Not being a musician I have wondered is western music with all its theory and rules something that has been discovered and understood and applied to countless different tunes over time. Or has it been invented and could some other system not based on the eight notes in an octave be invented and work just as well.

This'll be good !
I reckon in the old days if you hit 2 rocks together in time someone might start dancing............

I think music has always existed as it based on natural frequencies and the duplication thereof.

Humans have been able to align these natural frequencies to a rhythm, or time signature, as well as a structure (in the context of a "song" A/A/B/A )

Please discuss further!

All books on music theory appear to me to be going out of their way to make it appear more complicated than it is.

My guess is that music started with something like a tea chest base. The someone figured if you put a fret half way down the broom stick, neck or whatever, you get double the frequency and that sounds good to the human ear. Next they found another spot that sounded good at 1.5 times the openly vibrating string. That has a ring to it and beats nicely.
Also. 1.3333 ( one and a 1/3) times the frequency sounds good. So now you've got 3 frets that sound good, lock them in. Why stop at 3? But there is only one way to now smoothly fill in the gaps. That's with 12 frets. The frets are spaced according to the 12th root of 2. The 5th and the 7th fret are 1.4949 and 1.3327 times the frequency. Close enough to 1.5 and 1.333. Sounds good enough for guitar players.

( Or maybe I should have said that if you try various numbers of frets along the open string to the half way point 6,7 frets...15 frets 16 frets etc you'll only get a fret land on or very close to the two intermediate sweet spots by dividing it down by 12. 12 is not a random number it's a universal number like pi)

So really there should be 12 notes in the scale, 3 sweet ones and 9 random ones. But I think that's just too many for us to comprehend in the one song so it was made confusing with 8. You'll note all the 8 note scales, major, minor, aeolian, etc keep the 4th and 5th, the sweet ones, and fiddle with the rest.

Then of course came piano players, they weren't limited to playing with evenly spaced frets, so they made the 5th exactly 1.5 times the frequency, and the 4th exactly 1.33333. Perfect, but only if you played in the key of C. If you played in Bb it sounded quite different. Didn't Beethoven like Bb? With a stringed instrument you can put a capo on and everything just scales up so basically sounds the same. This small variation of the same 8 note western scale has two names, natural and even tempered. Can't remember which is which.


( just realised i've referred to the note at the 5th fret as the 4th. That's just music theorists trying to confuse us again, I think it's got more names than that even)

pages.mtu.edu/~suits/scales.html

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Ian K said..
All books on music theory appear to me to be going out of their way to make it appear more complicated than it is.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that Gödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and music, but rather about how cognitionemerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. In the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the braincoordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants

ive read geb 4 times now and still dont understand it.
seriously **** off achilles you turtle shooting prick

jesus just reading the wiki is bringing back nightmares

One dialogue in the book is written in the form of a crab canon, in which every line before the midpoint corresponds to an identical line past the midpoint. The conversation still makes sense due to uses of common phrases that can be used as either greetings or farewells ("Good day") and the positioning of lines which double as an answer to a question in the next line. Another is a sloth canon, where one character repeats the lines of another, but slower and negated.

You might like to read this. There are alternatives.

www.wendycarlos.com/resources/pitch.html

and wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining musical temperaments

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament

music is discovered and understood. The theory evolved to try and describe it.
very difficult to explain to a beginner why a minor 3rd works in major, just that it sounds good.
David Bowie uses a Csharp in a C major song (Man who sold the world), - doesnt meet basic standards of theory but sounds real good when used in right place.
hendrix didnt read music but was a master of the major chord all over the guitar neck, blues progressions and rhythm, plus we must thank him for the sound that he got from a Marshall amp, effects pedals and a strat, after experimenting with a lot of acid. He even has a chord named after him E7(#9). He did have a thorough understanding of the chords, scales and theory (just not written down theory)etc but used his knowledge and invented his own sound, based on traditional blues progressions.

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Poida said..
music is discovered and understood. The theory evolved to try and describe it.
very difficult to explain to a beginner why a minor 3rd works in major, just that it sounds good.
David Bowie uses a Csharp in a C major song (Man who sold the world), - doesnt meet basic standards of theory but sounds real good when used in right place.
hendrix didnt read music but was a master of the major chord all over the guitar neck, blues progressions and rhythm, plus we must thank him for the sound that he got from a Marshall amp, effects pedals and a strat, after experimenting with a lot of acid. He even has a chord named after him E7(#9). He did have a thorough understanding of the chords, scales and theory (just not written down theory)etc but used his knowledge and invented his own sound, based on traditional blues progressions.

It's not that difficult to explain.. A minor 3rd (aka flattened third) is just an extra note thrown into the normally eight note scale to spice it up. Like a bit of curry on the corner of your Macca's cheeseburger. If you'd never been to an Indian restaurant you'd spit it out. If you have you'd say "tasty".

That's all the E7(#9) is, the same thing, a flattened third thrown in with the normal third.

