the symbolic meaning (or lack of ) in aesthetics

borderpolice said:

I really don't like the major scale. Sounds way cheesy and classical. I never use it. i think it is rarely used in pop music. Instead modes like (mixo)lydian and so on dominate. And of course the blues scale, hugely influential.

Basically, in the first part of the 20th century, the conventional western classical scales have been generalised and displaced by the chord constructions that come from jazz (and not by atonal, 12tone, serialist stuff as classical musicians expected).

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Isn't the blues' "blue" note somewhere between the third and fourth (minor and major), hence blues' massively universal appeal and ambiguity between happy and sad (simplifying hugely)? Though of course this note is actually not used by our tuning.

Aren't major scales are used all over the shop, pop-wise (although maybe less and less with the dominance of R'n'B/soul modes)? Sevenths are hugely important also - a major seventh complexifies and drastically reduces the "happy" positive feel of a major chord.

[edit] broken link above, BP! sounds interesting...

I saw this...

yes. being haunted by my mother's own severely roman catholic upbringing, i'll say that death metal often evokes "church" for me, the sacrosanct,etc

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...and was just about to say this...

Re - the satanic banned flattened fifth - Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath!

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...but was beaten to it! \m/_ _\m/

dHarry said:

Gek's Eleanor Rigby point is very pertinent also and points out how people often miss the wood for the trees - you don't need a very sophisticated technical musical analysis of Eleanor Rigby to hear how it sounds musically "churchy", and of course it's also played solemnly by a string quartet - hardly rock and bleedin' roll is it?! So it has not only churchy but also classical (what they used to call art music) associations with the attendant baggage of emotional depth, seriousness, etc.

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Well that's what I was saying in the first place. You don't need to analyse it, the associations are there for anyone.

Mr. Tea said:

I saw this...

...and was just about to say this...
...but was beaten to it! \m/_ _\m/

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'course they also did After Forever:

Have you ever thought about your soul - can it be saved?
Or perhaps you think that when you're dead you just stay in your grave
Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you?
Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school?

When you think about death do you lose your breath or do you keep your cool?
Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope - do you think he's a fool?
Well I have seen the truth, yes I've seen the light and I've changed my ways
And I'll be prepared when you're lonely and scared at the end of our days

:slanted:

Yeah, well Sabbath was never really about the lyrics, was it?
Although rhyming 'Pope' with 'rope' is a touch of genius, I have to say...

swears said:

Well that's what I was saying in the first place. You don't need to analyse it, the associations are there for anyone.

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Of course!

dHarry said:

Isn't the blues' "blue" note somewhere between the third and fourth (minor and major), hence blues' massively universal appeal and ambiguity between happy and sad (simplifying hugely)? Though of course this note is actually not used by our tuning.

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there are various ways you can think of a blues scale: one is as a minor pentatonic scale with an added flat5. I don't personally hear the blues scale/note as either happy or sad, more as ... jazzy ... Which is also why i would never use it in dance tracks.

One important advantage of the Blues scales is that they give many useful intervalls. Take for example the blues scale at B-flat: any interval formed not using the A is either perfect (4th or 5th) or minor third ( think, cant be bothered to work it out in detail now). That makes composition and imporvisation easy.

dHarry said:

Aren't major scales are used all over the shop, pop-wise (although maybe less and less with the dominance of R'n'B/soul modes)?

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Interesting question. It doesn't feel like that to me, but i don't have absolute pitch, and rarely bother to transscribe tunes or even read transcriptions.

This leads to an further interesting question: when is a tune in a given scale? Given that modern pop tunes are usually constructed around harmonic changes, may one say that a tune is in a major scale, if the chord progression is only using chords from that scale (I, ii, iii IV, V, vi, viidim)? if so, i doubt that many pop tunes are purely in a major scale. An alternative definition would be to establish tonality via the use of V -> I cadences (as often done in classical music). but that rarely happens in pop music.

dHarry said:

Sevenths are hugely important also - a major seventh complexifies and drastically reduces the "happy" positive feel of a major chord.

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That's right.

dHarry said:

[edit] broken link above, BP! sounds interesting...

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fixed.

a major seventh complexifies and drastically reduces the "happy" positive feel of a major chord.

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Does it?
I always find Maj7ths make me feel "dreamy" or more major than major, as opposed to dominant 7ths which have more tension.

If only I could be botheredd to make some audio examples.....


Self generating music:

that wolfram thing's "dance" setting sounds like records from Zaire that used to get played by Andy Kershaw.

I think this is very cool:

http://home.netspeed.com.au/aistorm/Trance.html

borderpolice said:

This leads to an further interesting question: when is a tune in a given scale? Given that modern pop tunes are usually constructed around harmonic changes, may one say that a tune is in a major scale, if the chord progression is only using chords from that scale (I, ii, iii IV, V, vi, viidim)? if so, i doubt that many pop tunes are purely in a major scale. An alternative definition would be to establish tonality via the use of V -> I cadences (as often done in classical music). but that rarely happens in pop music.

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This is stretching the limits of my current musical knowledge - do you mean that if a chord sequence uses the minors from it's parent major scale (say a Bm in the key of A major) then the ostensibly A major melody over the Bm is then minor, in passing? Or is that nonsense?

Funnily enough I heard an annoying pop song on the radio months ago that consisted almost entirely of a II-V-1 over and over. But maybe that's the exception that "proves" your rule... (apologies to semantic purists also for that).

Edward said:

Does it?
I always find Maj7ths make me feel "dreamy" or more major than major, as opposed to dominant 7ths which have more tension.

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I have mild Synesthesia and find that adding the 7th to a major chord makes it a bit more greenish/lilac.

This from Wolframtones is priceless:

When prominent scientist Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science in 2002, it was immediately hailed as a major intellectual landmark. Today the paradigm shift that Wolfram's work initiated is starting revolutions in a remarkable range of areas of science, technology--and the arts. WolframTones is an experiment in applying Wolfram's discoveries to the creation of music.

At the core of A New Kind of Science is the idea of exploring a new abstract universe: a "computational universe" of simple programs. In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram shows how remarkably simple programs in his "computational universe" capture the essence of the complexity--and beauty--of many systems in nature.

WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram's computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story--and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.

It's all original music--fresh from "mining" Wolfram's computational universe. Sometimes it's reminiscent of familiar musical styles; sometimes it's like nothing ever heard before. But from just the tiniest corner of the computational universe WolframTones can make everyone on Earth their own unique















- wait for it -














cellphone ringtone.

dHarry said:

This is stretching the limits of my current musical knowledge - do you mean that if a chord sequence uses the minors from it's parent major scale (say a Bm in the key of A major) then the ostensibly A major melody over the Bm is then minor, in passing? Or is that nonsense?

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What i meant is that each scale has seven chords that you can play using only notes from the scale. So if one were to define the scale of a song (fragment) as the scale that contains all the chord notes, you would probably not find that many modern pop-songs that are using a major scale. I'm not suggesting that this is a good definition of scale.

dHarry said:

Funnily enough I heard an annoying pop song on the radio months ago that consisted almost entirely of a II-V-1 over and over. But maybe that's the exception that "proves" your rule... (apologies to semantic purists also for that).

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No, I expressed myself very badly. I was just giving examples of possible definitions of scale. I also dont think that's a good definition one at all.

Edward said:

Does it?
I always find Maj7ths make me feel "dreamy" or more major than major, as opposed to dominant 7ths which have more tension.

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Interesting - still, dreamy is more complex than a simple positive major? I can't help feeling the "near miss" of a seventh or ninth as a tension or suspension of affect...

dHarry said:

At the core of A New Kind of Science is the idea of exploring a new abstract universe: a "computational universe" of simple programs. In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram shows how remarkably simple programs in his "computational universe" capture the essence of the complexity--and beauty--of many systems in nature.

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Sounds a bit like J.H.Conway's Game Of Life. Fascinating stuff.
The idea of the computational universe is gaining a lot of ground in physics at the moment - cropping up in areas as way-out and arcane as the holographic principle as it's been applied to information theory and black hole entropy. As Gribbin and Davies put it in The Matter Myth, there's been a transition from 'it' to 'bit'...

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Mr. Tea said:

Sounds a bit like J.H.Conway's Game Of Life. Fascinating stuff.
The idea of the computational universe is gaining a lot of ground in physics at the moment - cropping up in areas as way-out and arcane as the holographic principle as it's been applied to information theory and black hole entropy. As Gribbin and Davies put it in The Matter Myth, there's been a transition from 'it' to 'bit'...

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Is that where David Deutsch comes in, restating the laws of thermodynamics in terms of quantum information theory? I vaguely remember reading something to that effect back when I used to understand information theory and quantum...

I haven't read any Deutsch, although it looks like he has some intersting and worthwhile ideas.
Information theory is something I wish I knew more about. Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark And The Jaguar touches on it, and loads of other stuff, in a pleasing holistic way.

It sounds a LOT like game of life / cellular automata, because it is. Wolfram is a pretty big cheese in those circles having done a lot of research into CA and CA applied to musical ideas.

http://www.geocities.com/vienna/9349/

maths music

Edward said:

Does it?
I always find Maj7ths make me feel "dreamy" or more major than major, as opposed to dominant 7ths which have more tension.

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Definitely 100% in agreement here. From memory I think Scott Walker seems to love his Maj7ths to differentiate the non-scary chordal parts of his music. They sound almost melted, lost in a reverie. More complicated (emotionally as well as musically) than a simple major...