Universal Property of Music Discovered

Researchers at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam have discovered a universal property of musical scales. Until now it was assumed that the only thing scales throughout the world have in common is the octave.

The many hundreds of scales, however, seem to possess a deeper commonality: if their tones are compared in a two- or three-dimensional way by means of a coordinate system, they form convex or star-convex structures. Convex structures are patterns without indentations or holes, such as a circle, square or oval.

By placing scales in a coordinate system (an 'Euler lattice') they can be studied as multidimensional objects. Dr. Aline Honingh and Prof. Rens Bod from the ILLC did this for nearly 1,000 scales from all over the world, from Japan to Indonesia and from China to Greece. To their surprise, they discovered that all traditional scales produced star-convex patterns. This was also the case with almost 97% of non-traditional, scales conceived by contemporary composers, even though contemporary composers often state they have designed unconventional scales...

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I'm not really an expert on octaves and scales, but this seems to speak of a universal language that at its heart has the ability to communicate to us all in an artistic, and now it appears, scientific way. It's not a suprise considering that instruments can sometimes speak to us more clearly than any vocabulary can describe.

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


its because everything is sound waves,the ripples on the beach sand are the earths heart beat and music resonates with life because its what life is doing at all times

Thats interesting, if they can create a three-dimensional pattern out of these similarities maybe it can imply making some sort of universal holographic language out of sound frequencies...I just saying

Thats nifty info. I wonder if in the future when we have the ability to put a hologram in every home, if you could create music using 3-dimensional fractal patterns. Actually putting music into 3-d, thats the dream.

reply to post by MyPathManifests


actually your not far from the truth, i make music and an artist has to picture the sound in shapes and patterns in your mind to fully put the piece togeather,especially with lyrics, sound has image,ask a blind person, but doesnt necassarily mean the images them selves can make the sound, it has to be built from the sound up,get it ha ha ill be here all week

reply to post by MyPathManifests


actually your not far from the truth, i make music and an artist has to picture the sound in shapes and patterns in your mind to fully put the piece togeather,especially with lyrics, sound has image,ask a blind person, but doesnt necassarily mean the images them selves can make the sound, it has to be built from the sound up,get it ha ha ill be here all week

reply to post by MyPathManifests


Check this out, I know its not exactly what you are talking about but look at these, they are called Reactable.
Some DJs are actually performing using that

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


This truly is the universal language, along with computation/math integers.
Now you can decode the SETI language, and intercepts.

I hope you saved copies of all those triplets and spikes.

This could go even cooler
Lets suppose that one found that there are emotional similarities as well and that the shapes once plotted coud be fed back into the system and directly introduced to the brain to set the base brin pattern.One could maybe make manics a little more humble or make a depressive smile.
There are all kinds of possibilities here for future research fellows.....ahem

Cool. Could this be used to design new scales by drawing convex shapes in the lattice?

Can anyone explain the lattice system they use and how notes find their place within them? Obviously we have the pitch of the note as one reference point but what is the other reference point? I'm sure this ties in with the Platonic solids in some way but I can't quite get my head around it.

Originally posted by MyPathManifests
Thats nifty info. I wonder if in the future when we have the ability to put a hologram in every home, if you could create music using 3-dimensional fractal patterns. Actually putting music into 3-d, thats the dream.

You can do (edit) the reverse now, with cymatics. A plate is placed over a speaker, fine powder of some kind is placed on a plate. A glass dome over the plate would keep the powder from flying off. But you can't make the type of images as in the original post. Maybe with the software, Mathematica.

many of the primary notes in a scale are based upon very simple and universal ratios:

2:1 octave
3:2 fifth
4:3 fourth
5:4 major third
6:5 minor third


it was "discovered" long ago that these intervals, in relation to each other, created pleasing or harmonic qualities (some say pythagorean had a hand in this, but i think it goes much further back).

the circle of 5ths was born, and from this came the western concept of 12 notes in an octave.

(on an aside note, this method of creating 12 notes from the circle of 5ths wasn't perfect, and the need for what is called Temperament was born back in the day to fix the slight variations that were caused. There is a book by the same title that gets into that whole mess. the book is by Stuart Isacoff. it is an interesting book, but a rather dry read.)


anyhow...
these simple and universal ratios were known by most cultures, whether they were technologically advanced or not.

i assume that these universal ratios would uphold on other planets as well (if the laws of physics weren't thrown completely out of whack by time/space travel). 3/2 is the same everywhere in the universe. and 3/2 creates the musical tone of a perfect 5th. so that means the perfect 5th exists everywhere in the universe.

i have always fancied the concept that alien music wouldn't be all that different than our own, in that we are all working with the same simple and universal ratios to create harmonic musical tones.

so, yeah... the zeta reticuli can certainly be playing jazz!


to wrap it up... since most geometry (2-d and 3-d) is rooted in basic ratios, as is music, it is logical that the sound intervals of a scale can be translated to geometric patterns, and often rather succinct and universal ones at that.

sacred geometry can certainly be translated into a musical chord or scale, and vice versa.

that is why, when folks under halucinigenic influence say they can "see music" it does not seem that far fetched. their brains are merely translating sound waves from an audio to a visual perspective.


anyhow... thanks for the post OP. it is a topic that has always fascinated me.