( Oh and "7" in the E7 is actually a "flattened 7", If there was any logic to the terminology it should be written E (#6,#9) or E(b7,#9) or E(b7,b10) . But don't be put off by terminology, it's designed to be confusing. )

Who was it that said "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"? Anyhow, I'm pretty sure music started with the human voice (not a tea chest or its stoneage equivalent) and there are no "natural frequencies" there. Only sounds occur naturally. Music is socially constructed categories of sounds. Therefore "music theory" is also socially constructed. Because music is socially constructed it (and it's theories) are socially specific and not universal.

Birds started it, then the crickets chimed in.

Aborigines had the click sticks some 20 thousand years ago and the didgeridoo, combined with foot stampings and
Voice.
This was a form of security- the low notes would push away any snakes and venomous animal's while providing group bonding and entertainment. Discovered an invention I guess.

are you a strict Platonist?
www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-apr-29-me-32280-story.html
A World of Difference between Invention and Discovery
based on this article you would say the current thinking is that music was invented?

Keith Richards explains the 5-string guitar: '5 strings, 3 notes, 2 hands and 1 asshole

Music was invented.
It was our first language
Music is a celebration of life

Invented is probably not the best term to put in the heading. The OP was about " western music with all its theory and rules ". Which was just a system of writing the jist of it down around a basic framework. That way Beethoven could post a letter to Bach. Now we've got youtube.

Lyrebirds have been around for 15 million years. We split from chimps 7 million years ago. We learnt from the birds. Those who were good learners were better wooers of the opposite sex and now music is part of our dna.

Music is just a branch of mathematics.

Mathematicians have the same argument about whether mathematics is invented or discovered. The ones that say it is invented, are wrong.

Clearly I am a strong Platonist.

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Ian K said..
All books on music theory appear to me to be going out of their way to make it appear more complicated than it is.

My guess is that music started with something like a tea chest base. The someone figured if you put a fret half way down the broom stick, neck or whatever, you get double the frequency and that sounds good to the human ear. Next they found another spot that sounded good at 1.5 times the openly vibrating string. That has a ring to it and beats nicely.
Also. 1.3333 ( one and a 1/3) times the frequency sounds good. So now you've got 3 frets that sound good, lock them in. Why stop at 3? But there is only one way to now smoothly fill in the gaps. That's with 12 frets. The frets are spaced according to the 12th root of 2. The 5th and the 7th fret are 1.4949 and 1.3327 times the frequency. Close enough to 1.5 and 1.333. Sounds good enough for guitar players.

( Or maybe I should have said that if you try various numbers of frets along the open string to the half way point 6,7 frets...15 frets 16 frets etc you'll only get a fret land on or very close to the two intermediate sweet spots by dividing it down by 12. 12 is not a random number it's a universal number like pi)

So really there should be 12 notes in the scale, 3 sweet ones and 9 random ones. But I think that's just too many for us to comprehend in the one song so it was made confusing with 8. You'll note all the 8 note scales, major, minor, aeolian, etc keep the 4th and 5th, the sweet ones, and fiddle with the rest.

Then of course came piano players, they weren't limited to playing with evenly spaced frets, so they made the 5th exactly 1.5 times the frequency, and the 4th exactly 1.33333. Perfect, but only if you played in the key of C. If you played in Bb it sounded quite different. Didn't Beethoven like Bb? With a stringed instrument you can put a capo on and everything just scales up so basically sounds the same. This small variation of the same 8 note western scale has two names, natural and even tempered. Can't remember which is which.


( just realised i've referred to the note at the 5th fret as the 4th. That's just music theorists trying to confuse us again, I think it's got more names than that even)

pages.mtu.edu/~suits/scales.html

Seriously Ian??? Aborigines have made music banging 2 sticks together and dancing away for thousands of years. I don't think they had tea chests before white man invaded their country. Same can be said of Amazonian tribes, the mud people from PNG....the list goes on and on. Banging on different sized coconut shells made sounds of different frequencies. '
It may not be what we in the developed western world consider technically to be 'music', but nevertheless to their culture, it is. It's all about interpretation.
'Music' as we refer to it is quite modern. It is only that we as civilised cultures gave the sounds a measurement or terminology that we still use today. Anyone that claims to know the invention of music is delusional and ignorant in my opinion.

There is a theory that music evolved us. Grooming in primates is a bonding behaviour but it is not very efficient because it requires at least one on one contact.

Humans are the only animal that "grooves". Play a beat and all the people who can hear that beat will synch with it. That is a social bonding experience as well. The theory goes that the ability to make music caused more social cohesion which lead to bigger groups working together. Imagine some ape-like people sitting around grooming and one is rocking back and forth and grunting rhythmically. The others join in and everybody has a good time. Add the development of agriculture and you end up with us.

As for Western music, I suspect it defines a universal subset of music. The scales have a mathematical relationship and harmony and keys have sprung out of that. It's fine as far as it goes. The basic harmonic structure of the blues is almost universal. Virtually every culture tends to groove on the same two chord patterns and they're basically a 5th apart. Listen to some Mongolian throat singers twanging along on their two string guitars and tell me that isn't a boogie.

