What, you thought I was gone forever?
Here is a fascinating article about why it is that most music — in a wide variety of cultures and places, including Western music — is based upon the familiar 12-tone system. According the article, "when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music." I have often wondered about the power, the emotional reach, and yet the seeming naturalness of music. The fact that the underlying tone structure may be intimately related to speech sounds makes sense to me.
Categories: Science