How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond
How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond
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Overview
"Any readers whose love of music has somehow not led them to explore the technical side before will surely find the result a thoroughly accessible, and occasionally revelatory, primer."—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
What makes a musical note different from any other sound? How can you tell if you have perfect pitch? Why do ten violins sound only twice as loud as one? Do your Bob Dylan albums sound better on CD vinyl? John Powell, a scientist and musician, answers these questions and many more in How Music Works, an intriguing and original guide to acoustics.
In a clear and engaging voice, Powell leads you on a fascinating journey through the world of music, with lively discussions of the secrets behind harmony timbre, keys, chords, loudness, musical composition, and more. From how musical notes came to be (you can thank a group of stodgy men in 1939 London for that one), to how scales help you memorize songs, to how to make and oboe from a drinking straw, John Powell distills the science and psychology of music with wit and charm.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780316183673 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Little, Brown and Company |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2010 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Sales rank: | 429,240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How Music Works
The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, from Beethoven to the Beatles and BeyondBy Powell, John
Little, Brown and Company
Copyright © 2010 Powell, JohnAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316098304
1. So, What Is Music, Anyway?
On my first evening as a student in Birmingham I walked into the local chip shop and asked for my favorite post-pub delicacy—chips, peas and gravy. The Chinese lady looked at me quizzically and asked, “What’s gravy?” I was totally flummoxed. I was used to unquestioned access to gravy back in my home town, and I had no idea how to describe the stuff…“A sort of thin brown sauce?” Fortunately the situation was saved—and a whole new world of Birmingham sophistication was opened up to me—when she smiled and said the magic words, “Curry sauce?”
This story is not about the pros and cons of gravy. The point is that sometimes we can be familiar with something we really enjoy, but have no idea what it actually is. This is the relationship most of us have with music—pleasure without understanding. To my shame, I must admit that I still don’t know what goes into gravy, but I have managed to untangle some of the ingredients of music, and I hope you enjoy my explanation of how musicians manage to manipulate our moods using only string, bits of wood and lengths of tubing.
This book is not based on opinions or hopeful guesswork. It is based on real information about how musical notes are produced and what happens when they combine to form a piece of music. Many people think that music is entirely built on art, but this is not true. There are rules of logic, engineering and physics underlying the whole creative side of music. The development of music and musical instruments over the past couple of millennia has depended on a continuous interplay of art and science.
You will be glad to hear that you need no musical or scientific training to understand this book, although musicians and scientists should find plenty of things they didn’t know before. The only musical skill you need is the ability to hum or sing two songs: “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”—and it doesn’t matter how quietly or badly you sing them, I can’t hear you. As far as math skills go, it would be useful if you can add, subtract, multiply and divide, but even these skills are not essential. Also, because I am assuming that you have no training in the subject, I will explain the meaning of any specialist words I use as I go along. This may be a little over-explanatory for the musicians and scientists among you, but I would rather be irritating to some than baffling to others.
Throughout the book I have occasionally provided details of pieces of music that might be useful to illustrate various points. Most of these examples can be watched on YouTube or listened to through other media—but they are not a necessary part of reading the book. I put them in because you might enjoy them, and because this is an excellent opportunity to advertise some of my favorite music. If you think I have explained something badly or you need more detail, please contact me by email on howmusicworks@yahoo.co.uk and I’ll see if I can come up with an answer. (This address can also be used by wealthy music firms who want to bribe me with vast sums to include references to particular bits of music in future editions of this book.)
Music covers an enormous range of subjects, from the love lives of the great composers to how to build a guitar or play the trumpet. You could say that books about the history of music cover the “when” questions and most other music-related books address the “how to” problems. This book, on the other hand, deals with some of the “what” and “why” questions about music like: what is happening to the air between the instrument and your ears? And why do such things affect your mood?
Read on, and you will discover the answers to these, and lots of other questions, including:
What’s the difference between a note and a noise?
What are minor keys, and why do they sound sad?
Why do ten violins sound only twice as loud as one?
Why do clarinets sound different from flutes?
Why are Western instruments all tuned to the same notes—and why those notes, not others?
What is harmony and how does it work?
Some of these questions have been answered in the books you will find in the physics section of the library, filed under “Musical Acoustics.” The only problem is that the technical nature of the subject has meant that these books use lots of math and complicated graphs in their explanations. Books full of graphs and math have a limited readership—and this is why the only people who seem to know anything about how music works are a few badly dressed academics (and I speak with some authority here, as a badly dressed academic myself).