However, there are shedloads more people in Asia (including India and China) than in all the Western countries combined. Their musical traditions are far richer than you would hear in strict Western structured music. Hell, even Western music is richer than conventional Western music by the time you add in jazz and contemporary classical music. Not sure about 12 tone music. That was shat but it did serve to free classical music from some boring conventions and forced people to re-discover melody and harmony. I guess punk did the same for popular music.

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sick_em_rex said..

Seriously Ian??? Aborigines have made music banging 2 sticks together

You must have come in late Rex and not read the original post. "western music with all its theory and rules".

The links in Harrow's post explain it best.

Pretty sure they were making music in Africa since before the rest of the world was colonised.

Discovered in Africa way back. Beans beans the musical fruit the more you eat the more you tooot...different clans had unique frequencies...conch shell tootfest was the original gathering of artists.

was invented by Richard Starkey..back in the stone age days

It's pretty simple really. Anyone can hum. If you are walking along humming, pretty soon you find yourself humming different notes, not just one. You make a silly tune in your head.

The first simple instruments made different notes, but not to any proper theory. Rather, the makers of the instruments found that certain different notes sounded good together - they 'harmonised'. These harmonies were based on certain multiples of frequencies, although the early instrument inventors would simply have found that placing holes on a tube at certain distances made the harmonising sounds that they liked. Different harmonies are produced by different multiples of length, and therefore different multiples of frequency. (Note, not complete multiples....that gives you octaves....but rather fractional multiples.) Eventually they discovered more of these and tried to formalise the ideas.

The harmony fractional steps can be repeated, and you move higher and higher up with your notes. There is a problem though. When you repeat one fractional harmony, and move higher and higher, and then start with the same base note with a different fractional harmony, and go higher and higher with it, you would like some of the higher notes to coincide with each other. That would let you design a piano keyboard, or guitar fretboard. But the problem they found was the notes did not line up. They were close, but not quite the same. So, to be able to play the different harmonies on the one instrument, they had to slightly alter the harmony fractions away from the perfect fractions. After they did this, and lined up the notes to meet, there were still a few gaps that needed to be filled in, and doing so gave the 12 notes that we now have on a piano. (Well, it's a little more complicated, has also to do with wanting to be able to play in many different keys on one instrument, but then the problem becomes a little recursive and harder to explain.)

Therefore, the fact is that the 12 notes are not perfect. They are not a 'natural', ideal system. They are a convenient construct to play music that sounds 'right' to our western ear. In fact, many people argue about how the 12 notes should be adjusted to make it all fit together. There are lots of different documented ways to do it, with each sounding slightly different. These are called temperaments. Most people use an 'equal' temperament, which is the most mathematically regular pattern, and gives the most regular sound for all signature keys, however it is a compromise, and other tuning temperaments will sound better for certain instruments and in particular for playing certain pieces of music in a particular key.

To really put it in a nutshell, a 12 note scale happens to be a convenient system that provides a lot of combinations of the harmonies that we find pleasing to listen to, and has been adjusted to allow those combinations to be played from different starting points on the scale (ie. played in different 'keys'). However it is not the only system that could be employed. Using an alternative system would create entirely different sounds than the ones we are used to, with endless possibilities for new 'music'. A friend of mine once had his synthesizer modified to do just that, so he could play some sort of ancient middle eastern music that did not line up with the western 12 note scale - it had additional quarter tones that gave a particularly distinct feel to the sound.

So 12 might be the lowest useful division of the octave but has compromises. Doesn't stop some folks trying to get more harmonies in there. He finally plays it at 2.30.

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Ian K said..
So 12 might be the lowest useful division of the octave but has compromises. Doesn't stop some folks trying to get more harmonies in there. He finally plays it at 2.30.

Without even starting the video, that initial screenshot is glorious and says it all!!!

I remember trying to tune my guitar perfectly by harmonics when I was younger, and being confounded by the fact I could never get it exactly right. I always thought it was just intonation problems, but even with an adjustable bridge, could never get it just right. It was decades later when I bought a digital piano that I was reading the manual and it listed all the different tuning temperaments that were built-in. I didn't know what it was talking about, so I did a little research, and that was my "Aha!" moment, suddenly realising that it wasn't ever possible to tune a guitar (or any instrument) 'perfectly'.

Just stumbled upon this very cool YouTube video that talks about "micro-tonal" music. It explores 43 note scales, keyboards with 1066 notes, and lots, lots more. Addresses the OP's question in an entertaining way without any technical mumbo-jumbo. Great stuff!

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KiwiDave said..
Music is just a branch of mathematics.

Mathematicians have the same argument about whether mathematics is invented or discovered. The ones that say it is invented, are wrong.

Clearly I am a strong Platonist.

Spot on and the math when applied to music can determine bad notes which are just notes within the mathematics that do not fit into the equations. I once watched an excellent documentary on the mathematics of music and it explained it very simply. From memory the scale of notes can be traced down a spiral and that's all I can remembe.

I guess it depends on your definition of invention and discovery.


This would be my perspective:

everything that is possible exists in: theory. So if everything that is possible already exists, you can't invent it. You re just discovering it, whether it's in theory on in reality.

I.e I think of a novel idea. That idea has always existed, its just that I became AWARE of it for the first time

There hasn't been anything original since the big bang.