A SHORT "NATURAL" HISTORY OF MUSIC

Music is so natural...

When we're happy, we naturally feel like singing or whistling, like birds in springtime.

Sometimes a melody comes to us, sometimes quite simple, even simplistic, just two or three notes repeated over and over again, but they make us happy.

What is the magic behind it?

Nothing magical, just the wonderful world of HARMONICS.

Music IS Harmonics!

WHAT ARE HARMONICS?

A sound produced by an instrument or the voice is never a single frequency.

It's made up of a dominant frequency and its many harmonics or overtones, which are multiples of the dominant frequency.

The word "harmonics" indicates that these components generate harmony.
Harmony is the orderly and pleasing association of elements in a whole.
The words "orderly" and "pleasing" indicate both mathematically precise and aesthetically pleasing.
Harmony is an expression of nature, of the laws of nature.

A note is therefore a set of harmonious sounds.

Without going into too much detail... when a voice or the sound of an instrument is rich in harmonics, the charm of these harmonics inspires us to sing our own notes that are also in harmony with those harmonics.

And music is born...

Because each note has a particular color or mood or emotion we feel in the notes a closeness to our own emotions.

So the impulse to sing as an expression of our joy is natural.

Just as in a language, there are bonds between the syllables of a word and bounds between the words, in music there's harmony within the notes (the harmonics) and harmony between the notes.

• A note by itself, because it's made up of harmonics, is always "harmonious".
• When there's harmony between several notes, it's because they have harmonics in common. We can call them "harmonic notes".
• A homogeneous set of "harmonic notes" is a "harmonic scale".

How many harmonic scales are there?
Thousands!

Several hundred harmonic scales have been preciously preserved for thousands of years in Gandharva Veda, a branch of Veda, the oldest tradition of wisdom still alive in India.

Today, the purest tradition of these harmonic notes is Dhrupad music.

As each of these scales has its own "color", these harmonic scales are called Raga (color or emotion).

The emotions associated with the Ragas, as well as the time of day or night when this "energy" predominates in nature have also been preserved in this tradition.

Music is natural. We are all musicians.

Since the dawn of time, in all simplicity and innocence, music has been a natural way of expressing our emotions and enjoy them.

Originally, music was improvised. Musicians let themselves be guided by their inspiration of the moment. But as says the beautiful Brazilian song Canções e Mementos: "there are moments that marry song”. And those magical moments come when they please...

So, by memorizing compositions, musicians could more easily recall the subtleties of their notes and scales.

Then, to convey them better, the compositions had to be written down.

As composers continued to draw inspiration from their elders, the beauty and complexity of compositions sometimes developed to the point of eclipsing the natural beauty of the notes themselves.

Little by little, music moved from the street (troubadours) to chamber music, salon music, concert music... music for the elite. From an innocent, improvised music from the heart, music slowly evolved to a music of the learned composers and performers.

Over the centuries, as compositions took precedence over improvisation, music became more and more elaborate, but lost the spontaneity, sensitivity and beauty inherent in the notes themselves when they are pure.

Then, in the industrial age, music "benefited" from several technological advances that were not always in the direction of refinement:

Solid metal wires replaced gut strings for a purer, louder sound (fortepiano, guitar...). But the simplicity of tuning (from the harpsichord to the piano) and the freedom to move notes by feel (metal frets fixed in wood for the guitar...) got lost.

The two most catastrophic "evolutions" for the purity and refinement of music were the equal tempered scale and the fixing of note frequencies.

Those two sentences Mozart said illustrate the extent of the damage caused by the equal tempered scale:

- "My job is to put together the notes that love each other".

Notes that "love each other" are notes that have an affinity, a common trait that unites them. "Birds of the same feather flock together". And to play with this affinity is the musician's work: on the one hand, by "marrying" the notes of the scale he has chosen, and on the other, by selecting from the infinite variety of notes the few he could "marry" into a beautiful family (scale) where all the notes love each other.

- "I'll kill anyone who plays my music with that"Mozart said when he heard the tempered scale. With "that", yuck!

In Mozart's time and before, the instrument (harpsichord) had to be tuned before each performance. For such and such a musical piece, the fifth had to be slightly lowered, the fourth slightly raised...

THE EQUAL TEMPERED SCALE

For reasons of convenience (to avoid retuning the piano and be able to switch quickly from one mode to another), the idea came to create an "equal temperament".

This meant wiping the slate clean of all the subtleties of the different temperaments (scales) by placing the 12 steps (semitones of the chromatic scale) at regular intervals.

- Can you imagine the revolution this "equal tempered scale" represented at the time?

Music went from analog to digital, literally!

