PHQ | QUESTIONS: Music Type Theory and Donations

39 comments

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  • Taylor
  • August 21, 2015 at 5:46 pm

  No worries, you’re not shooting down my idea, I tend to be blind to a lot of details in pursuit of the big picture so it’s nice to have people point out the things I missed.

  I would like to note, I’m an amateur enthusiast when it comes to music theory, I have no authority in it.

  I know there are so many exceptions in music theory, especially when we get to jazz, you can kiss the rules and framework goodbye. Different cultures have different rules, so that does make the question of universality tricky. The octave is not unique to western culture and has emerged in other parts of the globe at various times in human history.

  I’m focused largely on the octave and again, taking a big view picture and blurring out all the details. The Robert Laughlin quote that inspired this idea was from a book on emergence in physics, and I take an emergent rather than reductionalist approach to it. Personality typing itself is generalized and emergent. It describes the universal patterns we see in each type but does not address the complexities and unique qualities belonging to each and every person.

  I’m speaking of music theory in its most ideal form, in the same way a chemist might use PV=nRT (the ideal gas equation). Gases in the real world do not behave ideally, but the ideal gas law equation describes how an ideal gas would act, and it can be useful in chemistry for solving for unknown variables.

  (for anyone not familiar with music theory, perhaps its easier to think of sol-fege, Do-Re-Mi. The tonic would be “Do”, the first note of the scale, and the dominant is “So”, the fifth note.) This relates to the circle of fifths because it is arranges the major keys by intervals of the fifth to create a full circle.

  First, I see the dominant function as the dominant (V), and the inferior function as the tonic (I).

  The dominant seeks the tonic, the way our dominant function seeks the inferior. An ideal piece of music ends in the tonic.

  The way I understand Jungian theory, the process of individuation is to develop the undifferentiated unconscious functions (namely our tertiary and inferior). The goal is to become whole, which means reaching and integrating the inferior. I know for myself personally, that end goal of inferior Se is always beckoning, like Jay Gatsby’s green light, the end point that I’m always reaching for When a song doesn’t end in the tonic it can feel cut off, incomplete.

  As for the friction, (I’d probably use the word “tension”) think of the end of a hymn, the “A-men”. It is so hard not to return to the tonic. People who know nothing about music theory instinctively want to sing the “-men” back in the tonic.
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  • Meg
  • August 21, 2015 at 4:17 pm

  Except the octave is only the very beginning of a theoretically infinite overtone series! Imagine a guitar string: You play it open, you get the fundamental pitch; split it in half, you get the octave. Split it again, you get a fifth; again, another octave; then a third, then another fifth, then the ratios go all wacky and you get super-flat (to our ear and compared to the rest of the math) sevenths. And on and on. THAT is the spiral we’re talking about, and a more precise analogy to the music of the spheres.

  If you’re interested in the intersection of music and metaphysics, a great book to check out is “Music and Renaissance Magic” by Gary Tomlinson. A good explanation of how overtones work is at http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/overtone.html

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  • Meg
  • August 21, 2015 at 4:06 pm

  Here’s a great bibliography of research on music perception and cognition: http://daniellevitin.com/levitinlab/articles/2011-Torovolas_Levitin-Music_perception_and_cognition_research.pdf

  Much of the more recent research confirms what one might expect about the relationship between music and mood, which is that there’s nothing really empirical about it; i.e., such-and-such interval/key/tempo/pitch/style/whatever doesn’t elicit particular moods. The effects largely depend on the listener or player’s current mood and what they like in general. A lot of music therapy works on the iso principle: starting with active or passive music activities that match where the client is in the present and then working through to a more positive state (which is not always mirrored in music that might conventionally be considered “positive”).

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  • Meg
  • August 21, 2015 at 3:58 pm

  Hm. At first blush it sounds like a nice metaphor… but I’m not convinced that, if you flesh out the music theory, it would hold up even as a metaphor. OK, so we move through the circle of fifths by intervals of fourths and fifths. Those, along with the octave and unison, are consonant — and carry nearly equal weight in the (if you will) hierarchy of the scale. I do like the comparison of the dominant and auxiliary functions with the tonic and dominant scale positions — where the dominant Jungian function is “home base” like the tonic of a scale, and the auxiliary Jungian function is that guiding voice that points you back toward home, like the dominant scale position points back to the tonic. But, metaphorically speaking, the inferior function creates dissonance, no? There’s a friction there; it’s a blind spot. Not unlike in tonal music, you can work with the dissonances, and those dissonances can serve to move you through progressions and keys in new and interesting ways. All that aside, let’s keep in mind that this is Western music theory and is hardly a universal or “natural” way of hearing, understanding, experiencing music, so it definitely has limits as far as describing any kind of neurological or psychological “universals.” What about the harmonic series? What about microtones? I ask these questions not to shoot down your idea but to flesh it out from other angles. I LOVE music (obviously) so I enjoy hearing about how others experience it; I could talk about this stuff all day. Cheers!

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  • Charis Branson
  • August 21, 2015 at 1:26 pm

  Thanks for the comment, Beckie!

  Joel has been tossing around the idea of a subscription service, whereby people would subscribe for a low monthly payment and gradually be able to work their way through most of our premium content.

  We are seeing more and more of that pop up in the digital media world. It may very well be the wave of the future!