Maths shows why tonal music is easy listening.

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<font size=3>Tunes create context like language

Maths shows why tonal music is easy listening.</font>

19 June 2004

PHILIP BALL

Ever felt as though a piece of music is speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to an Argentinian physicist.

His analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones, which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to make sense of atonal works.

In both written text and speech, the frequency with which different words are used follows a striking pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency. In other words, a graph of one plotted against the other appeared as a straight line.

The economist and sociologist Herbert Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship. He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word "music" than the word "sausage".

Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, used this idea to test whether different types of music create a semantic context in a similar fashion.

The key in which a piece of music is written is one factor that influences which notes are more or less likely to come next. The repetition and elaboration of particular melodic phrases is another.

More on this Story (http://www.nature.com/nsu/040614/040614-11.html)

[DoctorDoom]

This brings up an interesting concept:

1. Use a computer to scan a literary work, and assign numbers from 1 to 20 for the ranking of appearances of the 20 most used words.
2. In the same manner, scan a musical work, and assign numbers from 1 to 20 for the ranking of appearances of the 20 most used notes.
3. Create a musical composition in which each note is assigned in sequence by the appearance of each correspondingly ranked word in the literature. E.g., "the" might correspond to "C", so whenever "the" appears", a C-note is added to the composition.
4. Play it and see how it sounds.

This might provide a fascinating correlation based on the premise of the article.

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Kewl

[Wyatt_Junker]

I heard a Christian sister describe her near death experience at church after a complication from surgery.

She kept talking about the music. And that God's voice had an intimate, tonal ambience to it, that composition flowed from His being. And it had the ability to rend the heart, open it up and lay it bare. Like a sword peeling back layers of rot, gently, always careful not to damage what lies beneath.

And that the notes that He spoke had a living quality to them that translated instantly, all of them haunting and yet able to heal the emotional damage caused by a life on earth.

Like the time when you were a child and your emotions were larger than they are now, unable to be contained. The smell of Spring in the air was like getting drunk. Life was more than enough. But God can, instantly, evoke through song, those feelings that have been buried, ressurecting them from the past. He can, through a single captivating note, change your life. Repentance is a song. You have to have a good ear.

[DesertFox]

J.R.R. Tolkien's book The Silmarillion has one of the most fascinating recapitulations of the creation you'll ever come across. In Tolkien's concept, it ALL began when God created sound, which preceded even light (a notion that cosmology supports, as sound was a key element in the primordial, pre-light cosmos. Another neat thought inherent in Tolkien's cosmogony is that sound depends fundamentally on vibration, and string theory holds that all matter, and hence all forms of energy, derives most basically from the manner in which superstrings vibrate).

Anyway, God got the angels together to expose them to creation for the first time by giving them music. He encouraged them to join in and Lucifer immediately tried to impose his own notions. But where God's tones had been melodious and beautiful, Lucifer's were repetitive and strident, like bad German march music. At first God understood this perversion as an error of beginners and He smiled benignly, but it soon became clear that Lucifer was trying to take over the choir. Shortly thereafter he and his buddies got a celestial boot in the ass.