So I thought a bit of background on this research project may be helpful and as I said it did very much grow out of my honours project. By the time I got to third year of my undergrad, I became increasingly intrigued by the relationship between musical scales and the harmonic series, seen as they do not aligne how we often assume they would. This also brings to question the power of the human brain in interpreting and adjusting for the inconsistencies between musical scales and the harmonic series.
It seams to me at least that our brains and amazing skills at interpretation are hardly ever given the credit they deserve. I think so many people just listen to music for fun, which is great, but I don’t think most people realise just how much power and interpretation actually goes on for you to have the conscious thought of “hey, this music’s quite good, yeah I like it” or something similar. Musicologists and researchers have known music is complex for a very long time and when mathematical tools and discoveries into harmonics were made, it didn’t make understanding music any easier. In fact I think it probably made it seem even more mind boggling that our brains aren’t constantly mind boggled by music.
My honours project consists of research into three main sections that go into understanding musical harmonics. the first is what we learn from music history, by far the most subjective interpretation of harmonics as the rules of musical harmony change with each new fashion. The second is the mathematical and scientific, more of a useful tool for understanding music. It’s far more objective but very much built in a space that assumes log 2 and agrees that harmonics are built with ratios. The third is the weirdest, it’s the human brains interpretation and understanding of music. The weirdness comes from the juxtaposition of human biology and interpretation. Biologically human ears are “designed” for a ratio based music system but our brains don’t panic if we don’t hear that they adjust.
So I figured if our brains can adjust our understanding of a “non-biological” and “non-harmonic” musical system then surely they can do the same for a musical system that isn’t even trying to conform. If we understand the rule behind the scale then surely we can interprete and understand the scale. In order to test this theory I made up a log e ratio scale, I didn’t want anything too outlandish, hence a ratio scale, but at the same time I didn’t want the scale to sound to familiar so log e worked well.