Slashdot Mirror
Why Dissonant Music Sounds 'Wrong'
ananyo writes "Many people dislike the clashing dissonances of modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg. But what's our problem with dissonance? There has long been thought to be a physiological reason why at least some kinds of dissonance sound jarring. Two tones close in frequency interfere to produce 'beating': what we hear is just a single tone rising and falling in loudness. If the difference in frequency is within a certain range, rapid beats create a rattling sound called roughness. An aversion to roughness has seemed consistent with the common dislike of intervals such as minor seconds. Yet when cognitive neuroscientist Marion Cousineau of the University of Montreal in Quebec and her colleagues asked amusic subjects (who cannot distinguish between different musical tones) to rate the pleasantness of a whole series of intervals, they showed no distinctions between any of the intervals but disliked beating as much as people with normal hearing. Instead the researchers propose that harmonicity is the key (abstract). Notes contain many overtones — frequencies that are whole-number multiples of the basic frequency in the note. For consonant 'pleasant sounding' intervals the overtones of the two notes tend to coincide as whole-number multiples, whereas for dissonant intervals this is no longer the case. The work suggests that harmonicity is more important than beating for dissonance aversion in normal hearers."
in b4 Fourier
Dissonance in music is neat - like hemisync brain harmonics "stuff". But if you're not familiar with it, it sounds strange. Read: not news...
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
is much better at annoying one's parents, as successive generations of teenagers have discovered for the past fifty years or so.
I had no idea what "dissonant" music was, so I had to go to youtube and look some of this guy's music up.
Hated it.
Is his music supposed to typify music which displays a lot of these clashes/"beating" the Slashdot submission describes? He's certainly not mentioned in the abstract - which make sense because although his music lacks a delicious tonal centre I'm not aware of any attempt on his part to include this sort of issue in his music. Can someone with access to the paper (it doesn't appear to be free) confirm my suspicion that he's not mentioned in it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJsmjhSpD3I
This all makes sense to me. I've always been surprised by my (and others') ability to remember the tunes to songs even when I can't remember the words. It's sometimes like I can feel what the next note should be, what note would feel right. Maybe it's a similar mechanism to how these people found that things can just sound wrong, even when the subject is amusic.
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Or it's just two and a half millenia of enculturation for the heirs of Greek culture, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Yet another attempt by folks who assume their music is the music that nature itself demands to find a universal in the brain. They should take a world music class first to realize that what sounds great to one group of people sounds shit to another. I think, for example, of Gamelan tunings which are not harmonious in the sense of the overtones lining up, but sure sound right to folks in Indonesia. Or some ancient Japanese gagaku.
Why knock Schoenberg? It's pretty tame stuff anyway. Beautiful though.
Also -- the equally tempered scale is not at all harmonious. It's based on a equal division of the octave, which does not occur in the harmonic series. Far from it. Play a fifth on a piano -- it will be off by a substantial margin instead of being a harmonious 3:2 ration. But, since we are used to it, it still sounds pretty great. (Although I do prefer meantone tunings for a lot of music, they just can't play in many keys) It's a problem that the ancients knew about though. We call the disjunction between a stack of 12 fifths (at which point we are back to the starting note) a pythagorean comma after all... (256:242 -- quite a significant difference) That to say, in some sort of pure natural harmoniousness, all Western music fails, because it involves playing multiple notes at the same time (since the 8th-9th century when theories began to develop, notably in the scholica enchiriadis). Nature doesn't like that, because the harmonic series will clash, even on the second best interval, the fifth (3:2)
Note to all geeks -- tuning theory is very cool. It tracks the history of mathematics too.
And by the way the title of the cited paper is
The basis of musical consonance as revealed by congenital amusia
.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
Music is perceived by the mind and not the ear. Music is different therefore from sound which seems to be the focus of this research.
An appreciation of the music of Schoenberg is definitely an acquired taste. Those who are uninitiated or otherwise not predisposed toward it will likely only sense the apparent awkwardness of the sound. But Schoenberg, as well as atonal and even microtonal (look it up) music in general, does have its aficionados, which tends to indicate a higher cerebral involvement beyond the ear.
Dissonant, random noise has infected the chiptune community like a cancer.
It could just be bad music, dissonant or not. Try Pat Metheny's Zero Tolerance For Silence. Parts 3 and 4 are the best ones (1 and 2 are a bit boring).
