of how distant the source is from us in combination with how large a room or hall the music is in; often referred to as “echo” by laypeople, it is the quality that distinguishes the spaciousness of singing in a large concert hall from the sound of singing in your shower. It has an underappreci-ated role in communicating emotion and creating an overall pleasing sound.

Meter is created by our brains by extracting information from rhythm and loudness cues, and refers to the way in which tones are grouped with one another across time. A waltz meter organizes tones into groups of three, a march into groups of two or four.

Key has to do with a hierarchy of importance that exists between tones in a musical piece; this hierarchy does not exist in-the-world, it exists only in our minds, as a function of our experiences with a musical style and musical idioms, and mental schemas that all of us develop for understanding music.

Melody is the main theme of a musical piece, the part you sing along with, the succession of tones that are most salient in your mind. The notion of melody is different across genres. In rock mu-sic, there is typically a melody for the verses and a melody for the chorus, and verses are distinguished by a change in lyrics and sometimes by a change in instrumentation. In classical music, the melody is a starting point for the composer to create variations on that theme, which may be used throughout the entire piece in different forms.

The idea of primitive elements combining to create art, and of the in-portance of relationships between elements, also exists in visual art and dance. The fundamental elements of visual perception include color (which itself can be decomposed into the three dimensions of hue, satu-ration, and lightness), brightness, location, texture, and shape. But a painting is more than these; it is not just a line here and another there, or a spot of red in one part of the picture and a patch of blue in another.

What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas. Those dabs of paint and lines become art when form and flow (the way in which your eye is drawn across the canvas) are created out of lower-level perceptual elements. When they combine harmoniously they give rise to perspective, foreground and background, and ultimately to emotion and other aesthetic attributes. Similarly, dance is not just a raging sea of unrelated bodily movements; the relationship of those movements to one another is what creates integrity and integral-ity, a coherence and cohesion that the higher levels of our brain process. And as in visual art, music plays on not just what notes are sounded, but which ones are not.

Source : This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141565.This_Is_Your_Brain_on_Music

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