harmonic intervals
Articles about harmonic intervals:
Researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience believe that the use of 12 tone intervals in music is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech. According to their research, the notes traditionally used in tonal music sound “right” to our ears because of the way our bodies make sounds used in language.
When the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, according to Dale Purves, Professor for Research in Neurobiology.
The researchers tested their idea by recording native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers uttering vowel sounds in both single words and a series of short monologues. They then compared the vocal frequency ratios to the numerical ratios that define notes in music. The speech sounds produced by different speakers and languages produce the same variety of vocal tract resonance ratios, Purves said.
The lowest two of these vocal tract resonances, also known as formants, account for the vowel sounds in speech. “Take away the first two formants and you can’t understand what a person is saying,” Purves said.
