[troutman]

Originally Posted by arloiginla

Yes there is actually...it's called the overtone system. Brief explanation here:

http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdiction.../overtone.html

Basically, it's sound waves and their frequencies. The A that most instruments tune to, has a frequency of 440Hz. The A above that (an octave higher) has a frequency of 880Hz. It's all mathematically connected. Which is why if you play a note with 440Hz together with one that is 880Hz at the same time, it sounds "good" but playing 440Hz with say, 875Hz, would sound dissonant and "bad."

For the layman, the further away from the fundamental you get, the more dissonant the sound gets. Chords that have notes in them close to the fundamental, are the most popular ones today. That's why you can take the 4 chords that most pop songs use, and play them in any order and they'll sound different, but will all sound "good."

This is why music exists in every culture, society, etc. It is as natural to us as breathing.

Read this article on how music has similar effects on our brains as drugs and sex. Literally.

http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/mag...6/alacarte.asp

Good post.

See also,

http://www.yourbrainonmusic.com/

I was eventually lucky to be able to work with many well-known musicians. But I also worked with dozens of musical no-names, people who are extremely talented but never made it. I began to wonder why some musicians become household names while others languish in obscurity. I also wondered why music seemed to come so easily to some and not others. Where does creativity come from? Why do some songs move us so and others leave us cold? And what about the role of perception in all of this, the uncanny ability of great musicians and engineers to hear nuances that most of us don't?

Music is unusual among all human activities for both its ubiquity and its antiquity . No known human culture now nor anytime in the recorded past lacked music. Some of the oldest physical artifacts found in human and proto-human excavation sites are musical instruments: bone flutes and animal skins stretched over tree stumps to make drums. Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep, and college students studying with music as a background. Even more so in non-industrialized cultures than in modern Western societies, music is and was part of the fabric of everyday life. Only relatively recently in our own culture, 500 years or so ago, a distinction arose that cut society in two, forming separate classes of musical performers and music listeners. Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries.

Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs. I would say that most Americans qualify as expert music listeners. We have the cognitive capacity to detect wrong notes, to find music we enjoy, to remember hundreds of melodies, and to tap our feet in time with the music - an activity that involves a process of meter extraction so complicated that most computers cannot do it. Why do we listen to music, and why are we willing to spend so much money on music listening? Two concert tickets can easily cost as much as a week's food allowance for a family of four, and one CD costs about the same as a work shirt, 8 loaves of bread, or basic phone service for a month. Understanding why we like music and what draws us to it is a window into the essence of human nature.

This book is about the science of music, from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience - the field that is at the intersection of psychology and neurology. I'll discuss some of my own and the latest studies researchers in our field have conducted on music, musical meaning, and musical pleasure. They offer new insights into profound questions. If all of us hear music differently, how can we account for pieces that seem to move so many people - Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, or Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry Starry Night (Vincent)" for example? On the other hand, if we all hear music in the same way, how can we account for wide differences in musical preference - why is it that one man's Mozart is another man's Madonna?