In Search of Music's Biological Roots - 3 views
-
Ryan Catalani on 18 Oct 10For both English and Mandarin speakers, the major formants in vowel sounds paralleled the intervals for the most commonly used intervals in music worldwide, namely the octave, the fifth, the fourth, the major third, and the major sixth. To Purves, the upshot is a simple truth: "There's a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech," he says. "That's the reason that we like music." "Whenever we've heard happy speech, we've tended to hear major-scale tonal ratios," Purves says. "Whenever we've heard sad speech, minor tones tend to be involved."