intrinsic melodic appeal

Ledge, I really do think there might be certain ways of progressing chord structure that appeal to me more than others. The confluence of different chords atop one another is even more interesting; this is what Schnauss does brilliantly. Differently melodic and textural synth lines create sonic richness, and this sonic richness is progressed in a very satisfying manner; the progressions and flow often pertain to a major/minor/suspended chord confusion (there's a method to it I'm sure, but one I can't describe), and this emotional fragility is, I find, highly stimulating for the responsive mind. There might well be other bands engaged in micro-management whose concerns are more rhythmical or minimalist, whom I might like less, but I'd need to hear more. You say you're an Autechre fanboy; they're an act I'd really like to check out.

-- Just got offed, Friday, 8 June 2007 15:32 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

a major/minor/suspended chord confusion (there's a method to it I'm sure, but one I can't describe)

Yeah something like that - musicologist to thread

this emotional fragility is, I find, highly stimulating for the responsive mind

that has to be tautological or wrong, though.

Tautological, probably. Ditch 'responsive'.

This thread will >>>>>> progress vs. novelty, as long as we actually take the trouble to get into the nitty-gritty of musical theory. It would help if I had perfect pitch and could identify all the chords I'm listening to, though.

For now, I can state that I prefer my music to be pre-planned to some extent; if not in exact melody or rhythm, at least in structure and general 'plan'. Pure improvisation (such as most of the jazz I've heard) has never done anything for me, whereas jazz-inflected music that DOES work out where it's going first (Soft Machine, Acoustic Ladyland, Foetus etc) is often extremely exciting. This, I believe, is because when one has a plan, be it structural or broadly melodic, one can execute it with one's fellow-players EXACTLY as one would like. Fine-tuning is worth a lot in my book. When one defines a plan, one will generally (if one has any integrity) choose to create one's music to the best of one's imagination. Such a condition requires a certain grasp of musical progression and flow; there are certain melodic (and chordal) 'links' that complement one another in more intriguing, satisfying ways than others.

Tautological, probably. Ditch 'responsive'

And add "my", 'cause y'know this is about subjective responses.

I guess I loaded the thread title a little, it could be about non-melodic qualities - but that's definitely what I respond to.

And another question - how to wean onself off this dependency? 'Cause I do see it as a kind of weakness, restricting what one might choose to listen to in quite a broad way.

Well, I think certain musical ambitions require certain melodic/textural/rhythmic realisations. There aren't certain ones that will always work regardless of the situation. I'm just interested in seeing how certain executions fit certain musical aims.

lol @ scrabbling for synonyms :-D

how certain fulfilments meet particular musical undertakings

how arbitrary completions suit given sonic ventures

I am predisposed toward maj-7th chords. I also like chord progressions that start with I-vi, especially if the bass is moving down instead of up. I have been surprised that I have liked songs within certain genres that I otherwise don't usually like, and then I realize that it's because they contain basic elements like these.

This thread will >>>>>> progress vs. novelty, as long as we actually take the trouble to get into the nitty-gritty of musical theory.

this comment has made me want to revive THE HANDS UP FOR LOUIS JAGGER HE LOVES THE NAZIS meme

I'm glad I'm learning to play the guitar - a few months ago that would have been greek to me. Praps I could figure out what my own predispostions are: get some key songs and study the tabs...

xpost yeah on the other hand I don't want to drown the thread in musical theory. Would rather find out how to break the habit. Or at least get a new fix.

I share the major-7th thing with Jaymc. (We've talked about this a bunch of times.) I think everyone has some cluster of preferences along these lines -- sets of chords, intervals, progressions, and other things we're just fond of, the same way we're consciously fond of the timbres of certain instruments.

I would think of this as a very small-scale version of the way large-scale cultures have totally different musical systems. E.g., I was just realizing something along these lines the other day: my dad grew up in a country whose trad music uses a pentatonic scale, and then in the early 80s he LOVED A Flock of Seagulls' "Wishing," which ... has a giant pentatonic hook and melody. This is surely a basis of genre, too: you grow up listening to (say) country, and you're gonna have a fondness not just for the country style, but for the country way of constructing and moving through chords and melodies, even when they're showing up in other kinds of music.

