A man playing a bonang Credit: Andrew Otto via Flikr under a CC license
A man playing a bonang Credit: Andrew Otto via Flikr under a CC license The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures. There are many more kinds of harmony out there Peter Harrison According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, 'consonance' - a pleasant-sounding combination of notes - is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these 'integer ratios' are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music 'dissonant', unpleasant sounding. But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong. Their study, published in Nature Communications , shows that in normal listening contexts, we do not actually prefer chords to be perfectly in these mathematical ratios. "We prefer slight amounts of deviation.
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