Continuity & Semantic Context In Music

[KeyserXSoze]

http://www.nature.com/nsu/040614/040614-11.html

Tunes create context like language
Maths shows why tonal music is easy listening.
19 June 2004
PHILIP BALL

Repitition of notes in music create semantic meaning.

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.

From Bach to Schoenberg

To measure these effects, Zanette analysed four different compositions: J. S. Bach's Prelude Number 6 in D; Mozart's first movement from his Sonata in C (K545); Debussy's Menuet from the Suite Bergamasque; and the first piece from Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11. Each is a solo piano piece, but they all differ in style and period.

Zanette counted the frequency of different notes in each piece (taking into account both the pitch and the length of the note), and plotted that against their rank, as Zipf did with texts.

All of the pieces showed a text-like distribution, especially for the higher-ranking notes. But the strength of the relationship varied, as indicated by the slope of each graph, published on the preprint server arXiv1.

The pieces by Bach, Mozart and Debussy all produced a relatively steep graph, suggesting a strong relationship between rank and frequency, and therefore a high level of meaningful context. In other words, if you have heard part of the piece, it is relatively easy to predict what kind of thing will come next. Zanette adds that jazz pieces he tested showed a similar pattern.

But the Schoenberg piece, one of the first truly atonal works, had a much flatter graph. This means that the piece does not have a set vocabulary of commonly used words that keep appearing. Instead, the size of the vocabulary increases at about the same rate as the length of the piece; new "words" are constantly introduced, while earlier ones are seldom repeated.

Although all of the piano pieces have a text-like property, the atonal composition has less structure and less context; it is like a story whose characters are constantly changing.

Unfamiliar flux

Zanette says the finding implies that the reason many people find it unsatisfying to listen to atonal music is not simply because its harmonic and melodic structures are unfamiliar, but because the meaning or context of the piece is constantly changing.

"That doesn't mean Schoenberg's music is not comprehensible," Zanette cautions. Indeed, Schoenberg himself wrote that the goal of the composer is to produce comprehensibility. Zanette points out that the sequence of notes is only one of the ways to create context in music. It could also be produced rhythmically, for example.

He suggests that to appreciate atonality, we may need to look for coherence in different aspects of the composition.

"It's very good to start having these scientific bases for understanding music", says Brazil-based composer Heather Jennings. "They provide a fresh perspective on musical theory."

 

[James_H]

is this really new science? Composers have been composing according to maths for ages.

 

[Anonymous]

great article!

i totally agree with trying to find other ways to appreciate atonal musics. being more of an atonal composer, i totally understand the challenge of understanding and comprehending the grating side of music. but there things other than melody and harmony to concentrate on. take for instance frequency: if i'm listening to, say, Nico or Coil, some tracks might be rhythmless sections of cyclic noise and resonance. but in that you can find cylces of frequencies and it's rate of oscillation. i often zone out to this, focusing on the frequency at which a lead drone or melody oscillates -- faster as it goes higher and slower as it goes lower. it's almost percussive. the slashing viola work of John Cale can be pretty raw, but if you listen to how the notes vary, how they change, you can began to see...errr...hear.... within the sounds how there is perfect rhythm. or i may just be crazy :blah:

 

[James_H]

yeah, you just think of the rhythm in different terms, like when you're listening to indian classical music.

 

[Anonymous]

yes, but making the correlation between tonal and atonal thru math is pretty new. the rate at which the "familiar" occurs in tonal has never really been studied like this, not to my knowledge.

 

[Anonymous]

yeah, you just think of the rhythm in different terms, like when you're listening to indian classical music.

good point. you can hear different forms of rhythm in lots of eastern musics. lots of sufi/hindi/chanting music is like that. no percussive rhythm in the normal sense, but lots of cyclic vibrations.

 

[James_H]

i've got this 1958 record of some fairly randomly selected indian classical music, it's truly amazing though. To listen to and to think about. The producers helpfully put a bit of indian musical theory on the back too so I can talk in terms of talas and ghats

 

[James_H]

I think that whoever's doing the test is sort of missing the point of shoenberg's music by saying that it's hard to predict what will come next - serialist music's based on a random(ish) order of the 12 notes of the scale, which is then mathematically variated. So of course it's going to look like that.

