This is <i>very</i> old thinking (like half a century old) and the folks most qualified to comment on what is music and what is isn't are those at the vanguard, the "noise music" folks, the electroacoustic artists.<p>For one thing, monophonic music can be very rich. The Indian classical traditions (Hindustani and Carnatic) are both primarily monophonic. The "monophonic is boring" comment would also insult Bach (ex: suite for solo cello, which is awesome)
This article would probably never be used by anyone as reference for signal analysis but it does offer a good overview of western harmonic tonality.<p>I do want to make one correction:<p>"Did I say music was based on notes? That's not true. Real music is based on intervals (the ratio of two notes) with high degrees of consonance (shared harmonics)."<p>Not true. Real world musical tonality is based on a combination of consonance, dissonance and noise. We don't just hear the fundamental frequencies and their harmonic compliments when we listen to a note coming from a musical instrument. The tonal character of any instrument and hence the tonal character of music is complimented and equally defined by other factors that this article is discounting as noise.
Or it was, anyways, before.. say.. the 1960's.<p>(Hell, artists were exploring "noise as music" in the 1920's, even earlier... a century later, and it's really time we stop pretending we can pin down and define "art" as a mathematical or scientific phenomenon. Art is fundamentally a <i>social</i> phenomenon, driven specifically by an inherent counter-cultural attitude, and therefore by definition it naturally evolves beyond any specific description we attempt to apply to it. By that I mean that art is always trying to break its own rules. You could argue that <i>good art</i>, what we consider ground-breaking work, at any point in history, is specifically that which is not described by previous attempts to define a set of rules.)
"Monotonic music is boring. Real music is polytonic..."<p>"Ego Trip", MacDara Ó Raghallaigh. An hour of solo fiddle and foot tapping. Best album I have heard in heard in ages. But then, he occasionally double-stops, so I guess it's not purely monotonic...
<i>Consonances are sometimes described as being inherently more pleasant to the ear and dissonances as less pleasant.</i><p>This is probably the only article I've read about harmony that properly uses ambiguity when describing the pleasantness of dissonance. As a (very) long time, die hard metal head that both appreciates and enjoys the musicality that dissonance can produce, it irks me whenever someone makes outrageously definitive claims that it causes physical pain, depression, et cetera.
The best definition of noise, I think, is sound that interferes with the transmission of meaning or disrupts the process of interpretation.<p>It's really that vague, and depends entirely on context and the people and intentions involved. Any definition that attempts to be more precise is certainly going to produce counterexamples. Certainly any definition that tries to define noise in terms of a finite set of identifiable properties of sound is doomed to fail. And, despite the attempts of this article, you most certainly cannot define noise as anything other than tonal music. There are many forms of atonal music, many of which are quite old.
We have one of the very few research institute dedicated to this kind of topics in Paris : the IRCAM[1]. They do very interesting and amusing research. I attended a few talks there and I heard some pretty strange musical stuff, that I wouldn't have distinguished from noise if I hadn't listened to the talk before (and even then, I'm 100% sure I didn't get it fully, because I didn't understand all the math from the talk, and because my ear is not trained enough).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ircam.fr/?L=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.ircam.fr/?L=1</a>
That was over my head but it did remind me of my sound system engineer career days (it lasted a week).<p>All I remember is for some reason odd trans harmonic distortion sounds good but even trans harmonic distortion doesn't.
I feel like this is almost like saying "Novels are based on words"- turns there are some good analytical and physical reasons why we have the words we do, but that doesn't tell you shit about how to write a novel. I think the title overstates the scope of the observations within.