I love me some tritones and minor fifths. The whole Red album by King Crimson, Sibelius' 4th Symphony, quite a few of Debussy's solo piano pieces, first song on first Black Sabbath album. Delicious.

a country whose trad music uses a pentatonic scale,

Isn't that most of the world? Just cause of the way harmonics work?

I don't know. There's a lot of progressions and timbres and rhythmic variations I love, but most of them I've learned to love. I wasn't all that into jazz, until I listened to a ton of jazz.

I'm sure there are hardwired biological reasons for why certain music affects us in certain ways; why we identify minor chords with sadness and pain and major chords with happiness. At the same time, these sort of genetic things are very abstract. I like certain types of music one year and hate it the next. My tastes change from day to day, so its hard to feel like any music I like is connected to me on some intrinsic animal level.

augmented fourths >>> diminished fifths

(I'm not being facetious, I really love Lydian modality and hearing the augmented fourth resolve)

a country whose trad music uses a pentatonic scale,

Isn't that most of the world? Just cause of the way harmonics work?

yeah I'd say there's probably something more specific about the way "Wishing" uses its pentatonic scale than the simple fact that it uses one at all -- perhaps the narrow melodic range, the unison/octave harmonies, etc.

I think there's probably something to what you guys are saying, and I suspect it might be simpler to describe than you think. I mean, I guess there might be people who derive pleasure simply from hearing a minor sixth in a melody, but I don't think most people experience music in such a microscopic, de-contextualized way. It's like looking at a chair - the chair is made up of lots of molecules and atoms, but we just see a chair. I can't really speak to "a major/minor/suspended chord confusion" because that doesn't really mean anything to me. I'd have to hear the music in question.

I'd encourage you to mess around with a guitar or piano while listening if at all possible, especially if you're not used to doing so. Being able to find the key of a tune is a good start; next try picking out the melody. If you can do that, try to work out the chord progression. Then figure out the middleground and background parts, the instrumental licks and vocal harmonies and such. I think developing one's ear in that way is extremely valuable not just for musicians but for all music appreciatiors. If you work at it you can really start to perceive music in a much more defined way, and I think it becomes a lot easier to pinpoint the source of certain feelings. And of course it's much easier to talk about when you can use concrete terminology.

I love me some tritones and minor fifths.

There is no minor fifth. A tritone = a diminished fifth or an augmented fourth.

Isn't that most of the world? Just cause of the way harmonics work?

The pentatonic scale is common in different places, but the only explanation I know of for that is that it's very simple and easy to sing.

And the pentatonic scale is easy to sing because it only has minor thirds and whole steps - no half steps.

Thanks, minor diminished fifth is right.

Let me know if I'm just high, now-- I'm at work so I can't just pick up my guitar and see-- but don't the notes you can get out of a wind instrument with no keys or valves (like a bugle,) and the notes you can get from a string with no frets, pretty much correspond to a pentatonic scale?

That's what I was trying to say by "the way harmonics work".

no, not really. You can get the traditional Western major pentatonic scale by going up the circle of fifths from yr root note (C, G, D, A, E). The harmonic series hits a lot of notes not in the pentatonic scale before it hits all the pentatonic notes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonics

I'm sure there are hardwired biological reasons for why certain music affects us in certain ways; why we identify minor chords with sadness and pain and major chords with happiness.

Why would this be genetic, and not just a convention of European harmony? There'd seem to be plenty of music systems in the world where this major/minor thing isn't the case, or is just non-applicable to the way music is organized.

Re: the "Wishing" hook, yes, the pentatonic scale is being used in much the same way as where my parents come from (though actually I'd guess the Flock are trying to resemble east-Asian pentatonic stuff more than anything)

don't the notes you can get out of a wind instrument with no keys or valves (like a bugle,) and the notes you can get from a string with no frets, pretty much correspond to a pentatonic scale?

You can get anything you want out of a string with no frets - i.e. on the violin, viola, etc. The harmonic series comes into play on a string when it's made to vibrate on both sides of a node (which are found at mathematical intervals along the string, i.e. 1/2, 1/3, etc.) rather than making it vibrate on only one side at an arbitrary length as it does when it's stopped by the player's finger.

And the harmonic series doesn't really produce the pentatonic scale in any straightforward way.

Also what nabisco said about the conventions of western music not being genetic.

