Re: How important are overtones?


"Joey Goldstein" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:42F38F88.41A85140@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
> "Tom K." wrote:
>>
>>
>> Wasn't it Rameau who justified the minor triad as an interval inversion
>> of
>> the acoustically more desirable major triad? That always seemed pretty
>> weak
>> to me, given their very different functions in most tonal music.

Didn't Rameau also omit one of the ratios (like factor 7) from his string
lengths/divisions because it didn't "fit" with what was happening in music?

>
> Why it is that people think the minor triad needs to be "justified"
> acoustically in the same way as the major triad is beyond me.

I'm not sure that either one of them need to be "justified" :-) They're
rampant :-)

>
> There are certain characteristics of the minor triad that make it
> suitable as a tonic triad in much the same way, but not exactly the same
> way, as a major triad. But the frequency ratios involved in the minor
> triad are considerably more complicated than those involved in the major
> triad. The sense of acoustical root is much more ambiguous in the minor
> traid than the major triad. In traditional minor key harmony musica
> ficta has to be introduced in order for the ear to remain fixed on the
> tonic minor triad as the home chord.

Salient point. But this is not always true is it? - I mean there's plenty of
"modal" Aeolian songs that use some other means (rather than pitch
relationships) to "promote" a tonic (or final, or whatever we want to call
it). Seems to me that there's always a much larger set of interactions going
on.

This is necessary because the minor
> triad is nowhere near as acoustically pure as the major triad. In minor
> key harmony all the pointers to the tonic that exist in major key
> harmony are grafted in to the material artificially. Led by these
> familiar pointers the ear expects to hear a tonic triad at certain
> points. What it hears is a minor triad and evidently a minor triad is
> good enough so that we accept it as a tonic triad.

It's funny to me that, like the problem with "justifiying" the minor tonic
triad, there doesn't seem to be the same desire to do so in what we call a
melodic minor scale etc. They make all of these associations with Major
scale, but obviously, we've "adapted" the minor modes to our artistic use
(by rasing the 7th, or 6th and 7th, or not) why can't it be accepted that a
major scale (and all of the modes for that matter) are simply our
adapaptations for artistic needs of some frequencies that occaisionally
happen to coincide with a physical phenomenon?

>
> Now, the minor triad is the most like the major triad of any possible
> triad. Any other conglomeration of 2 tones will be even more unlike the
> major triad than the minor triad is. There are other interesting
> proportional similarities between the two triads.
> 1. The minor tirad is the inversion of the maj triad:
> Maj triad = maj 3 + min 3rd
> Min triad = min 3rd + maj 3rd

Joey, you've mentioned CEA having a more "major" or stable sound before. I
would think that that might put CEG and CEA as being closest, and CEbG
being further (note, i.e. the first inversion of a minor triad, EbGC
transposed to C to yield CEA. Interesting how CEbAb fits into that scheme.
SO are they closest by intervallic content - you said above the frequency
ratios are far more complex in the minor triad - are they more or less so
(even though the intervallic content is different) in ctructures like CEA -
or do you know?

[snip]

> The ruling interval in a tonic triad, whether it be minor or major, is
> the P5th, not the 3rd.

I think that's what makes it "stable", and the deviation from the "natural"
overtone makes the m3 sound "sad" as we typically describe it.

Steve


.

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  • Re: How important are overtones?
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