Here, I attempt to mull over 3 major questions that came up in a discussion about music and the mind among my friends. The 3 questions were: 1. Why music played or sung by some musicians sounds more melodious than others? 2. Why the same song or tune played in different musical instruments feels different?, and 3. How do the sounds and music produced by these instruments differ in terms of wavelength, frequency, tone, timbre, etc.?
Philosophers, scientists, musicians, musicologists and common people have thought about these and related questions for eons. I do not claim any expertise but I would like to make a few observations. The questions posed above are related mainly to the generation, on the one hand, and the perception, on the other of what we call music, and the dynamic interaction of the two.
Fundamentally, I think, there are two important topics of interest: physics and psychology (both modulated by social and cultural beliefs and practices). Physics can tell us about how interactions between materials in vocal cords and instruments create vibrations that are transformed, propagated in space and time, received, re-transformed in our ears. Psychology and neuroscience is attempting to explain to us how these retransformed nerve impulses reach the brain, produce a cascade of neural activations that help us perceive the sensory stimuli as music or noise. Psychology in unison with sociology could perhaps tell us how upbringing, background, conditioning, education and longtime listening could help us distinguish different sounds subjectively as pleasant or unpleasant, arousing or boring. As much as the technicalities of how different instruments generate sounds of different pitch, loudness and harmony are important, so is the subjectivity of perception equally important.
We should first note that there is ‘no noise (and music), only sound’ as a very well-known composer John Cage put it. Singing and sound instruments create vibrations and reverberations we perceive as music or noise. The demarcation between music and noise is subjectively and culturally influenced. Mallikarjuna Mansur to one’s ear could be divine music but Bob Dylan could be nerve-wracking. Others may appreciate both ,and for yet others only Bollywood songs epitomize music. Other fortunate ones may claim and appreciate all of them as music, and yet others trash them as unbearable noise. Appreciation of language, lyrics, cultural nuances go a long way in appreciating music.
Music theory identifies and analyses some important parameters of music: rhythm, harmony (harmonic function), melody, structure, form, and texture. Understanding these concepts goes a long way in explaining and comparing between musical pieces. However, experiential aspect of music is hard to describe in words as many sensorial, cognitive and emotional aspects are interwoven into the experience. With these points in mind, we can in a very general way answer the above questions as follows:
Question: Why is music played or sung by some musicians sounds more melodious than others?
Some people are found to be more melodious than others presumably because they generate sounds that have greater rhythm, harmony and form. Further, the song they are singing is understandable to us and evokes in us feelings of childhood, love, happiness, melancholy or bliss whatever suits the occasion. But all of us may not logically or analytically quantify the rhythm, harmony etc., and based on such analysis come to decide that the music is melodious to us. Rather, our neural network has learned to perceive it as such based on prior exposure, learning, conditioning and associations.
Question. Why the same song or tune played in different musical instruments feels different?
Different instruments change the various parameters of music so that the generated sound sequence is not perceived as the same although certain aspects such as structure and literature of the music is the same.
Question. How do the sounds and music produced by these instruments differ in terms of wavelength, frequency, tone, timbre, etc.?
There is apparently enormous scientific, musicological and philosophical literature on the structure and form of sounds generated by different instruments. Many physicists (including Sir C.V. Raman) studied the physical aspects of musical instruments in a very rigorous way.
While much of music perception, understanding and appreciation could be based on your background, upbrining etc., there could be some aspects that could be innate. The following abstract from a study published in the reputed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that even new born infants can recognize aspects of music. This means that our brains are built to recognize certain aspects of regularity of sounds that we call music (see below).
(Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Feb 17;106(7):2468-71. Epub 2009 Jan 26.Newborn infants detect the beat in music.Winkler I, Háden GP, Ladinig O, Sziller I, Honing H.
Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, H-1394 Budapest, P.O. Box 398, Hungary. iwinkler@cogpsyphy.hu
Abstract
To shed light on how humans can learn to understand music, we need to discover what the perceptual capabilities with which infants are born. Beat induction, the detection of a regular pulse in an auditory signal, is considered a fundamental human trait that, arguably, played a decisive role in the origin of music. Theorists are divided on the issue whether this ability is innate or learned. We show that newborn infants develop expectation for the onset of rhythmic cycles (the downbeat), even when it is not marked by stress or other distinguishing spectral features. Omitting the downbeat elicits brain activity associated with violating sensory expectations. Thus, our results strongly support the view that beat perception is innate.)
All this said, one should note that music is not just about sounds. Deaf people can experience music by vibrations in their body. Beethoven composed music even after he was deaf!
Eclectic Musings by Ranga Sitaram 