Auditory Qualia

The Piece

Taken from "Six Soundcard Sonatas" by Greg Fox, open source audio 2005.

Elegy for Auditory Qualia (1.63MB), 3.5 minutes long


Description


At the start of the piece, the chords are all minor.

By the end of the piece, the chords are all major.


The chords actually consist of the full gradient, starting with minor and ending with major. In other words the ratio is this at the start:

1 : 1.19 : 1.5

and by the end it's

1 : 1.25 : 1.5

with all the intermediates having intermediate values for the middle
value, eg.

1 : 1.2 : 1.5,
1 : 1.21 : 1.5,
and so on


Can you tell when the chords stop being minor and start being major?

Did you detect the change?


NO???!?!!!?!!!

What, they just suddenly were major instead of minor?!!!!


Isn't it supposed to *feel like something* to hear a major chord, as opposed to a minor one?

Discussion

Nobody's trying to claim that music doesn't exist, or even that major and minor don't exist. I do think, though, that the proponents of "qualia", "secondary qualities", and so forth, over-emphasise the intrinsic nature of experiences at the expense of their function.
Music perception happens on a number of levels and one of those has to do with telling the difference between things, noting change: the hearing equivalent of motion-detection in vision. Part of the impact of a particular chord has to do with its context, and much of the emotional quality imputed to music derives from its cultural and contextual details, in other words what comes before it, what happens after it, what it says to us musically, not just experientially. It fits into the framework of our lifetime listening experience.

That's not to deny that there are physical properties of sound which influence how we perceive them; the concept of dissonance is closely related to the complexity of the relations between frequencies. The concept of metre is directly observable as the degree of pattern in the relative amplitude of the musical phenomena.

But what I'm hoping to do with this experiment is to shake the faith in the intrinsic "what it's like"-ness of a minor or a major chord. Actually we can miss an awful lot of the detail and be none the wiser. In fact if someone asked you what was going on in the piece, it's entirely possible you might not spot that the series of chords constitute a smooth gradient of types of 'third'.


Greg Fox, July 2007