When I first started to study the physics and psychology of music I thought it would be straightforward. How much can there be to understand about how saxophones and harps make different sounds or why we use scales? Then I started reading. Some of the things I had thought I understood, like loudness for example, were bizarrely complicated and much more interesting than I thought they would be. To aid my own understanding I began to condense the information into simpler explanations. Eventually I realized that most of this knowledge could be presented clearly to any reader who has no musical or technical training but simply loves music. So I started to put together the notes that eventually grew into this book.
Even some top-class musicians are not familiar with the basic underlying facts about music—they play their instruments and produce the correct notes in the right order without wondering how or why their instruments were designed to produce those particular notes and not others. It’s as if the musicians are acting like waiters—they deliver the meal to us—and the food is put together by chefs (composers) from boxes of ingredients, but no one knows how or why those ingredients became available in the first place.
I think it’s a shame that something as popular as music has had so much mystery attached to it. In writing this book, I haven’t used any math, graphs or written music, and I have kept the style conversational. By exploring the basic facts behind what notes are, and how they can move you to dance, kiss or weep, you’ll discover that many of the mysteries of music turn out to be perfectly understandable—and you’ll be delighted to hear that your newly acquired understanding won’t stop you from dancing, kissing or weeping.
My aim is to show you—both musicians and non-musicians—that music can be understood on a very fundamental level. This level of understanding can deepen our enjoyment of music in the same way that some knowledge of how shadows are created or how perspective works can enhance our enjoyment of a painting. Some people worry that understanding more about music will reduce the pleasure they get from it, but the reverse is true. Learning how a complicated dish is prepared makes you appreciate it even more, and doesn’t change how good it tastes.
Though this is a book about all music, I have concentrated on Western music of all types—from Frank Sinatra, U2 and Beethoven, to nursery rhymes and film music. All these styles of music, from punk rock to opera, follow the same rules of acoustics and mood manipulation.
There are complicated, overlapping layers of musical appreciation and understanding. At first glance you might think that the performing musician knows more about the music than a listener who can’t play an instrument, but this isn’t necessarily true. A non-musician who is a fan of the piece being played might know a lot more about how the music should sound than a performer who is playing it for the first time. As a listener, you understand a lot about music already, but a lot of your knowledge is hidden on a subconscious level. This book will help to explain and clarify all this stuff and I hope it will give you a few “ah, so that’s how it works!” moments.
But enough of the preamble—let’s get on with the ambling.
What is music?
The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was always keen on sharing his views on music, for example: “Brass bands are all very well in their place—outdoors and several miles away!” This is more than a little harsh on brass bands, but it does show that music can produce strong negative feelings as well as positive ones. When it comes to music, we all have our favorites and intense dislikes, so no definition of music can include words like “beauty” and “pleasure.” All we can safely say is that music is sound which has been organized to stimulate someone—which is a bit feeble really. The “someone” might be the composer only, and the “stimulation” might mean anything from joy to tears. Thankfully it is much easier to define the individual building blocks of music: notes, rhythm, melody, harmony, loudness and so on. We will be exploring all these subjects during the course of the book, and we will begin with the most basic block of all—the musical note.
A musical note consists of four things: a loudness, a duration, a timbre and a pitch. One of these features can be summed up in just one sentence but the other three will require a whole chapter or more each. “Duration” is the easy one, so let’s do it now: some notes last longer than others.
The most distinctive property of a musical note is its pitch, so we’ll start there.
What is pitch?
Pitch distinguishes a note from a noise. I will explain this at greater length over the next couple of chapters, but for now a short introduction will help to get us started.
If you hum any tune you like, you will be choosing a duration, a loudness and a pitch for each note you produce. Subtle changes in loudness and duration during a song can carry a lot of emotional information—but as we’re only going to be humming the first four notes of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” we don’t need to worry too much about that. So, try humming notes for these four words at the same loudness with the same duration for each note. All you are choosing now is the pitch. The first two notes have the same pitch; then there is a shift up in pitch to “Black”; and then “Sheep” is the same pitch as “Black.”
All musical notes involve regular, repeating vibrations in the air. When you were humming any single note just now, you were producing a regular vibration with your vocal cords that was repeating itself many times a second; when I hum “Baa” my vocal cords vibrate about a hundred times a second. When I hum the note for “Black” I have to produce a higher pitch note and I do this by increasing the number of vibrations I produce every second.
So, whether the note is produced by a vibrating string or the vibration of your vocal cords, higher pitch notes involve more vibrations per second. Every melody is made up of a string of notes of different pitches.
