The course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework. Analyses of speech and musical databases are consistent with the idea that the chromatic scale (the set of tones used by humans to create music), consonance and dissonance, worldwide preferences for a few dozen scales from the billions that are possible, and the emotions elicited by music in different cultures all stem from the relative similarity of musical tonalities and the characteristics of voiced (tonal) speech. Like the phenomenology of visual perception, these aspects of auditory perception appear to have arisen from the need to contend with sensory stimuli that are inherently unable to specify their physical sources, leading to the evolution of a common strategy to deal with this fundamental challenge.
Relationship of Vocalization to Music
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From the course by Duke University
Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why
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From the lesson
Vocalization and Vocal Tones
A discussion of the nature of vocal sound signals, their biological importance and their role in understanding music.
Meet the Instructors
- Dale PurvesM.D.
Duke Institute for Brain Sciences
So in Lesson 5, let's come back to the relationship of vocalization to music.
And let's take a look again at this slide that I showed
you before and be reminded that the vocal tract has all
the characteristics of a musical instrument.
And the reason for showing you this again is to make the point that as such
the human voice would have been the instrument and
it is an instrument as we discussed before.
That first produced preferred tonal relationships in song melodies and
harmonies, so if you ask the question well,
where is music likely to have come from?
And why is it that many of the characteristics we're gonna discuss in
the remaining modules of the course have the phenomenology
that we know in music?
The answer is almost certainly that they come from the human voice.
Again, not in the current text of language that we're familiar with today.
But in terms of ancient pre-linguistic vocalizations that must have
been the beginnings of the melodies and
harmonies that were first generated by the voice that were much later
adopted by primitive instruments and
much much later adopted by the music theory that we're familiar with today.
So let's just go through that argument in a little bit more detail.
So this is just a variation of what I told you at the beginning,
but now having gone through the lessons today,
we can maybe understand this or appreciate it a little bit better.
Human vocalization is the major source of tonal sound signals in the environment.
That's a critical foundation for thinking about music, particular tonal music, and
why it has the characteristics that we're going to discuss in the upcoming modules.
And, the reason for
its importance is that these vocal signals, and again they don't have to.
We think of language today as being a means of conveying lexical information.
But of course that quite apart from its modern incarnation as
the 6,000 languages that exist in the world today.
Pre-linguistic vocalizations
conveyed enormous amount of biologically important information.
This has to do with the information about the speaker's size.
A big person has a much lower, the voice has a much lower set of frequencies,
generates lower harmonic series than a smaller person.
The gender of the person is revealed that way,
the age of the person whether it's a kid or an adult is revealed that way.
The emotional state of the person is revealed.
You know very well when a person is bored or sad, or happy or
angry from the way tonalities are being expressed.
Again, it doesn't have to be In terms of words, and
of course by the timbre you can identify the individual speaker most of the time.
So the point is that identifying and
attending to vocal sounds would have been biologically critical for our species.
Without this information, we wouldn't have done nearly as well as we did do.
And by the way, this information is not limited to
human beings and human perceptions of sounds.
I mean it's obvious, I mean I think if my dog was a medium sized dog,
I mean when he barks or growls,
you can tell that he's not a chihuahua, he's a pretty big dog.
That's just as important for other animals as it is for us,
we use it to greater advantage perhaps and certainly in more subtle ways.
But it's generally present in biologically vocalizations.
So, the general point that I wanna make finally that I made in the beginning but
I re-iterate here is that we should because of their
biological value especially, be attracted to vocal sounds and
this has been demonstrated in a lot of different ways and
this is not anything special, again to vocal sounds.
We're attracted to things that have biological value and biological reward for
us ultimately in terms of survival and reproduction.
But you don't have to think about it in such basic terms.
We are attracted to any sensory signal that provides
information that is useful to us.
Whether that signal involves food and our great
liking of foods that have caloric content like sugar.
Or in any context the information that pertains to potential mates and
many other contexts in which you can think about this.
We're especially attracted to the sounds that are important in the same way
that we are attracted to other sensory qualities that are important to us for
biological survival, for nourishment, for reproduction, and so on.
So this is not anything special.
This is absolutely fundamental, but again, if we want to understand
music, the point of all this is that we have better be able to think about it and
understand it in terms of its biology as well as in
terms of the esoteric things that modern music theory and
our knowledge of music today is more often concerned with.
So let me then sum up the main points of the module for today.
First of these is that evolution of our tonal sense comes from vocalization and
it's biological values.
I've just explained that in vocalization what we hear doesn't accord with physics.
That's really fundamental.
We've gone over that a number of times.
And again, there's evidence in vocalization that's the case,
is what we've talked about mainly today.
Rather what we here accords with accumulated auditory experience, both in
the context of intensity and the loudness we hear in response to intensities and
frequencies, and the pitches that we hear in response to those frequencies.
And the overall [COUGH] idea is that this framework provides a beginning for
understanding music and it's attraction in biological terms.
Which is gonna be the essence of the remaining modules of the course.
So next time we're gonna to continue this same conversation by
pursuing music further and its appeal in biological terms.
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