The increasing subtlety of the marginal effects achieved by adding partials to a fundamental suggests that an arbitrarily numerous quantity of partials would observe negligible change with the superposition of another partial. The example of the stiff piano string causing a positive warmth quality to permeate the sound envelope of a piano’s tone shows that not all of the prevailing soundscape in popular musical culture can be broken down to neat, uniform subunits. Some appealing sounds come from asymmetry and imperfection. The comparisons to nature made by the Chinese musical notation of chi’in provide a more concrete image of the characteristics of sound colors. The addition of sound color to musical interpretation expands the complexity of musical intent. It appends new dimensions such as register to the likes of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Helmholtz compares the interaction of sound waves to those of a rippling body of water. He explains that the waves coexist and phase through each other, summing as they overlap. The wide range of perspective offered by sight relative to hearing makes apparent the limitation of the human ear to detect only individual sounds or multiple sounds in a vague clump, rather than all details of a complete soundscape.
Questions:
Have other cultures adapted some writing convention for musical components such as register?
What is the absolute threshold for humans to distinguish a tone color from another?
How does the interaction of sound waves create tertiary sonic qualities such as register?
Music 26 Blog: Ryan Hyun 