Wired Science | Wired.com: Stop that noise! Many creatures, such as human babies, chimpanzees, and chicks, react negatively to dissonance—harsh, unstable, grating sounds. Since the days of the ancient Greeks, scientists have wondered why the ear prefers harmony. Now, scientists suggest that the reason may go deeper than an aversion to the way clashing notes abrade auditory nerves; instead, it may lie in the very structure of the ear and brain, which are designed to respond to the elegantly spaced structure of a harmonious sound.
4 comments:
The science of acoustics and the human brain are a loose science at best. Human perception is so subjective I think that making an overarching assumption about the perception of sound is ludicrous. I think that we have evolved to a point where our ears are very good at seeking patterns in the world around us. We love to see and hear patterns which make us see that there is organization to this chaotic world. I am also not surprised that this study was funded and completed when there are more important things to be researching.
This has been one of the more fascinating articles that I have read. We are fragile and very sensitive beings and sound is something that we are either completely aware of or something that we choose to ignore. It's interesting that our brain craves harmony and identifies patterns in the sound. The information in this article could really help someone like a sound designer. There are different effects that you could potentially get when you play around with various sound patterns. Obviously, there are some sounds that are stronger and more disarming while others are simply pleasant. It would be good to try testing sounds and starting with a very harmonious and pleasant sound while moving to a harsher drum. There are many ways to mess with the mind, sound is just another tool.
Newsflash: Science is pretty.
Just as Fibonacci's spiral is not only mathematically pretty but the corresponding graphical representation of it pleasing to our eyes as well. My point is that humans seem to be wired to find harmony beautiful.
There's millennia of evolution here making all of this work the way it does.
What I also find fascinating in this article is the idea of "amusics," or people who cannot identify consonance with dissonance and how this condition is inherited. So, seems like you really can't teach the world to sing; some of us are just born that way...
Is harmony beautiful because that is the way our ears work or do our ears work that way so they can hear beautiful harmony better?
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