Expression of Emotion in Eastern and Western Music
Music as Biology: What We Like to Hear and Why
The course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework. Analyses of speech and musical databases are consistent with the idea that the chromatic scale (the set of tones used by humans to create music), consonance and dissonance, worldwide preferences for a few dozen scales from the billions that are possible, and the emotions elicited by music in different cultures all stem from the relative similarity of musical tonalities and the characteristics of voiced (tonal) speech. Like the phenomenology of visual perception, these aspects of auditory perception appear to have arisen from the need to contend with sensory stimuli that are inherently unable to specify their physical sources, leading to the evolution of a common strategy to deal with this fundamental challenge.
Biology, Music, Evolution, Neurobiology
This course really helped me to understand how music works. In my opinion this course is an excellent tool if you want to start into sound effects and soundtracks, etc.
I enjoyed this course. It made me appreciate music more as it relates to our emotions etc. Thank you to all the lecturers who were instrumental in putting this course.
Music, Emotion, and Cultural Differences
How emotion is conveyed by vocal similarity in music across cultures, and how the speech of a culture and its music are related. A summing up of the major points in the course follows.
Introduction to Emotion8:44
Emotions Elicited by Major versus Minor Scales14:49
Comparision of Major and Minor Music with Vocalization in Different Emotional States6:50
Expression of Emotion in Eastern and Western Music7:10
Language, Speech, and Cultural Differences in Music19:42
Mbira Music: Background and Cyclical Structures4:05
Mbria Music: Nonhamronic Frequencies3:47
Dale Purves
So what I've said in the last lesson is basically about western music. And the question naturally arises, is what applies in western music characteristic of other musical traditions or is this kind of a western phenomenon and other musical traditions go in a different direction and really don't apply the same generalizations that I've been making. So, in this fourth lesson we're gonna consider the expression of emotion in eastern and western music. And by eastern we're going to focus on the music of southern India. And this traditional music is called Carnatic music. And the singing of Carnatic music and the instrumentation of Carnatic music is again in south India been around for many centuries. And I'm going to have a colleague whose been a major contributor on the work that we've done on this, Janani Suderarajan. I'm gonna ask her to demonstrate what carnatic music sounds like in her singing. She's an accomplished cCarnatic singer and I think you'll get a good idea from her demonstration of what Carnatic music sounds like. So here's Janani. >> I'm gonna sing a small piece of improvisation, which is commonly known as the alap or the alapana in Carnatic music. And so this basically doesn't have any meaning, it's just an improvisation of the scale. [SOUND] [MUSIC] >> So, having heard a bit of Carnatic music and understood that this is the traditional eastern music that come from a completely different historical background I the south of India, obviously a very big region of the world. The question is what if any similarity is there between classical eastern and western music. And again I'm going to ask Janani to describe this slide and the next one because, not only is she much more familiar with the issues, as a Carnatic singer and a south Indian who has been steeped in this tradition, but she can also pronounce the words that are easy for her, difficult for me. So I'm going to have Janani describe the comparison of the 12 tone system in Carnatic music, and how it relates to the 12 tone chromatic system in western music. >> The basic set of tones and tonal relationships in Carnatic music follow the 12 tone octave division system, which is similar to western music. So this table here on top shows the 12 tone system in Carnatic music, and as you can see from the table at the bottom which shows the intervals used in western music, there is a correspondence between the intervals used in western music and in Carnatic music. So there are additional relationships that are also used in Carnatic music in the form of ornamentation or Gamakas. But the major tonal system that's used in Carnatic music follows this 12-tone system here. So, for instance, the perfect unison in Western music corresponds with Sa or in Carnatic music. The perfect fifth in western music corresponds with par or punctumum in Carnatic music and similarly, other intervals also have corresponding names in Carnatic music. >> So again, I'm gonna ask Janani to describe the similarity of eastern ragas and western modes and to compare for you Carnatic Indian ragas with western modes and the emotions that they convey. The question being again whether it needs two traditions, the means of conveying emotion in music is basically very similar. >> The tonality of a chromatic melody is determined by the raga in which it is composed. So, a raga is an alogus to modes in western music, in that they are specified by a collection of tones, and tonal relationships. Some ragas also specify patterns of ascending, and descending tonal relationships. So similar to Western music and Western scales again, ragas can be taught to be associated with certain emotions. Though the same raga can be played differently to elicit different emotions, they can broadly be classified as being associated with positive and excited emotions, or negative and subdued emotions. Just like the major and the minor scare. So for instance Bilahari and Mohanam are ragas that are associated with positive and excited emotions whereas ragas such as Punnagavarali and Varaali are associated with negative and subdued emotions. >> So just to wrap up this fourth lesson, the point is that even those these two traditions Carnatic music in southern India, and western classical and folk music have come historically from very different places geographically in terms of the development of the music. They tend to use very much the same ways of expressing emotion in these two traditions, again arguing that the basic way in which emotion is conveyed is by the imitation in the voice of emotional states and relating that in music to the tonalities that are used to express either excited or subdued, sad emotions in these two traditions.