Musicians, I found a cool radio show

[il Padrino Ute]

Originally Posted by creekster

I'm not Farrah, but I'll boldly respond anyway. Farrah can clean up the mess later.

Think about making a fist and hitting a piano keyboard. That makes a chord. It is a dissonant chord. And you probably won't like it, but that is still a chord. This is sort of what they are talking about.

I have yet to finish listening to this piece, but it is indeed fascinating. We are highly inoculated in our modern world with dissonant sounds. The particular chord in Stravinsky's piece was shocking compared to the music of the classical or baroque periods, etc. Indeed, most composers went to great length to avoid any dissonance and would only use dissonance as a passing tone, or some such, in a piece. IN fact, a seventh chord is really a diminished seventh but in the day they did not like the dissonant sound of a true seventh so they called it major seventh and used the diminished seventh as a regular seventh, which does resolve nicely to the dominant. Bach and others even went to great lengths (remarkably so, given how his music works) to avoid parallel movement in his compositions.

The other thing that I wonder about in listening to this is that they analyze dissonance in terms of the western 12 tone scale (e.g. a minor second, which they call dissonant, only has that meaning in the 12 tone scale). With different intervals, the degree and quality of dissonance would be different. I wonder what this would do to the neurological response? The dissonance of smashing metal, for example, is probably not expressible with full accuracy in a 12 tone scale, but it would likely, it seems to me, cause the same sort of dopamine response that they discuss.

I like Duran Duran.