And despite the frequency of such a labelling, I think identifying major with happy and minor with sad is wrong. I think the closest you can get with a metaphor is probably major = bright and minor = dark, but really major sounds like major and minor sounds like minor. There's plenty of sad music in major keys, and non-sad music in minor keys.

I'm with nabisco here, in that how we respond to various chord progressions and harmonies is dependent on how we learned to hear music. None of that is "hardwired" -- except to say there does seem to be a human tendency for music appreciation.

Regarding harmony in general, it took a long time to develop. Things as simple as V -> I resolutions took hundreds of years to "invent", coming from modal counterpoint in the middle ages (and just like mutant genes, there were rules that had to be broken for that to happen). My feeling is that the closest thing to "hardwired" our love of particular intervals or progressions have is our apparent love of resolution, of having our expectations fulfilled. a note that appears to come "naturally" from its predecessors might set off a similar neuro pattern is, say, realizing that 2 + 2 does indeed equal 4. using this logic, V -> I works because the 7th note in a scale resolves to the 8th (or root). Like wise, a suspended chord has a tension because the 4th note of scale refuses to resolve down to the 3rd -- and if it should, everyone is aware that something signigicant just happened (mostly because we're all accustomed to what a major triad sounds like).

(and you could make the argument that we like major triads because following the overtone series high enough, you end up with a major chord. even higher, you add a 7th, 9th, etc etc etc)

V -> I works because the 7th note in a scale resolves to the 8th (or root).

Yeah, and the important part is that it resolves by half-step, the smallest interval in the western system. v -> I also has the seventh resolving to the root, but it goes by whole step and so we perceive it as weaker.

But there was a time when thirds and sixths were not considered consonant - people needed to hear fifths and octaves to feel resolved. And there was also a brief period (I can't recall exactly when/where this style was established) where cadences actually used double leading tones - that is, the root was approached by half-step from above as well as below. So your dominant chord would be spelled 5 7 b2, or G B Db in C major. It's a weird sound to our modern ears.

Maybe you get to a point when you've heard so much atonal stuff that your so accepting of out-of-tune playing - out of rhythm stuff sounds worse.

Also:

(and you could make the argument that we like major triads because following the overtone series high enough, you end up with a major chord. even higher, you add a 7th, 9th, etc etc etc)

That's true, but as you can see illustrated on the wikipedia entry, the naturally ocurring harmonics are significantly out of tune compared to western tempered tuning, so again the "natural" argument is not quite so conclusive.

Maybe you get to a point when you've heard so much atonal stuff that your so accepting of out-of-tune playing - out of rhythm stuff sounds worse.

I don't see why that would be - atonal music is still meant to be played in tune.

I think I meant - does it all start sounding 'acceptable'

- my mate freaks at the Planet of The Apes horn music, says how can i bear it.

- have sonic youth warped me....and can i sue

<i>where cadences actually used double leading tones - that is, the root was approached by half-step from above as well as below.</i>

yes! in fact, I recall having to write this stuff in college for counterpoint class, and due to a strategic use of leaving out 3rds in places, and using double leading tones in others, I came out with resolutions that were effectively, say, E - > Bb, which probably would have blown up the church.

as far as the tuning in the overtone scale, I guess it makes sense that anything we could play would only be an approximation (or distortion) of things occuring in nature. However, it also seems conspicuous to me that things like octaves and fifths, occuring in music of a lot of other cultures besides Western, would also just happen to be the beginning intervals of the overtone series. (also, milton, please jump in w/spectral composers.)

However, it also seems conspicuous to me that things like octaves and fifths, occuring in music of a lot of other cultures besides Western, would also just happen to be the beginning intervals of the overtone series.

Well yeah, that's for sure. I think anybody using string or wind instruments will have that for the reasons you mention.

came out with resolutions that were effectively, say, E - > Bb, which probably would have blown up the church.

