From my era as a student of philosophy I knew how much bs the modern scientific method has to offer when scientists disregard the logical foundations of what they are doing and use science exactly as the morbid doom scrolling person at the train. But I didn’t believe the situation was so bad, until i bump into this article https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240227130746.htm . They jump from acoustics into aesthetic relativism and give the label „ science shows“ to it. Basically Thomas Kuhn was right using his concept of normal science : basically people use the name science to prove what they are imagining in their heads, and they imagined it because of the limited framework of the current norm. The norm today is to say that the gamelan music is better for your mental well being as a woman than the 9th Symphony and things like this, no?
What bothers me is not the AESTHETIC FACT that we want to hear more than consonances, but the confusion between philosophical and scientific method, giving the label of ultimate truth to something that lack the ARGUMENTATION. For the argumentation you need to dive into conceptual analysis. Here you will understand that the consonance of Pythagoras is a COSMOLOGICAL statement about the structure of the world. You can’t just ignore centuries of development of this discussion and come with “aha, this doesn’t work, because now my study shows that people found this dissonance pleasant” and “ now – thanks to this ONE STUDY LOL we are going to finally compose music with dissonances using unconventional instruments “.
The guy wants to insert that over-used post-modern relativist tone but starts with a simple “Pythagoras was wrong…” .
His tunning was not wrong, but inadequate for further needs of the art. This musical view was not made for music! It is a result of his cosmology and limited to his numerology . Thanks to Pythagoras we started to systematically observe the musical possibilities like never before in other cultures. Thanks to him the problems of musical material could be observed with precision by the next generations; consequently our music theory is far more sophisticated and the western tools of musical creation achieved a level of expression that other systems did NOT achieve: mainly because these systems are imprisoned in a very subordinate view of art, while the western art art became fundamentally autonomous.
This statement about Pythagoras (he was wrong about consonances ) is like saying that chess was wrong about Minecraft.
How childish is this level of intellectuality!
To not even quote the fact that consonances – in the acoustics – are a physical object defined by numbers and facts of aural perception.
It is a common mistake to take the concept of one discipline and use this for a conclusion in another, without analyzing the limitations of the concept itself. Pleasant – for us- doesn’t mean acoustically consonant. Because the dimensions of being pleasant are way more complex and subjective. This doesn’t mean that the acoustics fact is not there.
Not only Pythagoras, but Helmholtz shows us these principles in the first chapter of his Lehre der Tonempfindungen. He didn’t say Pythagoras was wrong, he said: I want to reconceptualize what a tone (Klang) is and solve the problem of consonance; I am not satisfied with his mathematical explanation.
Basically the study of this link means : let’s pick some random people using the word “pleasant” and overwrite the whole discussion of great minds about the matter, because now this is the “scientific method”…
“Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don’t need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy.”
Omg i have many videos to do in this channel still