What determines how we perceive different types of music?

[chikiwighi]

Music can bring out such strong and mixed emotions from every listener. A listener also appreciates certain music over other. A listener will find some music to be horribly and some music to be great. What determines a listener to perceived a piece of music to be a great work of art? What determines a listener to perceive a piece of music to have no beauty?

It seems music has to be structured right in order for a listener to appreciate it. A music with wrong structure, whether is be bad rhythm or bad placement of noted, becomes a burden to listen to. What in our minds determines the structure that music has to have in order to be appreciated? Please explain why.

[danielwritesbac]

Originally Posted by chikiwighi

Music can bring out such strong and mixed emotions from every listener. A listener also appreciates certain music over other. A listener will find some music to be horribly and some music to be great. What determines a listener to perceived a piece of music to be a great work of art?

It is descriptive.
It is descriptive of something agreeable.

What determines a listener to perceive a piece of music to have no beauty?

It doesn't go anywhere or it doesn't go anywhere agreeable.

It seems music has to be structured right in order for a listener to appreciate it. A music with wrong structure, whether is be bad rhythm or bad placement of noted, becomes a burden to listen to. What in our minds determines the structure that music has to have in order to be appreciated? Please explain why.

It is descriptive of both sides of a theme and this provides a contrast that is necessary to more-completely illustrate the theme.

[danielwritesbac]

Artwork? Want to see some?
look up (search feature) the way that AndrewT does maths.
Look closely
Look again
and you'll see music.

His methodology will replay music as nicely as possible. . . if the components used were as perfect as the figures. But the components often vary from this goal because of mismatching their published data, and so the perfection is incomplete. Nevertheless, his method towards audio reproduction is a beautiful art indeed.
One day soon (at any minute), this method will work perfectly, when, by chance, every one of the chosen components do exactly as their manufacturer claims, and that will be irksome to him because it is a case where perfection has required chance. Unless, of course, he has already calculated the odds. See? Quite musical. I like that guy!

And,

Have a look towards Susan Parker, a fine lady sitting in her beautiful living room, at her divan, having a spot of tea and. . . winding output transformers by hand to put onto solid state single rail amplifiers. And why does she do this? Her method eliminates the hardness of sound that had previously distracted her from enjoying music.
Will any other method give the same performance? No. Some is similar. None is the same.

And,

Have a look at the guys with vacuum tube amplifiers. The vacuum tube amplifier will generally get "softer" and "bigger presentation" as it is turned louder, quite different than a solid state (with a few exceptions). Vacuum tubes will do as you ask up to 110% of their parameters, and solid state will do as you ask up to 47% of their parameters; however, the scale is so much larger for solid state that, theoretically, the technologies are interchangeable if/when design translation is successful. In practice, the figures vary so widely, that "equivalent" designs are very rare.

And,

While you're here at diyaudio.com, discover that the people here are all musicians, albeit the instrument played may be the design tools or the soldering iron.
There are people of thoughts.
There are people of action.
Here they both shall meet.
They sure do argue.
Only together they can fill the air with music.
And they do indeed.

Do you see music?

[wwenze]

I would've just said - personal preference. Like why do some people like Japanese food. Or why do some people hate garlic. Or why my eighth-grade English teacher thinks Peanuts is the best comic strip.

[wwenze]

Originally Posted by chikiwighi

It seems music has to be structured right in order for a listener to appreciate it. A music with wrong structure, whether is be bad rhythm or bad placement of noted, becomes a burden to listen to. What in our minds determines the structure that music has to have in order to be appreciated? Please explain why.

For two notes an octave apart the top note has twice the frequency of the bottom note - it's a harmonic. For perfect fifth, the higher note has 1.5x the frequency of the lower note. A perfect 3rd is ratio of 5:4 (25% more).

And a semitone, is the smallest difference of pitch that can be reliability heard by most people between two notes played non-simultaneously. (When played simultaneously it's possible to detect smaller difference and hear things out of tune) Now this one is hard to define, because the ratio can and does change depending on the note and key and instrument and style one's playing with/at. But fact that it's possible for an out-of-tune to escape detection supports the first sentence in this paragraph.

The first person who decided to split an octave into 12 semitones and connect everything with different fifth/third/forth/sixth etc intervals to form an octave of 7 tones is a freaking genius, but actually the exact inventor cannot be defined because music and its instruments had been invented long before birth of christ, probably when we're still naked and living in caves. Perhaps it's our desire for order - 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 frequency ratios that mysteriously shaped the scale. BTW a forth (4:3) after a fifth (3:2) becomes an octave. ( (4/3)*(3/2)=(2/1) )

Also there are rules to be followed when composing music (the above had nothing to do with composition lol). I do not know most of them as I stopped studying compositing at the early stage, but it's obvious that songs written by beginner composers share some common traits and generally do not sound as good. But again, these rules are dependant on the genre of music, so it's still personal preference as to which rule you want to obey. Because most of the rules are built on "we don't do this because it does not sound good", but rules are meant to be broken. Jazz had broken and formed its own set of even better rules. We're using the chromatic scale (12 notes/octave) today, Ancient Asia used pentatonic (5 notes/octave) which gives they the Chinese/Japanese characteristic feel even today. The professionals know what to do to the music to produce what kind of effect and it's a course worthy of a degree.

Took me awhile to recall the science. Never touched music for quite a while.

[danielwritesbac]

Originally Posted by wwenze

. . .But fact that it's possible for an out-of-tune to escape detection supports the first sentence in this paragraph.. . .

That would be awesome, because I would enjoy singing more than I do now. Unfortunately, my ears have perfect pitch and my voice does not.

I'm wishing now that I could remember additive synthesis, whereby it is possible to play the sound of the trumpet or the flute or the cello by using the piano. A specific cord plus a specific technique will do it. This is used in composing whereby you can cause the listener to recall the sound of other instruments despite that you're playing the piano. The chords look weird because some of the notes must be played at different loudness than other notes in the chord.

Another, oddly similar example, is the entertainment provided by 3" speakers, which is far different from the presentation of the actual concert but can cause the listener to remember how a well known song is supposed to sound and cause this memory to replay during the presentation of the underwhelming size speaker, summing, memory + speaker, to a more accurate representation than either could do solo.

P.S.
Thank you for the compliment!
I really like your posts too.

[chris661]

Let's rewind a little, and define music itself.

The online dictionary gives it as "sounds that are pleasing to listen to". These "pleasing sounds" are subjective and therefore it's very difficult to argue whether or not some music sounds better or worse.