Since the adoption of the equal tempered scale, what we still call "music" is no more than an imitation of music, because the intimate and delicate relationship (the harmonics) that united the notes has disappeared.

Today, almost everyone plays Mozart (and all the great composers) with that!

It is thanks to the harmony that binds the notes together that "music soothes the soul".

In the equal tempered scale, apart from the octave, there is no harmony, no resonance between the notes.

This loss of refinement has certainly influenced people's psychology and happiness, because the "notes that love each other" Mozart spoke of are made of these refined harmonics.

And if the adoption of the non-harmonic tempered scale coincided with the end of great composers, the end of genius, of musical inspiration, is this a coincidence?

The experience of refinement is the key to happiness.

Why can't we hear this scale is distorted and out of tune?

1. We've heard the equal tempered scale from a very early age, we've heard only this, and we've learned that "this" is music.
2. The virtuosity of the musicians, the elaborate, catchy, charming melodies and rhythms, and the poetry of the lyrics, conceal from us the uniform, unnatural nature of this scale.
3. Last but not the least: our brain creates ITS own reality!
   It has the capacity, on its own, to correct a small error, especially when it makes the perception more aesthetic or conforms to a belief...

A good example: the perfect chord: C E G.

It's called "perfect" because these three notes (when harmonic) have a very intimate relationship with each other. The ratio between G and C (a pure fifth) is 3/2. This means that while G makes 3 waves, C makes 2. So, every 6 waves, their peaks come together, i.e. for a G at 300 Hz, these two waves are in phase 50 times a second.

Relationship between the three notes of the perfect chord

You may note:

1. The simple numbers of the harmonic notes and the complex numbers of the same notes in the equal tempered scale
2. The tiny difference between the two scales.

Because the difference is so small, our brain is able to correct the error and give us the illusion that they are in harmony.

Consequences

When we listen to music in equal tempered scale, our brain has to compensate constantly to make us "hear" the music in tune. This compensation is extra work that prevents the listener from being truly relaxed, and prevents him from appreciating the finer nuances of the music and being carried along by it to more peaceful states of greater happiness and inner silence.

Through continuous practice, the brains of seasoned musicians develop this capacity for correction into second nature. As a result, they hear in tune the out-of-tune notes of the equal tempered, and because they no longer make compensatory efforts, they enjoy the music more.

This is why Western classical music is so much more appreciated by music fans than by people with untrained "ears".

In contrast, children and primitive peoples who listen to music in harmonic scales love it right from the start.

FIXING THE FREQUENCIES OF NOTES

At the same time, the importance of setting note frequencies also became apparent.

- What were the advantages of establishing a conventional reference note (A)?

1. To ensure that the various instruments in the orchestra played the same notes, otherwise there would be cacophony.
2. To adapt to the register (the possible pitch of the notes) of the instruments and the singers' voices.

Historically, the lead instrument would play the tonic, and the other instruments would tune to this note.

Once agreed on the tonic, the reference note, musicians find out by ear where the other notes of the scale are placed.

The transition to the equal tempered scale must have been very upsetting for sensitive musicians, because they could no longer go by their intuition. They had to learn to play out of tune and keep on playing out of tune..

It was at this point that the importance of fixing note frequencies became apparent. Since all the notes in this new scale are at regular intervals, fixing a reference note became very important, since all the other notes were fixed at the same time.

Strangely enough... it was a little before this time that were invented:

1. The technology for accurately counting seconds,
2. The technology for counting the frequencies of a vibrating string per second.

Together, these two technological advances made it possible to calculate frequencies. Before that, knowing a frequency was of absolutely no importance. For this reason, tuning forks didn't count Hertz (cycles per second) simply because it was impossible to count string vibration frequencies...

Moreover, since Pythagoras, and long before him since he studied music in India, the numbers used to qualify notes were known as harmonic RATIOS.

Ratios indeed characterize the relationships between notes. These numbers can be described as "relative" because they always relate one number to another, and not to its absolute value. A number by itself had no value in music.

Examples of interval ratios between notes: 3/2 a typical fifth (interval between C and G), 4/3 a typical fourth (interval between C and F), 5/4 a typical fourth (interval between C and E), 9/8 for a second (from C to D)...
By "typical" interval we mean that there are others, but this one is the most obvious.

With the introduction of the equal tempered scale and fixed frequencies, we moved on to absolute numbers. Once again, we went from analog to digital technology.

These two "inventions" made it easier to tune many instruments and change modes during a concert... But in terms of musical refinement, it was a disaster, not a step forward at all.

“SACRED” FREQUENCIES – 432 Hz…

With the destruction of harmony by the equal tempered scale, we thought we'd hit rock bottom. But no.

Now we're promised the wonders of tuning our instruments to a specific frequency.

