oh i just read the review on that site and it says 11th november.... can it be that C4 haven't yet scheduled it and intend just to shoehorn it into whatever (probably useless, graveyard) slot they can find???
Originally posted by carolchi: Can anyone tell me when Howard Goodall's How Music Works will be shown? I can't understant the C4 website at all.
How Music Works: Melody .....18/11/06 at 20:25 for 1 hour.
If it's as interesting as a series about the origins of music that Goodall hosted some years ago then we're in for a treat. I wish they'd repeat that earlier series but sadly I can't remember what it was called to send a request to Ch4. Still, we've this one to look forward to.
.....but what was the series quite a few years ago that Goodall ran on the origins of music? It told the tale of how the various musical systems and notation came into being, how different musical instruments evolved and so on.
^ do you mean the big bang programmes? it was 5 key moments in musical history, but i don't remember anything much about instruments. there was also another one called 'great dates' or something similar which is listed on his website.
Originally posted by mizdemeanour: ^ do you mean the big bang programmes? it was 5 key moments in musical history, but i don't remember anything much about instruments. there was also another one called 'great dates' or something similar which is listed on his website.
thought the bit about being 'hardwired' towards the pentatonic scale was interesting. the normal range of the human speaking voice is a 6th, which matches exactly the range of the pentatonic scale.
Originally posted by mizdemeanour: did anyone see the first part of this last night?
thought the bit about being 'hardwired' towards the pentatonic scale was interesting. the normal range of the human speaking voice is a 6th, which matches exactly the range of the pentatonic scale.
I saw it. It was interesting and entertaining but I'm not sure I came away much the wiser! He just seemed to pick on a few arbitrary morsels from musical history. What it did do is remind me of one of his previous programmes in which he pointed out how there is a "natural" tendency for fifths - i.e. music systems built around fifths make a lot of sense. Then he pointed out how you can count up in *perfect* fifths 12 times to end up 5 octaves above your starting note (try it - low C to high C - you cover all 12 semitones of the scale, albeit spread over 5 octaves). Except you don't land perfectly 5 octaves up - you end up out by what I now know is a Pythagorean comma - about an 8th of a tone higher than you "expect". In other words twelve 5ths do not equal five octaves. Does anyone know of a good explanation of this because I've searched around 'tinternet and I can't find one that doesn't disappear immediately into jargon and pages of mathematics and it's starting to do my head in!! I can only assume it means that perfect 5ths are not compatible with (perfect) octaves, and I would have thought that in-tune octaves would be a fundamental requirement of any instrument before you go adding any other notes. Or is this not the case? I guess HG did say last night that early music rarely deviated more than a single tone from note to note so maybe the notion of playing octaves together really *wasn't* ever considered.
I guess HG did say last night that early music rarely deviated more than a single tone from note to note so maybe the notion of playing octaves together really *wasn't* ever considered.
Until later on with Bach et al when they decided they did need such flexibility and started tempering with things.
yes - essentially pure 5ths are slightly too large to fit the octave, and octaves are more important than 5ths, so various tunings have been used over time to even out the comma.
equal temperament evens out the comma equally across the whole scale, however as a result, none of the intervals within equal temperament is 'true', with the 3rds and 6th being particularly out. its funny that this scale, which we all are so completely used to, would have sounded badly out of tune at one time.
the other great loss with equal temperament is 'key colour' - that is the flavour of the keys used to be much more different becuase the intervals and frequency ratios were different. this made key changes difficult and transposition near impossible, but it did mean that key was much more significant in a piece as a whole eg C minor - a declaration of love and the lament of unhappy love. E major - noisy shouts of joy, laughing and pleasure.
some people think key colour doesn't exist at all within equal temperament, but i would disagree with that, although it is much reduced.
Originally posted by mizdemeanour: yes - essentially pure 5ths are slightly too large to fit the octave, and octaves are more important than 5ths, so various tunings have been used over time to even out the comma.
Right, so it's as simple as that then - equal temperament gets you the best of both worlds as long as you don't quibble about the odd few cents of tunelessness here and there. Thanks for that.
quote:
equal temperament evens out the comma equally across the whole scale, however as a result, none of the intervals within equal temperament is 'true', with the 3rds and 6th being particularly out. its funny that this scale, which we all are so completely used to, would have sounded badly out of tune at one time.
Indeed. I've played (badly) one musical intrument or another most of my life and I can't conceive of a universe in which music is set up any differently. Some heretics seem to suggest that equal temperament is just one of a great many equally arbitrary music systems!
Originally posted by blast99: Right, so it's as simple as that then - equal temperament gets you the best of both worlds as long as you don't quibble about the odd few cents of tunelessness here and there. Thanks for that.
well, it depends where you take out the odd few cents... an octave is 1200 cents, but a perfect 5th is 702 cents (well 701.995 to be precise...) - to ensure the octave stays true, you can whittle away the extra cents from various different places and mathematicians and musicians have been arguing about that for centuries.... pythagorean temperament, just temperament, mean temperament, well temerpament etc....
the trouble with equal temperament is that it doesn't sit that easily with the human voice - when people sing unaccompanied they are much more likely to go for 'truer' intervals, which seems to fit with the 'hardwired' approach, and also explains why a lot of people struggle to sing 'in tune' with equal temperament.
