djsynchro wrote:All the intervals in the pentatonic scale are the really stable mathematical relationships. A lot of my friends are having babies, you start singing that "Doe, a deer, a female deer" song from "the Sound of Music" typical happy Major scale action, they immediately start smiling and moving in time to the rhythm. Dancing! I'm talking about 6 weeks old here! Music is in our DNA amazing but true.
even before 6 weeks.
but we shouldn't conclude that there is some kind of
hard-wiring in there !!
for exemple, there are a lot of pre-natal effects.
(and stable physical / math relationships are a thing, but we better should look at the relationships between purely organic vocal tensions to get more clues about what's going on when we use/expect a scale or another - I don't get it why scientists are constantly looking in the neurons instead of just the body, the whole body we live in !!!)
It is more relevant, I'd say, to assume that main musical dimensions (pulse and expressive variations around it, melodic directions, to name a few..) simply reflect more general perceptivo-motor capacities of human beings. It doesn't have to be music per se that produces all these phenomena. Music is just the name given by an observer. nervous system, or the body, doesn't know a thing about what is music or not. only the whole person does.
That's probably what makes music such an interesting entertainment : it reflects some of the fundamental principles of the job our BODIES do (let's not attribute everything to the brain, or worse, genes, or worse, DNA), in such a way that we can enjoy it toghether, in a shared, collective, participative / interactive way.
Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined?
I can't wait that scientists stop to use that irrelevant dualistic question.
there is nothing like "a wiring inside" and a "culture outside" (expect, again, in the language of an observer). they aren't two different forces acting independantly of each other.
there are just two concepts being historically studied in different buildings of universities and labs.
We really should abandon this dichotmy.
(then we will have some better clues about how the so-called "inside" and the so-called "outside" are inseparable by "nature", which might help us to achieve a better understanding of our intrinsic relations with our environnement - socio-natural -, which is kinda crucial nowadays)
I mean, they really should stop to search tones and melodies in neurons (exclusively I mean) and better look after them in, I'd say
mindful human social bodies.
And it is sad that the debate could rapidly lead to some little "fights". I mean, there isn't that much incompatibilities between the points of gjm (sorry if bad spelling from memory) and tone deft for exemple. just different aspects.
group dynamic in the first video is (partially at work) for sure.
we hear tonal music for yeeeeears, constantly, even when we go shopping, our mothers spoke musically with us , etc... tonal expectations aren't surprising.
Though I think the Bobby Mc Ferrin's demonstration was cool and fun.
I'm sorry I couldn't read each post in this thread, and couldn't complete what I'd like to say about it (have a train to catch right know, an Anticon Sole and the skyrider band gig is waiting for me).
but if I start writing about it, that would end in a book or something
(neuropsychology of music being one of the topic I'm teaching at University, and I do some researches on various related topic, so I would have a lot to say. this doesn't mean that I pretend to have a "better knowledge" about it : just consider here that "scientists" do not agree at all on those questions. and my point is very critical and skeptical about 95% of the mainstream old-fashioned sciences and scientific models. I mean, what you saw in the videos has been extensively studied for decades now, and we still don't know much about it. I've read HUNDREDS of papers about those things, it almost never gave me anything interesting as a musician or composer. So, I don't think we are in the right way to understand the whole thing. In their model, they don't talk about time for exemple, and music is all about dynamical trajectories in time !!! context,expressivity,shared dynamics : here is the music as it is felt, lived... but it is not considered at all. but hopefully, this has changed a bit lately).
Tone Deft wrote:
I guess we could try it on other people we know. play the first 3 notes of the pentatonic scale and then have them sing the next note in the sequence.
for sure it would work, unless they are tone
deaf people
Every single person used their ears in that situation. If they were deaf the result would have been different.