It's all associations. Associations with nature, associations from culture, associations we build from other music, etc. It's how our brain works, and how it's keyed to react to environmental events.
We can like fast driving beats because they match our excitement we've felt at other things. We can like slower rhythms for their likeness to intelligible patters we recognize in our lives. In general, the music just has to be present, and we'll generate the associations.
Dissonance just tends in our environments to get associated with things breaking, noises of discomfort, and instruments malfunctioning in one way or another.
Electronic music, like Commodore 64 music, has had to cope with odd dissonance being an element of its sometimes limited expressive set - and so has found interesting ways to blend in dissonance that gets interestingly divorced from the usual associations. It's why even though I'm not especially a musical connoisseur, I can appreciate some quality uses of dissonance in context.
Ryan Fenton
What if you *like* Schoenberg?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I studied this back in the '80s when I was majoring in Applied Music. Among other things we studied regarding harmonic intervals, we learned things like why a minor chord sounds "minor" as opposed to a major chord. It all has to do with how the frequencies of the notes (and harmonics therein) work with each other. This isn't news, though it is at least interesting.
So does cutting. Your point?
I'm a musician. What used to be considered dissonant in the past is acceptable and even pleasant today to our ears. Try playing jazz to a medieval musician. And there are musical systems based on notes not present in the Western 12-note scale (e.g. Indian music, the 'blues' note). Culture plays a big part in our perception of music. Also, a minor second by itself sounds bad, but in the presence of more notes it sounds wonderful, for example a major 7th chord. It's all in the context. So what's the point?
There's one part I find has some interest and the rest just sound like he's noodling idly while watching TV. My tracks aren't numbered properly so not sure which one it is. I wouldn't classify it as dissonant, though, not in the same sense as Schoenberg.
Musical taste is a moving target. Dissonance has somewhat been absorbed into our collective musical vocabulary. Witness the 'stab-scene' music from Psycho. We accept it has it's place and the mood it invokes, however audiences literally walked out of the initial microtonal performances.
This is all quite obvious. . . music is about the organization of sound. To break new ground from standard scales, it's necessary to look at the mathematical relationships between the tones. . .
This is what early classical/late baroque composers did when they introduced equal temperament (the division of a musical scale into 12 equal semi-tones) - this system allows transitioning to other musical keys (and thus more use of "accidentals" in classical composition), but with more jarring intervals. . . the composers were aware of the compromises, and new about the mathematical relationship between the tones.
From the abstract: "beating is unlikely to underlie consonance." Yeah, this is obvious and well-known if you study music and psychoacoustics.
Roughness = dissonance, but "consonance" must be more than the lack of dissonance. By that definition the most consonant music in the world would be monophonic stuff like Gregorian chant and early polyphonic music with its perfect fifths. Yet, for centuries people have preferred the "fuller" (and slightly more dissonant) sound of thirds and sixths - octaves and fifths sound relatively "empty" and "cold."
(Also, some sonorities like the augmented triad or a stack-of-fifths sus-chord are just barely more dissonant than major and minor triads, yet rarely appear in tonal music.)
So yeah, harmonicity (the extent to which a chord mimics the structure of the overtone series) is a positive force for consonance. (That mimicry produces rootedness, for one thing, which creates the sense of tonal center.) Dissonance = roughness, Consonance = harmonicity.
It *is* cool that they managed to find this distinction in amusics. It's good evidence.
(Also, as people have already started to assert, sometimes dissonance and flat-out noise is very fun to listen to, making the notion of some universal "preference" meaningless. Nevertheless these categories of sounds still have consistent psychological properties that are worth explaining - what you like as entertainment can be influenced by so many other dimensions.)
Total nonsense. Our current musical scale is a human creation and has nothing to do with how sound works. "Dissonance" is simply 2 notes combined that the listener is not used to. What was considered dissonant before we could create whole tones with a bow? Have you ever heard tribal music where the players have no way of tuning their instruments to each other? It's about as "dissonant" to your average city folk as you can get, but the villagers love it because they're used to it. A very long time ago, before the current musical scale was settle on, standard music was written in your basic C scale. There were no sharps or flats. Then some crazy bastards started writing music with half tones, so they had to make the sharps and flats... that's when they realized that not all of the notes were evenly spaced, hence the missing B and E sharps. At the time, sharps/flats were likely considered very dissonant and unpalatable, but as time went on they became the norm. Now there are people experimenting with 24, 32 and 100 tone scales. Think of the ultra simple beginning to "Iron man" by black sabbath... how simple and rudimentary it is. Now imagine someone from the 1900's hearing it... they likely could even bare to listen to it.