I think tritones were mostly avoided because they are difficult to sing rather than their dissonance -- the "devil in music" thing didn't come about till the eighteenth century, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't called so literally/religiously.

what an awkwardly worded post, I'm sorry

I don't think a tritone is inherently difficult to sing, it only seems so for us because it's unusual. "Ma-ri-a!"

surprised Geir hasn't ruined this thread already

hey, I'm not the one who's saying a tritone is inherently difficult to sing, those punks from 600 years ago are

I think it's one of those things that's more difficult to sing of you don't have access to any recordings or musical instruments for reference

Well again it's kind of a chicken or the egg thing. I think that because of the way western music is structured, which is partly because of the overtone series and partly because of fasion, for lack of a better term, the tritone has long been perceived as highly dissonant to western ears, therefore it was often avoided, and since it's dissonant and unusual (and also because it's a leap and not a step) it's difficult for us to sing. But really I don't think it's harder than a minor sixth.

true enough. I doubt a minor sixth transition was commonplace either in early Western choral music (though major sixth harmonies surely developed along with polyphony, thus making it more recognizable and singable for use in melody)

(nb I am completely making this up, except for the justification that tritones weren't used because they were hard to sing -- I'd heard that elsewhere.)

Well leaps were avoided where possible in voice leading for polyphonic music, so that's true. Remember too though that a sixth is just an inversion of a third - invert a major third and you get a minor sixth.

Why would this be genetic, and not just a convention of European harmony? There'd seem to be plenty of music systems in the world where this major/minor thing isn't the case, or is just non-applicable to the way music is organized.

I disagree with this. Or actually, I don't know enough about world musics to definitively disagree, but for the most part I do. The way music effects us to a certain level has to be attached to some sort of biological function. I'm not saying that European ideas like major and minor chords are something we've carried with us from early humanity, I'm just saying that they hint at or tap into an animal way we have of responding to sound. Fuck if I know why, if certain sounds have been ingrained in us to connote comfort or danger, or if it evolved out of our broader communication skills.

The only problem is, I don't know if there are other cultures who have "sad" music that is radically different from ours, that a Westerner would be inclined to misinterpret as happy.

The only problem is I don't know h

Message was sort of chopped at the end.

Well leaps were avoided where possible in voice leading for polyphonic music, so that's true. Remember too though that a sixth is just an inversion of a third - invert a major third and you get a minor sixth.

Well yeah, that's why I think it was easier for the sixth to sneak its way into the "this is easier to sing than a tritone" category, because as you get a bunch of people with different singing ranges and polyphony evolves, the minor sixth starts to bleed through as a familiar element.

There are certain harmonic relationships that I'm sure are biologically wired in us and therefore cross-cultural (e.g. octaves register as basically unison)

You know I just realized in my original post that I meant to express a love for tritones and whole-tone scales, not tritones and diminished fifths which are the same thing anyway. The Debussy pieces I was thinking of (eg "Cloches A Travers Les Feuilles") are replete with whole tone scales as is KC's Red. Derrrr, sorry.

Re: "the Devil's interval," yeah you do hear people saying stuff like "it was forbidden in the Middle Ages" which is hogwash. I do seem to recall reading in a book on temperament, though, that in one of the earlier systems of temperament all the dissonance was foisted off on one particular less-used interval. Said interval was referred to as "The Howler" and you just avoided it.

I think this was from a book called Measure For Measure which paralleled the development of scientific instrumentation with that of musical instrumentation. Great book, needs a re-read by me.

Said interval was referred to as "The Howler" and you just avoided it.

wolf fifths!

quote from someone in my band: "dude, that chord has no natural predators"

Also, seems like a big thing to consider re: the development of different "world musics," besides the "built-in" stuff (octaves, fifths, harmonic series) would be the mechanisms of the local language.

Speech patterns would be an influence on what kinds of musical sounds people would be pre-disposed to jibe with. Probably more an influence on rhythmic elements, phrasing and such, than on intervallic preferences.

I don't think the world can handle another "wolf" band right now, but "Wolf Fifths" might be a good band name ten years frrm now.

speech patterns are a big part of it

"it was forbidden in the Middle Ages" which is hogwash

well, it was definitely against the rules in the modal counterpoint all those gregorian monks were using. And as far as intervals go, it is the most dissonant, causes the most "beats" when played, which is probably as good a symbolic reason as any for ye olde religious types (who would have been the only ones caring about "music theory" at the time) to avoid.

however, at some point, they had to come to terms with the leading tones moving up from 7 to 8, and 4 down to 3 at the same time (which would eventually just be called "V7 to I"), making a tritone interval; my guess is that when that happened, modern Western harmony was born.

hmm, speech. Speech is pretty elastic though, people are always making little changes; on top of that, it's at least as succeptible to change from external sources as music is. Maybe if you grew up hearing the crash of waves on a beach, you'd be more atuned to the particular frequencies of that, and (along with a billion other things) would influence how your heard/spoke/wrote music.

