Facts About Music
- Art form using sound as a medium
- Communicates emotion to listener
- Created by: composer, performers, acoustics
- Appreciated by non-musicians
- Release of mind altering chemicals
- Meaning of sung or spoken text doesn’t count
Parts of Music
For creating music…
- Melody
- Loudness
- Rhythm, tempo
- Timbre
- Harmony
For Listening to music…
- Time base: Beats, tempo, rhythm. X-axis
- Attributes: Groups, strings. Y-axis
Time—The X axis
Repeated beats can group together
- Vastly aided by pauses and accents
- 0.2 sec to 1.8 sec are the tempo limits
- Groups (measures in music) are repeated
- Sequential groups establish a rhythm
- A person can anticipate a rhythm
- The current group is the psychological present
- Anticipated groups are the future
- Past groups are the past
Attributes—The Y axis
Whatever you listen to
- Melody
- Timbre
- Harmony
- Dynamics
- Location
- Structure (Verse-chorus, Sonata etc.)
- Acoustics
Attributes and Grouping
Sound entering the ear may come from many sources at once
- Looking at a ‘scope photo of pressure is meaningless
Attributes allow us to group these sounds into individual sources
Continuity of a group leads to a perception of a “string”
- Formation of groups and strings is unconscious
- We consciously connect these strings with the most probable source
The Auditory Scene
- All simultaneous sounds can become separate events in the perceptual sound space
- Tracks events as they change
The Music Auditory Scene
Like a map, but… A map may show many things
- State lines
- Roads, cities and towns
- Topography, lakes
- Points of Interest
The music space shows past, present and future
- Continuum of sonically identifiable qualities
- Melody, harmony
- Timbre (sound of a particular instrument)
- Loudness. direction or acoustics
Summary
The music listener follows, in time and by choice, strings that have emotional meaning
- Each string is one or more attributes that are consistent enough to be formed by subconscious groups
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