Did you listen to Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night)? It's one of his best known pieces and it's not the most dissonant or atonal (not the same thing). It probably requires some getting used to, stretching the limits of what you listen to, to appreciate it.
Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" was so jarring to the audience when it was first played that they rioted. Now it is a staple of symphony programs, though still a challenge to play.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Something is missing in the summary, the 'yet' does not reveal a disagreement as the amusical listeners disliked the same intervals.
It should be noted that it's traditionally considered the ratio of the frequencies that causes dissonance, not the closeness of the notes. To be harmonious two notes need to have frequencies that come into sync quickly. So a sixth (5:3) is is actually less harmonious than the closer fifth (3:2).
It would be interesting to check the numbers from their theory on the frequencies of the overtones as that gives many more possibilities for frequency ratios (first overtone of the second note against the root of the first note etc.). Overtones do diminish in strength very quickly so the root frequencies are always going to be more important.
Could be a parallel headline. Seriously. Dissonance is like pepper. Pepper is an irritant, but done properly, is quite tasty.
it has a good beat, and it's easy to dance to (not).
Various tonalities are associated with the specific emotions that we find either enjoyable or displeasureable, and music provokes these emotions involuntarily.
As described in the summary, clashing tones create a vibration or beating (this is empirically known by anyone who tunes musical instruments by ear) and cause a sense of disresolution and unrest.
Yeah, a lot of modern music is just random, manufactured crap, but truely talented artists select their musical tones, both deliberately and subconsciously, to tie in very closely with the lyrics (if applicable) and the emotions they intent to provoke.
It's perhaps not obvious but there is no such thing as perfect consonance in music:
- Tone C3 is an exact second harmonic of C2 and a fourth harmonic of C1. That's why the sound so nice together.
- Tone G2 is a third harmonic of C1, but (surprise) not an exact one. That's because if you take 13 third harmonics (C G D A E B F# C# G# D# A# F C') you are supposed to arrive at the same tone. But you don't, there is a slight frequency offset. In practice, this offset is distributed among all 13 intervals so we are generally unable to notice it.
- The fifth harmonic tone (C1 -> E3') is also inexact. It is fairly close to the sound (here E) obtained from the scale above but again there is a slight frequency offset.
- The sixth harmonic (C1 -> G3) is 2*3 times the fundamental frequency, so is as (in)exact as the third harmonic.
- The seventh harmonic (C1 -> ~A#3, noticeably lower) is not on the (twelve tone) scale but it still sounds nice.
- The eight harmonic is exact (2*2*2, C1 -> C4). And so on...
The twelve tone scale is a rather clever invention, it manages to approximate a rather large number of harmonics with a small number of tones. But it is still only an approximation - a perfect consonance can only be obtained for octaves.
Many predators see their prey based on movement, like cats. Perhaps dissonance in hearing is some evolutionary equivalent to this. The beating of wings, the trampling of feet, the clucking of the tongue of angry wives...
It's funny, because I've always thought of Satie's use of the occasional dissonant notes as what makes the music "human". Check his Danses de Travers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x6nuiNN3JI) at 0:38, 0:52, 1:02, and so on and so forth... the dissonant elements are what breathe real life into an already impeccably beautiful piece.
(Disclaimer: I know nothing of music theory but know a lot of music.)
It's not about music taste. "Zero Tolerance For Silence" speaks for itself by the title alone. You can describe it as a direct rebuttal of John Cage's 4â33â - and possibly evidence that Cage did not suffer tinnitus, and Metheny to some extent does. But that last bit is only as an example of what one might learn.
I have "Secret Story" (1992) among others. To know that he did this just 2 years later is just mind-boggling. When a coworker plays Pat Metheny, I don't know what song or album it is, or if he's a guest on someone else's recording, like with Anna Maria Jopek. I can instantly recognize the sound. Through headphones, which are tinny, or an iPhone played at low volume.
He had a certain mindset when recording this, especially since it is overdubbed so he had to do multiple takes. If he heard something on the first track he didn't like, he would have overdubbed. But he didn't.
To watch Metheny improvise is like watching a Rembrandt being painted, if you know about jazz. To some, maybe Van Gogh, to others maybe Dali is more appropriate. In the context of his career, this is like watching Rembrandt invent pointillism, and then abandon it. Even his characteristic sound isn't there. It is much like he decided to take something and dissect it, live, with everyone allowed to watch.