Music in 432 Hertz just means that the middle A of the piano is tuned to 432 Hz.

The promise…

• A 432 is the Divine A,
• Is spiritual music,
• It helps you meditate and relax,
• It realigns your chakras,
• It repairs your DNA,
• It opens your third eye,
• Is the music of nature, birds sing in 432,
• Orthodox monks sing in 432,
• Children scream in 432,
• Human speech is in 432,
• Plants grow faster when listening to music in 432,
• Fibonacci sequence, precession of the equinoxes, Schumann resonance...

The logic

Does this make sense?

NO. If you've followed the previous paragraphs, you've understood the insignificance of talking about frequencies for notes.

Music is not made of frequencies. It is made of INTERVALS.

• The pitch of a sound is an absolute value expressed as a frequency in Hz.
• The pitch of a note is a value relative to another note. It measures the interval, or space, or relationship between sounds. In harmonic scales, this interval is expressed as a ratio. In the tempered scale, it's expressed in cents.

Music is not a language of sounds.
It is a language of relationships, of links, of union, between sounds.
Music is a language of love.

So whether A is tuned to 440 Hz, 432 Hz or 412 Hz... we can safely say that it makes no difference to the beauty and harmonizing effect of music.

It is the harmony binding the notes together that "soothes the soul", not the absolute frequency of the notes.

What's all the fuss about A 432 Hz?

Origins

Joseph Sauveur (1653-1716), a French acoustics researcher submitted to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1713, the "philosophical" principle of octaves of 1 as the basis of a frequency for the study of acoustic physics phenomena.

Joseph Sauveur's frequencies are: 1-2-3-4-8-16-32-64-128-256...

Based on this series of frequencies he proposed a tuning fork for the mifddle C at 256 Hz.
Note that in his period, frequencies were not counted in Hertz but in cycles per second, a measurement that was still imprecise.
He didn't create this tuning fork himself, but inspired it.
By "philosophical" tuning fork he meant "scientific", in the sense of "used by scientists in their acoustic research".
The sole purpose of using 1 Hz as the base frequency is to simplify calculations.

Why is attributing "sacred" or "magical" properties to the 432 Hz frequency just a pipe dream?

1. The Hertz or cycle per second is not a natural, universal or cosmic unit of measurement. The second is a human unit, a convention.
2. Yes, a C at 256 Hz gives an A at 432 Hz, but this is only true in the Pythagorean scale, where the ratio A / C is equal to 27/16. But nobody uses the Pythagorean scale. Even less so in the equal tempered scale, where no interval between notes is calculated as a ratio

So it's all a pipe dream.

To the 432 fans: No frequency in nature (heart, brain waves, Schumann resonance...) is at 432 Hz or one of its octaves.

As for Giuseppe Verdi, since LA 432 Hz is also called Verdi's tuning fork, if he indicated that 432 Hz would be slightly better for orchestras, it was firstly to lower the tuning fork of the time, much too high, which was dangerously damaging to the vocal chords of the singers, and secondly for mathematical simplicity.

In fact, he joined the French "diapason normal" at 435 Hz, his main interest being to have a standard pitch, as he writes: "For my part, I would like a single pitch to be adopted by the entire musical universe. The language of music is universal; so why should the note called A in Paris or Milan become B flat in Rome?"

On the power of frequencies

Yes, each frequency has specific properties. Yes, you can heal or kill with frequencies.

But we're here talking about SOUND, not music.

• A sound is a frequency
• Music is a play on harmonics

If you're certain that a given sound frequency - 432 Hz, for example - will stimulate amino acids and help your tomatoes grow, then why not play that frequency continuously, rather than playing them Pachelbel's Canon, where they'll only hear your super A at 432 Hz from time to time?
You'll also avoid polluting them with a non-harmonic tempered scale.

ADVICE TO MUSICIANS

Instead of wasting your time with this 432 Hz stupidity, start by putting aside your synths, pianos and other instruments tuned to this damned equal tempered scale. Sing, and allow the loving notes to come to you. Listen to them, feel them, let their beauty touch you. An almost infinite number of notes and harmonic scales are naturally present at the finest levels of nature, at the finest levels of our own emotions. It's up to you to find them. They are the secret of musical refinement.

Not an easy task...

These harmonic scales, temperaments or moods, are the Ragas of Indian classical music.

The supreme science of Ragas is Dhrupad.

Bertrand Canac

More on harmonic scales and listen to Dhrupad

• Shivala's website, one of Europe's leading Dhrupad experts: http://dhrupadmusic.com
• Gundecha Brothers, Shivala's teachers, among India's finest Dhrupad singers: https://www.dhrupad.org
• To listen to ancient Dhrupad singers, search for "Senior Dagar"