Originally posted by CUJOCREEP
reply to post by MyPathManifests

 

actually your not far from the truth, i make music and an artist has to picture the sound in shapes and patterns in your mind to fully put the piece togeather,especially with lyrics, sound has image,ask a blind person, but doesnt necassarily mean the images them selves can make the sound, it has to be built from the sound up,get it ha ha ill be here all week

This is true. I create music as well and I always see music as waves, steps, and even in terms of color and heat and cold. But mostly as waves and steps.

everything in the universe is made up of wave's we are made up of wave frequencies. i personally think music is the language of the universe! i remember seeing the post of this lady that heard the rumbling noise in the states and said she hear almost like flutes playing as well, then she spotted this huge ship in the air hovering. to me music is going to be the way ET's in-gauge in conversation with us.

Guess it is true, music is the universal language. It stands to reason that mathematics are involved as well.
I wonder if one was to dimensionalize the atmosphere of music vibrations, would this pattern be seen on a broader level, as in a 3 dimension filling of space that resembles this "star" pattern.
I hope they go on to record all of the shapes from as many scales as possible, so that we can see a really detailed perspective of some of the more intricate aspects, and compare them.
Maybe we can start shaping music from a 3d perspective during the creative process.
Wouldn't it be cool to say, "Yea, I speak a few different languages, English, jazz and and blues!"

Peace,
spec

"Researchers at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam have discovered a universal property of musical scales. "

Interesting, although the basis for constructing the dimensions of the Euler lattice onto which musical scales were projected (in order to somehow depict their 'topology'), is not described whatsoever, hence ... arbitrary ?

There may well be a correspondence between audio perception, the topology of neural processing, and some mathematical abstraction aimed at categorizing the dimensionality of sound.

But the original research would have to be investigated (and, it appears, in Dutch, which brings in an altogether *different* element) in order to see if this approach holds any water, or is just, mainly, mental self-gratification fashioned into a justification for continued academic funding. Any volunteers for exposed-cortex electrical field monitoring ?

Sorely missing, at least from the journalist who wrote the story, are the simple facts that *all* detection of increments of pitch in a so-called 'scale' are logarithmic -- i.e., the 12-tone scale are each twelfth-root divisions of frequency between octaves such that, when you add up the 12 (equal) logarithmic equivalents, you get a doubling in pitch. This is all due to the spiral nature of the inner ear cochlea, acting as a resonant frequency detector of overtones, of course.

Also missing from the overly-simplified, yet obfuscating, story, is the fact that the harmonic overtones of the fundamental frequency produced by a vibrating string do not align with the 12-tone logarithmic divisions of octaves ('notes') which are extended and concatenated together to form such things as a piano keyboard. The fact that overtones of each of the 12 fundamentals of the 12-tone scale do not align perfectly with the higher-pitched notes in higher octaves is what requires the 'well-tempered' tuning of the piano, such that a given note in the upper half of the piano range can be effectively shared in the overtone structure of any of the 12 fundamentals.

As equally significant a shortcoming as the lack of explanation of tonal mapping of scales to the grid is what appears to be the apparent restriction of the analysis of perception of musicality to 12-tone scales to begin with.

It is not clear, when "thousands" of scales are mentioned, whether the authors are considering all combinations of 12 logarithmic pitches taken, say, 5,6,7,8,9.... at a time, or if they are allowing modes which include other divisions of the octave, such as the quarter-tones found in Indian music. Or the perception of musicality which comes from forms of musique concrète, or simply, perception of ambient, natural sounds, which can include such things as pink noise (sound of ocean surf), chirping of birds, and dissonance as well as 'harmony'.

Even more fundamentally, what about the even more universal property of 'music' which is formed by perception of the nature and energy in the progression of time itself, and not simply frequency, i.e., rhythmic patterns, drums, dance, and emotive flow.

And then, there's the blues, or jazz, where notes, and scales, are stretched, and bent ...

By restricting the research simply to melodic harmony, and leaving temporal and rhythmic perception out of the picture, this attempt to divine some 'universal' property of music, as the headline suggests, could be just leftover scraps on the cutting room floor of the sound editor, and that this 'theory' has all the properties of over-analytical categorization of natural phenomena so much in favor by academics !

But I don't want to be a spoil-sport: I would just put this particular theory of the 'universal property of music' up the traditional Einstein test, that is, if you cannot explain it to a child, you may not understand it, or it may not be correct !

Fortunately, when it comes to music, the proof is in the pudding, not the Euler lattice.