Certainly it is not the same as Schoenberg, since Schoenberg allowed an element of restriction into his music. In fact, if you take Schoenberg's idea of the tone-row, this is completely the opposite. I have not analyzed it to be sure, but I don't sense the rigor of that limiting factor.
Pat Metheny was playing to something he heard, or felt, as an affront to silence. You can appreciate it for what it is, without musical taste being involved. As a statement against silence, it certainly doesn't specify what it is for
So have they discovered why Yoko Ono tunes trigger insanity and panic?
http://www.furious.com/perfect/weapon.html
Table-ized A.I.
but for only five minutes at a time.
Bill Sethares has some nice work about this question, too: http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/
"Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get" - Jerry Avins
And scratching.
Your shoe's untied!
in the Theory of Harmony by (guess who)... Arnold Schoenberg, before he started experimenting with atonal composition.
I don't think it was a particularly new idea, even then.
I've read various explanations for Zero Tolerance. The difficulty is that it is radically different from his body of work both before and after, even his attempts at free jazz. Possibly it makes sense in the reactionary theory of music but I don't think that's what he was trying to achieve. The problem is that, as a piece of music, it doesn't stand alone from it's artist's statement, much like a simple black square on a white canvas. I feel bad for saying it but it barely works as entertainment and only has interest because of Metheny's stature.
While he had a high concept in mind when producing it I think it is too personal or individual to express to listeners. This is in contrast to Schoenberg where the outworkings of his radical theory were apparent. Perhaps Zero Tolerance requires recreating Metheny's mood at the time to understand it. Unfortunately most of my listening is done at work where there is little mental silence. I should try once again at home.
I've been fortunate enough to see Metheny play once. If I could somehow see Jim Hall I could die happy :)
Is his music similar to drone bands like Sunn O))), Earth or Boris?
It was the staging of the ballet and the dancing itself, combined with the subject matter, that caused the audience to riot, not so much the music. Plus there's plenty of evidence that the whole thing was staged to garner publicity. Later performances of The Rite of Spring without the ballet were actually well received.
And jazz.
Most music since the 1600s has been chock-a-block with dissonance. Music would be boring without it. Tension and release. Consonance and dissonance.
It probably requires some getting used to, stretching the limits of what you listen to, to appreciate it.
Alternatively, you could just listen to stuff you like. It seems kind of backwards to go through effort just to make yourself like something, and then spend the time liking it with your new preferences?
If you're going to modify your preferences at all, why not modify them in a way that's actually useful, like making chores more enjoyable or something.
What would you think of someone who played World of Warcraft and decided he didn't like it, but make sure to play to level 20 anyway, just to make sure he got the full experience? Same idea.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
you claim. And yet the ballet is all but forgotten.
Besides the fact that low harmonics (especially the first harmonic, i.e. the octave) seem to be widespread among cultures, some cultures *do seek* the beating of nearby tones (cf. Indonesian music). For a Balinese, a tone ain't "alive" without beats.
And then this:
Notes contain many overtones â" frequencies that are whole-number multiples of the basic frequency in the note
That's downright wrong. If you stick to the ideal string or the ideal flute, that's what theory says. But real-life instruments (bells, plates, drums, what have you) -- you might be hard-pressed to find a well-defined groound tone at all.
The Islamic call to prayer makes me want to stab myself in the ear with a screwdriver and twist.
and then we find out that the rioting never existed, it was fud spread by stravinsky to drum up the event.
at least that is what i learned from wikipedia
and the fact that in the 1910s that it was premiered in france, i think? the french back then were revolutionaries musically, i can't accept very easily that they rioted against a musical piece that was so close at home
As I understand it (from 'reading' the article very quickly), they are inching closer to knowing (scientifically, that is) *what* it is with unpleasant sounds that is unpleasant, not really why that is the case.
My best guess so far, having done several seconds of research into the matter, is that these sounds are commonly associated with 'alarm sounds' - things breaking, distress calls etc. Things that should make you afraid and run away from danger.
Harmonious sounds normally require things like voice control - they require a more relaxed environment, thus they are learned to be soothing.
