Music has been a part of human existence for a long long time. Evidence for it goes back tens of thousands of years. One such piece of evidence was found in the Chauvet Cave in Southern France. Some 25,000 years ago a landslide blocked the main entrance, cutting off almost all airflow through the cave. Consequently, the things inside were very well preserved. Among those was a bone flute made from a vulture’s femur bone.
Archeologist and instrument maker Wulf Hein made a replica and found he could play the pentatonic scale and, with some blowing variations, the full major scale. (1)
Harps flutes and drums are depicted in art from Ancient Egypt, mentioned in the Bible and also in the Ancient Indian Upanishads. Clearly, music has been meaningful to humans, but how?
Practical Uses
Today music has a lot of practical uses. It’s used to sell things (jingles), to enhance drama and create moods in movies and TV shows, as branding for products or politicians or sports, to enliven celebrations, foster school spirit (school/fight songs), enable dancing, teach things (Alphabet Song) and engage in worship. Several of these uses we know go back to Biblical and pre-Biblical times. Yet, all of them depend on some unique features of music.
A Reflection of Experience
Music reflects our experience in a way that no other art can. What enables music to do this is that it exists, as does our experience, in the flow of time. We experience our lives on multiple levels of this flow. From moment by moment thought, emotions, activities and sensory perceptions to milestones and life changing events that may be years apart. And music proceeds precisely in the same way. It is a series of events in time, flowing from one to the next, often marked by dramatic moments.
There’s something very fundamental that enables it to do this: Vibrations.
Music, Math and Feelings
We have known for thousands of years that sound is the result of something vibrating. The rate of these vibrations are measured today in Herz (hz), which is vibrations/second. The range of the piano keyboard from 27.5 hz to 4186 hz. It’s hard to imagine something vibrating 4186 times in one second! Yet, on average, we can hear vibrations as fast s 20,000 times per second. And dogs as much as 65,000!
Music works as it does because of relationships. If you hear a C Major chord playing on the piano on Middle C, you’re hearing frequencies of roughly 261, 327 & 392 hz. These form certain ratios with one another as shown in the image below. All the pitches you hear in music form certain ratios with one another. This is one of the ways music is, indeed, math.
The ratios in the C major chord are all pretty simple with 6:5 being the most complicated one. We call the pairs of notes Intervals. C-E is an interval as are E-G and C-G. The picture below shows all the intervals we commonly use and the ratio between their frequencies (M = Major, m = minor and P = Perfect). Consonant means we tend to think these sound good. A C major chord has only Consonant intervals: C-E = M3, E-G = m3 & C-G = P5. Dissonant means we tend to think these intervals clash and don’t sound good. As you can see, the ratios of the Dissonant intervals are much more complex. The ratio of the Tritone is so complex (57:40!) that Europeans completed avoided using it for more than 600 years!
What does this mean for our experience? Basically, it means we react to sounds very much the way we react to math. If some asks you what 3 x 2 is, you’ll feel perfectly comfortable and easily give the answer. But if they ask you what 91.5 x 743.2 is, you’ll likely feel tense and say, “I have no idea!” So we generally react to sounds with complex relationships by feeing tense and sounds with simple relationships by feeling more relaxed.
Tension and Release
And though it’s not quite that simple, that’s basically what happens when we’re listening to music. The tempo, the volume and relationships between the sounds affect the level of tension we experience. This can be quite obvious, but usually it’s quite subtle. In the Middle Ages in Europe, the quest to control dissonance led to some composers developing a masterful control over the flow of experience their music produced in us. None was greater than Palestrina. If you have the time, listen to the Kyrie by Palestrina and let yourself feel the beautiful flow of experience it creates.
All the music we hear to do that has harmony is built upon the work done over a period of 800-900 years in Europe.
Vibrations: Body & Mind
Yet, the vibrations in music affect us in an even deeper, more fundamental way. For most of the activity in our bodies that keep us going day and night exist in the form of cycles, which is what vibrations are. The flow of air and blood are basic cycles that we can easily perceive, but the electrical signals in our brain and nervous systems also form cycles as signals are constantly being sent all over the body from the brain and from all over the body to the brain.
UConn psychological sciences and physics professor Edward W. Large and his colleagues have uncovered what he calls neural resonance theory (NRT). “His research shows that human brain activity can also sync to various rhythms – from reggae to R&B to rhapsodies.” And according to NRT, “oscillations (rhythms) in the brain’s neural activity actually synchronize with the pitches and rhythms of music. This synchronization is what creates the sense of expectation or anticipation.” (2)
Music is really one of the most amazing things human beings have developed. Yet, we didn’t invent it. It exists in nature in many ways, from the rise and fall of wind—which plays the instruments of trees and structures and wind chimes—to the songs of birds to the amazing, extended songs of whales—and in the universe, the “Music of the Spheres.”
Music is truly a gift from our Creator for our enjoyment and benefit.
(1) From “Flute of Forgotten Dreams” in The Ethan Hein blog
(2) From “This is Your Brain on Music” in Uconn Today.