 

[Anonymous]

i like the bubbly-ness that the tabla creates. right now i'm working on some music that has, what i call, "suggestively synthesized" sounds. i created a randomly oscillating drum patch that mimicks the bubbly variations that indian and eastern percussion sets turn out. i also have a modular synth program running a droning, see-saw-like lead sound which inturn mimicks that of a viola or any other stringed and bowed eastern instrument. i also synthesized a sitar or mandolin-like sound in it as well. i'm trying to let people hear one half or the music and let their brains figure out the other half.

 

[James_H]

sounds interesting: Like having improvisations to a set pattern - but automising the improvisation.

 

[Anonymous]

I think that whoever's doing the test is sort of missing the point of shoenberg's music by saying that it's hard to predict what will come next - serialist music's based on a random(ish) order of the 12 notes of the scale, which is then mathematically variated. So of course it's going to look like that.

i think they're probably trying to find how normal people react to it initially, in the "oh, i can't listen to this" kind of way.

 

[James_H]

I guess so. I think it's just that avant-garde music needs a different approach taken to it, a lot of people apply the same listening skills as they would on normal stuff and consequently reject it.

 

[Anonymous]

sounds interesting: Like having improvisations to a set pattern - but automising the improvisation.

on the nose! i hate how a lot of music is too calculated and concentrate. i like to let things systematically drift.

 

[James_H]

yeah - recently i've been making quite a lot of rhythm based music (not formally, just jamming with people) where you can sit down and play on the one chord (or no chord) with a group of people who come and go, just making a constant rhymic pattern really.

 

[Anonymous]

i think interesting music is a mixture of rhythm, melody and disonance.

 

[James_H]

well i think any kind of music can be interesting as long as one has the capacity to be interested by it

 

[Anonymous]

good point. like the sound of trees falling in the woods.

 

[James_H]

how much do you buy the doctrine that "all music is sound, therefore all sound can be music"?

 

[Anonymous]

music to me is a moving and changing body of work, which can included birdsongs and chimes because it's a series of noises and sounds in a progression. any sound is only one possible part of that work/prgression. a sound/noise is just that. but if something else pops up to compliment that sound/noise, it then becomes music to my ears. i work in the industrial side of town, so i'm constantly hearing echoes of metal and machinery and trucks and drills and the like. it's rather musical(to me) to hear this "surround-sound" of atonal resonance and percussion. it's like a 7 hour song

 

[brianellwood]

Well, Messien was into birdsong in a big way! I find that my reactions to music depend on my state of mind. Sometimes atonal, no ostinato suits me and other times I enjoy music heavily driven by percussion such as early heavy metal and swing, which I find exciting. People think that because I play drums that everything I enjoy must have percussion in it, but I'm just as happy with a string quartet!
I find J.S.Bach very precise and so much of his work lends itself to the Loussier treatment, whilst Ravel's lush harmonious orchestration is indeed very satisfying in an immediate emotional way. Later and more contemporary work appeals to mind first and then emotion.
But you have to keep pushing the frontiers, even if it doesn't make money!

 

[Anonymous]

music to me is a moving and changing body of work, which can included birdsongs and chimes because it's a series of noises and sounds in a progression. any sound is only one possible part of that work/prgression. a sound/noise is just that. but if something else pops up to compliment that sound/noise, it then becomes music to my ears. i work in the industrial side of town, so i'm constantly hearing echoes of metal and machinery and trucks and drills and the like. it's rather musical(to me) to hear this "surround-sound" of atonal resonance and percussion. it's like a 7 hour song

When I was younger, I worked in several noisy factories. Car factories, wood working factories, etc. Noisy.

Years later, one of my neighbours tried to foist some of his atonal, industrial noise crap on me as cutting edge, "music".

Believe me, the racket in those factories was still much more musical than my neighbour.

Perhaps people working, and their machines, unconsciously fall into a sort of natural rythmn on their own account, whilst some composers just have cloth ears and a load of arrogance?

I hasten to add, that he'd never actually worked in a factory and, before moving to the big city, had lived in the rural Arcadia of the Home Counties.

 

[Anonymous]

actual noise/atonal/avant is less sequenced and prepared than actual electronic stuff. if i can here a verse/chorus/verse thing happening right off, it's not avant-noise...it needs more mystique.

 

[Anonymous]

i recommend the book The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance : The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age to anyone interested in electronic/avant/noise/minimalism and all other forms of "other music". the only thing missing from this book(and it covers a lot) is Throbbing Gristle it is a highly interesting read though. from Satie to John Cage to the Velvet Underground to New Order and so on.