Ever heard "Ion Dissonance" before?
your comment is wrong in too many levels. It's like deciding that you don't like sport because the first day you have pain in your muscles. Or like dumping a girl because the first time you dance with her is a dissaster Or never trying wine because coke tastes so much better... Most of the good things in life need getting used to them before enjoying. That's part of what makes us grow. But true: this is slashdot, you need to use a WOW analogy... why not a car one instead?: Automatic cars are better because manual ones are harder?
the mistake you make is that an activity may fall in its entirety in either the like or dislike bins.
for example, i like the guitar a lot. i do not like music theory that i have to learn, but i trust those who tell me that it is important so i want to learn to like it.
in the end, what you like is what you are learning.
sucking your mom's tits is the only thing intuitive. EVERYTHING else is learned.
I was actually talking about self-mutilation. Kids and stunted adults self-destruct in many, many ways, turning their heads into an echo chamber for garbage is one pillar of that, and that something is popular is no argument for anything -- much less that it merely exists. Was that any clearer?
The ballet is forgotten in the same way that all ballet is forgotten, to the general public. Save a few performances of The Nutcracker during Christmas, or the odd Hollywood movie where the two stars dyke-out.
and the fact that in the 1910s that it was premiered in france, i think? the french back then were revolutionaries musically, i can't accept very easily that they rioted against a musical piece that was so close at home
The French were musical revolutionaries back then, absolutely (Ravel, Debussy, Boulez et al), but this was the ballet crowd remember, and the venue was brand new. The vast majority of patrons attending the premiere would have been wealthy socialites expecting to see traditional ballet, with a smaller number of the avant-garde crowd who absolutely despised the former group.
French Composer Gerard Grisey (Founder of Musique Spectral & Professor @ Paris Conservatory & UC Berkeley) outlined similar ideas in his 1980s paper "Tempus Ex Machina" -using harmonicity and the harmonic series as the point of departure and sum / difference tones as the point of departure, instead of the typical tonic dominant tonic cadence.
Ultimately it's cultural indoctrination, but music that tends to follow the harmonic series (low periodic pulsation, higher frequency chromaticism) works - the reverse often doesn't.
Also, the harmonic series contains major and minor seconds - they don't sound "wrong" in the context of the fundamental tone. Invert the spectrum and things sound "weird".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Your_Brain_On_Music
I like a lot of noise and experimental music. Merzbow is one of my favorite artists.
So I believe I discovered my problem. I have a problem with underutilized spectrum. It bothers me when a given composition of audio does not fully exploit every frequency between 20Hz and 20,000Hz. My ears feel empty otherwise.
What a surprise, the talentless money lenders have also produced ugly, rubbish 'music', to match their ugly, rubbish 'art', and called it 'modernist' music, like 'modern' art. i.e. a talentless Jew, who can't paint to save his life, or who can't write decent music to save his life, REDEFINES what 'music' or 'art' IS, in order to gain control of a 'market' of bullshit products.
Hence the JEW name, 'Arnold Schoenberg'.
Have Jews ever produced anything of beauty? I think not.
Such an excellent post, I'd mod you up if I could. I'd wager a heavy majority of music listeners do weigh what you mentioned, whether the music stands alone without the artists statement, whether they realize they are or not. I mostly prefer music that moves me simply through the sound, without understanding the message or the lyrics behind it, so the article makes perfect sense to me. Some others can't separate that from the philosophy and intellectual searching that can be associated with music, and thus have trouble with what the article is explaining.
Actually we had to abandon Pythagoras hundreds of years ago, because 'pure' consonance sounds bizarre to our modern ears:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament
Modern chords+chromaticism that we take for granted did not exist before we had the mathematics and engineering to develop temperament, which, if you've ever tuned a piano before, you know introduces specific patterns of beats between intervals and offsets the pure ratios to allow for key changes, etc etc.
Off topic, likewise foreign scales and tuning sound very bizarre to western ears. (I remember the first time I heard zazen flute music, deliberately detuning two flutes to produce complex patterns of beats, that clearly environment and culture has a role in what sounds good and what sounds bad)
Study is interesting but inconclusive, too easy to confuse correlation/causation, or draw conclusions that make the fallacy of ecology.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Anyone going to a zombie horror flick will hear dissonant music piped at them for an hour and a half at a time.
Also, true story. Go check out raves and you'll find it is not unusual to hear a lot of wildly dissonant synth pads and glissandos while people are jumping up and down and having a good time.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Problem is priorities, sir. People work through learning a sport and relationship struggles because they want something they can see further down the line. I listen to music to enjoy it and relax, unwind. Suffering through dissonant music when I'm trying to relax isn't my idea of enjoyment.