I guess I'm just kind of soured on most of the things that are supposed to be hardwired. Obv our brains process sound in a particular way that we can generally agree that this sound is high compared to that sound, or that one is louder compared to that one. But even those things differ slightly from person to person (to say nothing of hearing defects). If you analyze the physics of a major chord, you will certainly come with particular frequencies, particular relationships of the sounds to the air, to how the hairs in our ear respond to them, to the way our brains sort out all the data, to the areas in the brain that light up when the chord is played -- but none of that really tells you much about how you feel about the chord, which is the most important part about processing music to me. I don't think that part is hardwired at all, I think it's dependent on experience and education.

"Against the rules," yeah, but not forbidden because OMG DEVIL MUSIC even though that would be more fun to believe was the reason.

Meanwhile, one's feelings about the octave are directly commensurate with how many late Wes Montgomery records one has listened to.

Seems like it would be fun to be able to follow this conversation.

I knew this would turn out to be very, very interesting. I think I can follow it at a relatively basic level, but I wouldn't mind a bit of spoon-feeding!

I'm there only up to the appeal of the major 7th, after that I'm lost.

A major 7th on its own isn't particularly inspired, though. Furthermore, as I say, this thread has been great, but it's focused exclusively on melody and chords, rather than rhythm and textures. These combine with melody to create the whole package, and this relationship is what gives me enjoyment. Melody on its own won't ever suffice (you can dispute this, but by 'melody' I mean a linear progression from one note to another. The rhythm, namely how long each note is held for, is a different matter entirely).

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I'm certain that there is some sort of hardwiring for the way our emotions respond to sound. Evidence for this? The tone of my cat's meow is clearly different depending on mood. The meow that means it desperately wants to go outside because it hasn't been out for two days is clearly very different from "g'morning" and "feed me" and "get the dog away." Oh, and btw, my cat isn't even a year old, it hasn't had enough experience to learn from my response how to tailor its meow to get what it wants.

This translates to other species, too. Aggressive, scared, excited, the sounds don't vary THAT much, they still tend to communicate the general message, even across species.

I know these noises represent an extremely simple form of communication that is a far cry from our speaking language or our musical language, but I think there are still strong enough parallels that it would be silly to ignore them. There is definitely some genetic hard-wiring for emotion-sound response.

actually, there is a book by linguist Steven Pinker called the "the Language Instinct" where he argues much the same point -- that we possess an intrinsic logic for language. Not in the words, but in the basic stucture of how we form words/sentences/entire languages, and how people are able to understand very subtle aspects of grammar and speech from a very young age. I think he's close to Noam Chomsky in a lot of his ideas in this regard. However, I know his isn't the only view (and in NoCal where I live, his is definitely the minority view). I personally think our brains probably are set up to do certain things well from the get go -- I don't know enough about brains (or language for that matter) to be able to say if this is one of them, and the rub is that our brains are another one of those things that change over time.

(you can dispute this, but by 'melody' I mean a linear progression from one note to another. The rhythm, namely how long each note is held for, is a different matter entirely).

The rhythm of the notes is contained in the term "melody" though. C E F E is not a melody, but any number of melodies contain those notes in that sequence.

A major 7th on its own isn't particularly inspired, though.

Right, any given chord might be neato in some way, but it's just a brick, not a house.

There was some other stuff I had to say but I'm on my way out - the octave is definitely a universal psychoacoustic phenomenon in that we hear pitches an octave apart as "the same." But I'm still skeptical of more specific notions about universiality and stuff being "hardwired." It's certainly an interesting area of study, though.

Also, I was imagining earlier what music might sound like if it wasn't originally developed on the sort of instruments we have. Any society that makes music by blowing into tubes is going to discover the harmonic series and such, but what about when the computers take over the world and create their own music? They can create arbitrary frequencies and timbres. What would that be like?

insert kraftwerk joke....here?

It would probably sound pretty cool to me, and pretty horrendous to Bob Dylan.

The other thing I love is a repeated/arpeggiated figure while the bass changes. Swoon!

I like it when guitars change their modulation and soar away...

There's a book I had read a while ago called "The Singing Neanderthal" that suggests that before there was music and language, human ancestors used a proto-language with musical elements and that the two branched off from there. Has anybody read this? I think there might be a little something to the "hard-wired" argument, but only a little.