Naming our notes
The notes on a piano or any other instrument are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet; A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Between some of these letters there is an extra note (the black notes on a piano keyboard). For example, there is an extra note between A and B, which can be called either “A sharp” (meaning “one step higher than A”) or “B flat” (meaning “one step lower than B”). This fairly daft-sounding system of naming notes has been handed down to us over the past few centuries and I will explain why in chapter 9. For the moment all you need to know is that notes are named after letters and the letter might have the word “flat” or “sharp” after it. In the illustration below, I haven’t the space to write the words “flat” or “sharp,” so I’ve used the traditional symbols “” for flat and “#” for sharp.
All pianos are tuned to the same pitches. If you press a piano key in Helsinki and record the pitch of that particular note, and then compare it with a piano in New York, the notes will be identical. Similarly, the notes of clarinets or saxophones are the same all over the world. You might think this is obvious, but it’s not so long ago that the pitches of musical notes varied from country to country, or even from city to city. The notes everyone is using nowadays were carefully chosen—but who chose them? And why?
Why do we all use the same notes?
If you play a stringed instrument such as a violin or guitar, you can tighten or loosen the strings to alter their pitch. At a fairly early stage of your training you are taught how to use this tightening process to tune your instrument. This involves making the strings produce notes which are the correct distance apart in pitch. For example, the distance in pitch between any two adjacent violin strings is the same as the distance between “Baa” and “Black.”
Let’s say we are tuning a violin. The first step could be to tune our thickest string to the correct note, G, and then tune the other strings using the “Baa–Black” difference between each one. You would get the initial G by matching your violin note to a tuning fork or the correct note on a (tuned) piano. But what happens if you don’t have a tuning fork or piano handy?
If you are playing your instrument alone, you can choose any old note for the thickest string and then tune all the other strings to that one (making sure that the difference between any two strings is the same as the jump in pitch between “Baa” and “Black”). All you have to do to choose your first pitch is to make sure that the string is stretched tight enough to make a clear note, but not so tight that it snaps. The pitch you initially choose will not be G (unless you have perfect pitch, which I will describe in a while)—in fact, it will probably be a note between two adjacent piano keys, maybe “A and a bit” or “a bit lower than F.”
As long as the difference between your strings is the same as “Baa–Black,” the music you produce will sound fine and other musicians with stringed instruments could tune to match your notes and join in. However, if one of your friends is a flute player he will not be able to play along. This is because the notes on a flute (or any other wind instrument) are fixed—you can’t choose any old notes on a flute. Your flute-playing friend can play, for example, an “E” or an “F” but he can’t choose “E and a bit.”
Let’s say that you and your string-playing friends are all playing a tune that goes “E and a bit—F and a bit—C and a bit”—this will sound just as pleasant as the flute-playing E–F–C but if you both play at the same time it will sound horrible. There are only two ways to make music together:
You violin players must hold the flute player down while one of you saws a few tenths of an inch off the end of his flute. Then you’ll have to file all the holes until they are in suitable positions for this new, shorter flute; or
You can all tune your violins to match the flute notes. Once you have done this, any other instrument can join in with you because you are now playing the standard notes.
These standard notes are no sweeter or more musical than any other group of notes. They are only correct because someone had to decide how long flutes and other wind instruments should be. (The length of such instruments determines the pitch of the notes they produce.) In the past, things were very confused—flutes made in different countries were all slightly different lengths—which meant that a German flute player couldn’t play along with an English one unless he bought an English flute. After a lot of argy-bargy about which length was the best, it was decided that a bunch of experts in badly cut suits would form a committee and decide once and for all on a group of notes that everybody would use from then on. After a lot of expert discussion (which sounds a lot like argy-bargy), they decided on the notes we use today at a meeting in London in 1939. So now, all over the world, flutes and all the other Western instruments such as violins and clarinets, guitars, pianos and xylophones have a set of standard notes.
Nowadays, if someone says “I have perfect pitch” they mean that the pitches of these standard notes are fixed in their long-term memory, and this peculiar ability is the subject of the next chapter.
Continues...
Excerpted from How Music Works by Powell, John Copyright © 2010 by Powell, John. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1 So, What Is Music, Anyway" 1
2 What Is Perfect Pitch and Do I Have It" 11
3 Notes and Noises 20
4 Xylophones and Saxophones: Same Notes but Different Sounds 39
5 Instrumental Break 48
6 How Loud is Loud" 81
7 Harmony and Cacophony 101
8 Weighing Up Scales 118
9 The Self-Confident Major and the Emotional Minor 141
10 I Got Rhythm 182
11 Making Music 203
12 Listening to Music 230
Fiddly Details 244
A Naming and Identifying Intervals 244
B Using the Decibel System 246
C Tuning an Instrument to the Pentatonic Scale 248
D Calculating Equal Temperament 250
E The Notes of the Major Keys 253
Bibliography 255
Acknowledgments 259
Index 261
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