Ah. Rap and country fans, then.
Alternatively, you could just listen to stuff you like. It seems kind of backwards to go through effort just to make yourself like something, and then spend the time liking it with your new preferences?
You learn to like it because of what it communicates. Pop music covers such a narrow range of human emotion, Beethoven was the great philosopher composer who wrote philosophy into music. Of course not all music is worth listening to, (I would say Schoenberg is not, he's incredibly boring once you understand him, he has nothing to say).
It can be an incredibly exciting experience to expand your taste, and then finally get it. Moreso than just staying where you are. And it opens new horizons of meaning and experience to you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This article is not claiming to know anything about consonance, if anything it's opening up the field to more questions.
It's comparing musical and amusical listeners to debunk the notion that constructive/destructive interference patterns (beats) are how we neurologically perceive consonance and dissonance. Nothing more. It's making no value judgements as to what consonance or dissonance is. If anything it goes out of its way to demonstrate how complex it is to make judgements regarding that. As others have pointed out here, 'consonance' varies substantially from culture to culture and between time periods.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
There's nothing wrong with your view, and it is one that the younger me would have endorsed, but it turns out that the range of music I like keeps on growing, without any effort on my part, and without making myself suffer through music that I am not enjoying. My collection of recorded music goes largely unplayed these days, as I often find it more satisfying to listen to something I have never heard before.
That's in direct contrast to your earlier statement and just goes to prove the other guy's assertion that it's silly to "suffer" through music you don't like.
The article features Diana Deutsch. I have her book from 1982, The Psychology of Music, and it has much deeper explanations, though they can be found in other sources too.
The fundamental idea here is the critical band, related to the spectral resolution limit of human hearing. Basically, if two tones are close enough, they are perceived as equal, and far enough, they are separate. However, there is a grey area where the ear cannot decide if the tones are the same or different. The usual explanation for dissonance is harmonics (integer multiples of fundamental tones) that happen to meet in the critical band. In consonant tones, the harmonics are either equal or notably different, so there is no confusion.
The point about distortion in modern music is important, because it is another source of dissonant harmonics. For example, when a major chord is distorted, the nonlinear process creates new tones that are not harmonics of any of the original tones, and thus likely dissonant. (When a pure tone is distorted, you only get more harmonics of the same tone. Think (sin x)^2 vs. (sin 3x + sin 4x)^2 for example.)
The critical band also explains why chords on a bass sound so bad. The fundamental tones are closer together, so the harmonics fall more easily into the same critical band of confusion.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This seems to reinforce why people still prefer the sound of tube amps over solid state amps. Tubes have higher distortion but generally that distortion is even order harmonics. Solid state amps generally have lower distortion but they have more odd order harmonics, which we seem to be very sensitive to.
Mr. Oizo - Pee Hurts
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I like to call dubstep "anti-music" because to me, it seems as though the musicians are intentionally trying to decouple the rhythm and melody. It's not just the sweeping, noisy sounds that annoy me, but the whole idea that there seem to be multiple tempos all fighting with each other.
Like reggae, dubstep is in 2/2 cut time. Its tempo has been described as 140 quarter notes or 70 half notes per minute. Sure, the bass's wobble frequency may at times sound decoupled from the piece's tempo, but look for the changes in pitch and wobble frequency; those tend to happen on the half note or the quarter note.
Willie McBlind is in harmonic or 'just intonation' tuning. They're on Spotify.
your comment is wrong in too many levels. It's like deciding that you don't like sport because the first day you have pain in your muscles.
But it's a lot *more* like deciding you're not going to spend significant effort to *modify* your preferences, once you've *already* tried something, several times, and found it not to your liking.
Seriously dude, you probably don't have a large enough budget that you've exhausted all the things you like, and now have to create new things to like.
But even if that were the case, and you've indeed decided to go down the road of "I will hammer my preferences to go in a certain direction", it's unclear that the road will take you to a place where you teach yourself to like listening to Schoenberg, rather than, say, teach yourself to like solving problems in the 3rd world.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
*wub* *wub* *wub*
The rioting was actually related to the horrifyingly bad dance, not at all to the music. Le Sacre du Printemps was well received a few weeks later when simply played as an orchestral piece.
I suspect you are right, that it was a combined effect of the visual and the aural. But Rite of Spring was unprecedented, musically, without the ballet aspect.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.