Regards the highlighted section -
Do you know what the overtone series is ?
from -
Overtone
"Overtones or harmonics are the natural parts of any pitch heard when it is sounded. That is to say, that each pitch that we hear contains addition pitches within it that are termed
overtones or harmonics. The relative strength or weakness of these
overtones determines the tone color or timbre of the pitch. This is why no two instruments sound alike.When a pitch is played, the main note heard is the fundamental (the note itself), but there is also present a series of other pitches above it called
overtones or harmonics. The first
overtone is an octave above the fundamental, the second is an octave and a fifth above the fundamental, the third is two octaves, the fourth is two octaves and a third, and so on, with each following
overtone closer to the last than the last was to the tone before it.
The series of
overtones (harmonic series) for the fundamental pitch C would consist of
C-C3-G3-C4-E4 G4-B-Flat4*-C5-D5 E5-F-Sharp5*-G5-A5*-B Flat5*-B5-C6."
Here are some snippets of musicology you may find interesting. I'm leaving out any use of the term 'spiritual', because it's one of those effectively meaningless words... though I may return to Gurdjieff's idea "The Law of Octaves" which he expressed half a century before Mandelbrot sets and fractals become known.
There are two aspects to the overtone series that I would like to draw to your attention, in relation to your statement (highlighted) about music.
The first is the historical development of music. As it happens, the notes in the overtone series are a sort of schema of the evolution of music over the last few thousand years.
Here is a quick cut and paste to save me from too much work -
"The overtone series can actually be used to trace the progression of harmonic development through Western music. As George Frederick McKay points out in
The Technique of Modern Harmony, different eras throughout musical history became more accepting of higher reaching chord tones in conjunction with the overtone series.
Octaves and 5ths are primal intervals, natural to ancient music. The use of the third became prominent in the Renaissance and with composers such as Palestrina in the 1500s. Bach and his contemporaries began to exploit the 7th in the 16th and 17th centuries. The 9th didnt become an important chord tone until the time of Wagner in the mid 19th Century, and the extended tones of #11 and 13th werent commonly accepted until the music of early 20th century composers like Debussy and Stravinsky."
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Quick Tip: The Overtone Series
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But it is man made, your favorite bands are not channeling some fundamental aspect of reality, not making it come to life"
As you can see, the historical development of music in fact does "
channel some fundamental aspect of reality, not making it come to life".
And there was no "central music committee" driving this. This was done spontaneously over many generations and cultures.
The second aspect of the overtone series I would like to tell you about is the Indian melakarta raga system.
Without going into a load of arcane musical maths, there is a musical 'problem' called the Pythagorean comma. I am not going to attempt to define that here, the post would become a Wikipedia entry. Suffice to say that to maintain the ratios of the different musical intervals over multiple octaves is an impossibility. Our (western) assignment of frequencies to the 12 notes of the octave is a best-fit compromise, the equal-tempered scale.
Here's some further information -
Equal Temperament -- from Eric Weisstein's Treasure Trove of Music
The Indians are a very clever bunch, and arrived at their own way of dealing with this. The Indian system uses srutis (microtones). The octave is divided into 22 notes rather than 12. They still use 7 note scales, but most of the notes have 2 or 3 variations, one of which is chosen for a given scale.
The raga system has 72 ragas. A raga is a combination of a specific
scale selected from the 22 srutis (sometimes 2 scales, one for ascending notes and another for descending notes), plus a specific
tala (time signature - though some of them are very strange and complicated to western musicians, except maybe some demented metal-heads) and a set of characteristic musical motifs (riffs) which serve as the prototypes for improvisation. Each raga is also associated with a specific emotion, time of year and time of day, but that is not relevant to this post ( in any way that I could 'prove').
Here is the important point about raga - the 22 srutis are all integer relationships to the tonic (root note of the scale). Thus they all have a direct relationship to frequencies of the overtone series of the tonic.
So each raga exploits the overtone series of the tonic which is always maintained as a drone (pedal note).Unlike western music, where choices have been made which disallow this level of consonance, each note of the scale resonates with one of the natural harmonics of the drone.
So there you have two examples of how the intrinsic nature, the physics, of sound underlies the historical development of music throughout human history, and is the underlying principle of one of the most sophisticated musical forms to have ever existed.
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not channeling some fundamental aspect of reality" ?
Yes it does. Musical forms have grown around the natural phenomenon of the overtone series. Not arbitrary.
opcorn:
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