There was some other stuff I had to say but I'm on my way out - the octave is definitely a universal psychoacoustic phenomenon in that we hear pitches an octave apart as "the same." But I'm still skeptical of more specific notions about universiality and stuff being "hardwired." It's certainly an interesting area of study, though.

I've thought about this quite a lot in the past. Alas, I'm far too much of a dunce to explain it well without drawing pictures and far too lazy to draw the pictures and get them up on this thread. Instead, I'll just point everyone towards this very interesting paper that(slightly tangentially) tackles this issue rather wellhere.

FWIW, my take is that the only "hardwired" bit about our perception of harmony is the feeling which we generally refer to as consonance/dissonance - although I think those words imply a hierarchy that isn't necessarily hardwired. If we accept (as per the paper) that our perception of consonance/dissonance (and hence our scales, rules of harmony etc) is fundamentally a consequence of the timbre of the sound we are working with, it seems reasonable to conclude that our system of music theory and tuning is a product of the instruments available to those who developed it (i.e. the human voice more or less).

Hmm, I fucked up the link slightly.

works fine for me, although understanding the goddamn thing may well prove a bridge too far

Really interesting article, thanks jng. I got the idea, but didn't go through it start to finish - it would seem to support the above conclusion regarding instruments and scales, but then how do cultures with non-western tuning systems and microtronality etc. come into play? Can we point to the fact that Gamelan music is based primarily on percussion, and pitched percussion tends to produce more complex overtones than string and wind instruments and say that accounts for the difference?

By the way, the tuning section of the wikipedia entry on gamelan is really interesting and quite germane to this discussion, I think.

I find this utterly fascinating because I have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER when it comes to notes, chords, structures, anything at all with regards to the actual... 'science', I guess, of music. I'd love to know if there are root melodic or chord or harmonic patterns that do it for me, but at 28 it's probably a little late to start learning to any degree where I'd be proficient (especially given the business of my life right now). It's still an idea for the future, I guess, and something I'd like to investigate.

I'm of the mind that pretty much anyone can get a good grounding with that stuff with a modicum of effort, Nick. Check out some of the lessons at musictheory.net for an accessible starting point.

Anyone else familiar with this book? Covers a lot of what's been discussed here -- development of pentatonic and also diatonic scales, perception of chords, actual workings of the ear and its nerves, hardwiredness etc etc -- in a pretty accessible style. I've no idea how the opinions voiced are seen among other musicologists etc though.

Wow, lots of great stuff here to think over. I'd still be interested to get some more personal or philosophical perspectives though. Like, how do you think this hardwiring affects your ability to enjoy music which doesn't have that immediate appeal? How does one develop a taste? It's quite a nebulous question I guess, but it relates to a thread from a while ago, about whether or not it would be possible to learn to appreciate any kind of music simply by listening to it enough. Tempting though the notion is I'm inclined to think I've disproved it for myself, just judging from the example of Fennesz, who should appeal to me on so many levels but who so far has utterly failed to push any of my buttons, and leaves me cold no matter how many times I listen.

how do cultures with non-western tuning systems and microtronality etc. come into play? Can we point to the fact that Gamelan music is based primarily on percussion, and pitched percussion tends to produce more complex overtones than string and wind instruments and say that accounts for the difference?

Yeah, that would pretty much be my conclusion - It'd be interesting to test though. All you'd need to do is use the methods mentioned before to predict a 'natural' scale from a sample of a single Gamelan hit, and compare it to the documented traditional Gamelan scales. I tempted to give that a go actually - I might be able to milk a paper out of it :)

xpost

Well ledge, I don't think most of this stuff is "hardwired" as in congenital, but I think one's formative years probably play a big part, just as they do with language. i.e., learning a language is a lot more difficult after childhood, and learning to hear a new type of music is probably harder as well.

But, like spoken languages, I think people can learn new musical languages later in life, through immersion and study. But I think that's totally different from the example you give - learning to like an artist is not the same as learning to appreciate a musical idiom.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/06/nerve_communication

This article really supports the sense that music is somehow physical, somehow intertwined with the body.

er, sound anyway, hehe

http://www.metafilter.com/62459/language-of-music

interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk
Pretty awesome, this.

Fanastic. Would love to see the whole talk.