It’s been known since Pythagoras that harmonic relationships between musical notes can be expressed as whole number ratios.

Ie: if you play a note on an open string, and then halve the length of that string, the two notes are related in a harmonious way (same note, one octave higher) – a harmonic.

If you third the string, you also get a harmonic note.

If you divide the string by a little bit more thn a half, or a bit less, the note is dissonant and jarring to the ear.

Now this may be a chicken or egg question but is the dissonance we experience when we hear an off note like this something biologically ingrained into our brains – the sort of way we find phi relationships pleasing or beautiful.. Or is it simply we’re used to working with whole number ratios in our system of music, and we’re just used to listening to music made up of these pleasing relationships?

Is there a biological explanation?

It’s difficult to immediately think of an evolutionary advantage for our dislike of musical dissonance, which suggests to me that its either “just one of those things” or, more likely, that it is a bye product of some other aspect of neurology which is advantageous…. Our innate love of patterns for example.

What I mean is that the adverse reaction to dissonance may be a result of our positive reaction to things that “fit together”… Things that make our lives easier.

found it on utube and when my speeds get better i’ll download the Moon Machine series. ta for the headsup

this article may help

Why dissonant music strikes the wrong chord in the brain

The common aversion to clashing harmonies seems to be due to mathematical relationships of overtones.

http://www.nature.com/news/why-dissonant-music-strikes-the-wrong-chord-in-the-brain-1.11791

Many people dislike the clashing dissonances of modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg. But what’s our problem with dissonance? It’s long been thought that dissonant musical chords contain acoustic frequencies that interfere with one another to set our nerves on edge. A new study proposes that in fact we prefer consonant chords for a different reason, connected to the mathematical relationship between the many different frequencies that make up the sound1.

Cognitive neuroscientist Marion Cousineau of the University of Montreal in Quebec and her colleagues evaluated these explanations for preferences about consonance and dissonance by comparing the responses of a control group of people with normal hearing to those of people with amusia — an inability to distinguish between different musical tones.

more…

and

Consonance and dissonance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonance_and_dissonance

Scientists discover most relaxing tune ever
http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/music/scientists-discover-most-relaxing-tune-ever

verdi interesting :)

from that first article
“whereas for dissonant intervals this is no longer the case: they look more like the irregular overtones for sounds that are ‘inharmonic’, such as metal being struck.”

maybe that’s why I don’t like cutlery being dropped on the kitchen sink, always thought they should treat the underside of sinks with some acoustic dampening

Well yes I sort of said that in the OP. there are strict mathematical relationships between notes we find harmonious :)

Maybe related

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_rectangular_bandwidth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bark_scale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise