Hi, I’m Phil. I’ve been teaching music for 18 years and I’m starting to think that this is not a note.
I came to this conclusion while trying to solve a problem. My job is to help break down complex musical problems and to offer simplified solutions. I’m quite good at it. One of the primary difficulties my students have is understanding and applying music theory.
Many people have trouble understanding musical terms in a tangible, easy to comprehend manner. People who understand the Dorian mode know that it’s the second mode of the major scale. It can be used to convey a cool, jazzy minor sound like in Daft Punks “Get Lucky” and “Around The World” and Foster the Peoples “Pumped Up Kicks”.
This is fine, but consider that “Dorian” is an entirely arbitrary term, as are the names of all the modes. The Dorians were an ancient Greek people, as were the Phrygians and Lydians. The names given to the modes we use today didn’t sound anything like the music the Lydians or Dorians used in the Classical era and they aren’t even that similar to the modes utilized in the Renaissance era that used the same names.
Language evolves over time like any other discipline, but typically this evolution makes logical sense. The problem I am trying to solve is that music theory is loaded with arbitrary language that doesn’t help the practicing student gain a better understanding of the musical concepts that language is trying to explain. Instead, the language acts as a barrier for the student to overcome. What’s worse is when more experienced musicians use the terms against non-experienced musicians as an obstacle. It’s pretentious and cliched and it needs to end.
This is largely due to the fact that we are attaching words to communicate an auditory phenomenon, this can be tricky since language is an inefficient means of communicating something as effervescent as music.
I don’t think that things need to be this way. Music can be better understood from simple to complex, like any other discipline. I see musicians trying to break down complex concepts that they do not possess the tools to comprehend. These players need a better path. A more direct route that doesn’t waste time on concepts that are either too complex for their level or utterly unnecessary to play music successfully.
Before I tell you what I think *this is, I want to explain how I came to this conclusion.
I like to ponder interesting questions and mull them over internally. My problem is that I often do this when I’m trying to get to sleep. Sometimes these thought exercises lull me into a pleasant sleep. This one kept me up all night. Ready?
Do aliens see in color?
That’s it. I couldn’t let this dumb, perhaps unanswerable question go and it lead me down a rabbit hole.
Have you seen David Eagleman’s “The Brain”? it’s a good series. You can catch on Amazon Prime. There’s this segment where he explains our perception of color. Basically, the sky is not inherently blue and a Fuji apple is not inherently red. In short, our reality is fundamentally tied to our biology. What’s “out there” is largely constructed of evolutionary biological processes that occur “in here”.
Colors don't exist in the world. Colors exist in the mind. Humans see ultraviolet wavelengths of varying lengths within a certain range. We see in essentially three colors, making us “trichromats”. You may have heard that dogs see in black and white, this is not necessarily true, it’s more like they have a more limited range of color experience, they are “dichromats” they see two colors. Goldfish can see in four colors, Mantis Shrimp can see in 12!
Back to the question about aliens seeing in color, let’s consider how similar you are to a common grey squirrel. You are both bifurcated creatures with two arms, two legs, and two eyes, generally speaking. You have a central nervous system, a respiratory system, a heart and lungs, the whole deal. Do you look like a squirrel? Not at all even though humans and squirrels have an evolutionary branch fairly close to each other and often inhabit the same ecosystem. Squirrels can’t see trichromatic color, so what makes you think that a life form branching from an entirely different terrestrial system than our own would be able to see color like us?
The anthropomorphizing of aliens in popular culture is absolutely preposterous. If they were real, they wouldn’t look like this. The people who make up this junk just have a bias towards bifurcated life forms that look a little like us. They wouldn’t even look like squirrels. Chances are you couldn’t imagine them. What makes you think they would look anything like something you’d recognize? What makes you think that your trichromatic eyes and limited sensory capabilities could even see them?
So, yeah there’s that. So then I had to ask.
Do aliens hear music the way we do?
I took an intense interest in this. I ran into the same problems with sound as I did with color but there was a large difference.
Displaced air molecules are a more fundamentally tangible phenomenon than color. You can measure tones, you can demonstrate air displacement to other creatures and they can experience that air displacement. Birds sing melodies we can hear and transcribe. What I’m saying is that music is more “real” than color.
So I got to thinking what can we call the process of pulling a string and displacing the air molecules around your head that works on more levels of analysis than “playing a note.”
Here’s a quick explanation of what “levels of analysis are” Take those big-headed aliens we like so much and enroll one of their children in an education course about life on earth. You take that alien child and show them this picture.
You ask them, “What is this?”
They may look at this and say, “A circle with two triangular shapes atop it.”
You say no, try again and tell me what the drawing represents.
“Oh, I got it. A multi-cellular organism”
You say no, try again.
“A mammalian vertibrate.”
You see where this is going. None of these answers are wrong. They just don’t work on the level analysis that we’re accustomed to. We say it’s a cat, a simple three-letter word that signifies the “furry petting thing” that we domesticated sometime ago for our amusement.
Now, for the purposes of education, let’s find a more accurate way of defining what “this” is:
I don’t like calling it a “note”, not for educational purposes anyways.( Disclaimer: I will probably keep calling them “notes” out of sheer habit, but bear with me here)
A “note” is something you write to somebody. You “take notes” in a lecture. My wife leaves me “notes” about what I have to do around the house. So why would we call musical pitches “notes”?
Maybe we can call this a “tone” and that’s closer to what this actually is, but we use a certain “tone of voice” to communicate. Let’s do better.
I think we should call this a “frequency”. That nails it down to its fundamental properties. Frequency is defined as “the rate at which a vibration occurs that constitutes a wave, either in a material (as in sound waves), or in an electromagnetic field (as in radio waves and light), usually measured per second.”
I’m plucking a string and that string vibrates with sufficient periodicity in order to displace the air molecules around your ears to produce a pitch. You perceive this pitch because of the frequency of the vibrating string.
And so you’re thinking, so what?
Well, I’ll tell you. Calling this a frequency takes into account the material mathematical elements of music. This note… (see there I go) vibrates at a frequency of 130.81 Hz. “Hertz” is how we measure frequencies in cycles per second. This string is vibrating at 130.81 cycles per second. That’s may not be important to you in the middle of playing a gig, but it is quite important conceptually for your understanding of how music is woven into the fabric of reality.
We can hear pitches from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Dogs can hear above this range and Hz below 20 certainly exist, we just can’t hear them. If you were to play a note that’s low enough, off the end of the left side of your piano, eventually all you hear is an even pulse. Pitch IS fundamentally rhythm. Those rhythms must be fast enough for us to perceive pitch. So, once again we have a limited range of frequency experience. We perceive music under biological constraints.
So going back to the question;
“Do aliens hear music the way we do?”
Maybe, but they probably would pick up on the rhythmic elements far before anything else. So maybe Beethovens 9th symphony is a crazy drum circle of simple and complex rhythmic ratios. Then these aliens would say, “Wow, these humans really do love all these crazy rhythms mashing up against each other!”
Okay, now we know that “notes” are actually “frequencies”. We can now begin to look at music under the correct lens and learn music in what I believe to be a better way.
When you tune your guitar or bass by matching pitch between two adjacent strings, you are lining up the frequencies to match each other. You are in tune when these frequencies do not conflict.
Consonance is simple rhythmic ratios. Dissonance is more complex rhythmic ratios.
I will explain how these elements work in following video posts. Let me know what you think in the comments below and please like and subscribe to stay informed of new content. Thanks for watching!