![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Music for Alien Ears
Jul. 6th, 2013 11:22 pmOne of my LJ friends, Lihan, posted about music for alien ears a while back, and that has popped up into my consciousness again. Here are my thoughts.
First, let’s get a few basic things out on the table. Music has Melody, Harmony, and rhythm. Sound has pitch, (or frequency) volume, (or amplitude) duration, (measured in seconds or parts of a second) and timbre. (The relative volume of all present overtones, and yes, some overtones may have a value of 0, meaning they’re not heard – Clarinets have no even harmonic content to speak of, as one example, which gives them their “round” sound) Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s move on to the meat of this.
There are some things about music that are subjective. For example, we can toss out lyrics as having much importance to an alien race other than the sounds of the phonemes that are pleasant. (Scat singing might translate better than actual poetic content, though tonality as mentioned later would still be a factor) And experience with different cultures and their choices in timbre may make timbric qualities more or less appealing to the listening alien. (European cultures tend to go for purity of tone, while other cultures may prefer more buzz, pitch imprecision, etc. in their music – this is prevalent in obvious ways in the music of Asia) Rhythmic complexity would also be a factor, and ditto for harmonic complexity. And of course the listener might have a different spectrum of hearing.
Now, let’s look at the things that would be more or less constant. For one thing aural spectrum isn’t much of a problem when we get into the concept of mechanically replicated or created music, as it’s easy to shift the frequency of a sound. But there’s another very basic consideration – the harmonic series.
The harmonic series is a function of wave motion. If the target alien can hear, then the alien will consider unisons and octaves as consonant. (And if the alien can’t hear then they don’t belong in this discussion) Unisons are always consonant, because the frequency is the same, and as an even multiple of the frequency the first octave (and by extension all subsequent octaves) are consonant. We can determine consonance by the highest overtone the target race considers consonant, too, as shown by our own musical history. Gregorian chant moves in fifths, the second overtone in the series. The next different overtone is the third above the root of the series, the fourth overtone, (the third one is two octaves above the root) and when England started embracing thirds the rest of Europe was horrified until they got used to them as well. But what sounds consonant, by the way acoustics work in physics, will sound consonant for all overtones below. Why? Because each overtone is an even multiple of the fundamental. So if you have a note at 100HZ (Hertz, or vibrations per second) then there will be overtones at 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, etc. One more thing – the octave has double the frequency of the note it’s an octave of, so in that series there would be octaves at 100Hz, 200Hz, 400Hz, 800HZ, and so on. And this is true for all notes, so one octave above that 300Hz fifth sits at 600Hz. This is the way acoustic phenomena works, because it’s the way all wave propagation works, so it’s going to work this way for all creature who can hear in a universe that has our same wave physics – the basic rules for sound are the same as that for light and any other fluid environment, even if it’s very dense fluid, like solid rock or metal. (Fluid is not synonymous with liquid)
What this means is that an alien who has a much more advanced ear than ours, aesthetically, will still hear our music as consonant. (Though possibly a bit boring) One with less melodic development will hear more dissonance in our music, with the result of either dissonance or exoticism to their ears.
Western music is known for harmonic complexity. To completely explain this would take four semesters to get through the music theory, and some things would still need later explanation, but it’s enough to say that starting with the Renaissance, with a major change of focus in the Baroque period, European music and those musical cultures descended from it have featured harmonic complexity. Get to the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East and you get rhythmic complexity, while India shows us how complex melody can get with the scales of more than twelve tones per octave and Java does things with pitch in the gamelan orchestras that also sound exotic or annoying to many westerners, based on how much they like exotic music. But all of these are progressions, so anything less advanced will sound okay, if a bit mundane, to any creature who is used to more complex music in one of these three areas.
There’s one more area of difference, though – dynamic range. Any creature that hears a smaller dynamic range may miss the very soft, very loud, or both types of dynamics in our music, while a species who has a wider dynamic range will once again hear our music as unadventuresome.
Questions?
First, let’s get a few basic things out on the table. Music has Melody, Harmony, and rhythm. Sound has pitch, (or frequency) volume, (or amplitude) duration, (measured in seconds or parts of a second) and timbre. (The relative volume of all present overtones, and yes, some overtones may have a value of 0, meaning they’re not heard – Clarinets have no even harmonic content to speak of, as one example, which gives them their “round” sound) Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s move on to the meat of this.
There are some things about music that are subjective. For example, we can toss out lyrics as having much importance to an alien race other than the sounds of the phonemes that are pleasant. (Scat singing might translate better than actual poetic content, though tonality as mentioned later would still be a factor) And experience with different cultures and their choices in timbre may make timbric qualities more or less appealing to the listening alien. (European cultures tend to go for purity of tone, while other cultures may prefer more buzz, pitch imprecision, etc. in their music – this is prevalent in obvious ways in the music of Asia) Rhythmic complexity would also be a factor, and ditto for harmonic complexity. And of course the listener might have a different spectrum of hearing.
Now, let’s look at the things that would be more or less constant. For one thing aural spectrum isn’t much of a problem when we get into the concept of mechanically replicated or created music, as it’s easy to shift the frequency of a sound. But there’s another very basic consideration – the harmonic series.
The harmonic series is a function of wave motion. If the target alien can hear, then the alien will consider unisons and octaves as consonant. (And if the alien can’t hear then they don’t belong in this discussion) Unisons are always consonant, because the frequency is the same, and as an even multiple of the frequency the first octave (and by extension all subsequent octaves) are consonant. We can determine consonance by the highest overtone the target race considers consonant, too, as shown by our own musical history. Gregorian chant moves in fifths, the second overtone in the series. The next different overtone is the third above the root of the series, the fourth overtone, (the third one is two octaves above the root) and when England started embracing thirds the rest of Europe was horrified until they got used to them as well. But what sounds consonant, by the way acoustics work in physics, will sound consonant for all overtones below. Why? Because each overtone is an even multiple of the fundamental. So if you have a note at 100HZ (Hertz, or vibrations per second) then there will be overtones at 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, etc. One more thing – the octave has double the frequency of the note it’s an octave of, so in that series there would be octaves at 100Hz, 200Hz, 400Hz, 800HZ, and so on. And this is true for all notes, so one octave above that 300Hz fifth sits at 600Hz. This is the way acoustic phenomena works, because it’s the way all wave propagation works, so it’s going to work this way for all creature who can hear in a universe that has our same wave physics – the basic rules for sound are the same as that for light and any other fluid environment, even if it’s very dense fluid, like solid rock or metal. (Fluid is not synonymous with liquid)
What this means is that an alien who has a much more advanced ear than ours, aesthetically, will still hear our music as consonant. (Though possibly a bit boring) One with less melodic development will hear more dissonance in our music, with the result of either dissonance or exoticism to their ears.
Western music is known for harmonic complexity. To completely explain this would take four semesters to get through the music theory, and some things would still need later explanation, but it’s enough to say that starting with the Renaissance, with a major change of focus in the Baroque period, European music and those musical cultures descended from it have featured harmonic complexity. Get to the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East and you get rhythmic complexity, while India shows us how complex melody can get with the scales of more than twelve tones per octave and Java does things with pitch in the gamelan orchestras that also sound exotic or annoying to many westerners, based on how much they like exotic music. But all of these are progressions, so anything less advanced will sound okay, if a bit mundane, to any creature who is used to more complex music in one of these three areas.
There’s one more area of difference, though – dynamic range. Any creature that hears a smaller dynamic range may miss the very soft, very loud, or both types of dynamics in our music, while a species who has a wider dynamic range will once again hear our music as unadventuresome.
Questions?
