Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
From drums to fifths
The essay is called The Emancipation of Dissonance, and it theorizes the history of music as a history of accepting more sounds as music. It may begin with drumming. Then came the tonic, a note and the same note an octave above, followed by the fifth, which is why it is called the perfect fifth and why a lot of Baroque music has it.
Thirds and sevenths
Adding the third produced chords, major and minor, and people resisted it with a what-the-hell reaction that it felt off. The seventh brought jazz, and listeners judged it unacceptable and said it was not music. After that, more and more tones came in.
Beyond twelve notes
Western music uses twelve notes, while Arabic and Indian music use twenty-four, and other scales go further, into microtones. Electronic music can make any kind of sound at all.
Karim Amin, the CEO of Clay, takes accepting more sounds as a product principle: some ways of being that feel off may turn out to be productive or useful once they are put in the right context.
Why is the fifth called perfect?
A perfect fifth is the interval between two notes whose frequencies stand in a ratio of 3 to 2. That is among the simplest ratios after the octave, so the notes blend very smoothly. Pythagorean tuning, attributed to the ancient Greeks, built the whole scale by stacking fifths. Medieval theorists classed the fourth, fifth, and octave as perfect consonances.
How do Arabic scales divide the octave differently?
Arabic music is organized around maqamat, melodic modes that use intervals falling between the notes of a piano keyboard. A common example is a neutral third, sitting roughly halfway between a major and a minor third. Players of the oud and the nay produce these pitches by ear, and singers do the same. Arab theorists have long described the octave in terms of quarter tones.
How did electronic music open every sound to composers?
In 1948 Pierre Schaeffer, working at French radio in Paris, began assembling pieces from recorded sounds such as trains and doors, a method called musique concrete. Electronic studios in Cologne and elsewhere soon built sounds from oscillators in the 1950s. Robert Moog's synthesizers brought the technique to wider audiences in the 1960s. Sampling and digital synthesis later removed nearly every limit on the sounds available.
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