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Harmony

Paul's Posts — 04 January 2012

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Harmony

I don’t know about you but harmony in music always gets me.  I guess one could say I am a sucker for it.

When musicians play what they refer to as “the hook” or “the chorus” it typically has harmony involved – or the build up of slightly off sounds followed by the release of a harmonized passage – it always attracts me.  I wonder why?

Is harmony in music the same as agreement between people?  After all, in each case, harmony of two creates a third component that resonates with the first two.

Disagreement between people and non-harmonious sounds also have a third component but the resonance is unwelcome.

I think music and its harmonies are reflections of our everyday lives and challenges to find agreement and harmonies within our lives.

High-end audio is all about reproducing those harmonies in perfect form so we can enjoy them even more.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(2) Readers Comments

  1. Soundminded

    January 4, 2012 at 10:46 am

    Harmony is one of the four basic elements of music, at least that’s how I learned it. Harmony occurs when two or more different tones having certain mathematical relationships between their frequencies are heard simultaneously. The flip side of harmony when those relationships don’t hold is disharmony or dissonance. Dissonance is as important in music as harmony. Skillfully used it can add shock and power to music. An excellent example is found in the opening lines of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, a landmark work in the evolution of music according to many people. Bernstein’s analysis of it in one of his televised concerts for young people is highly recommended. It seems to me some later composers like Charles Ives wrote almost nothing but dissonant music.

    Recordings of music fail to fully capture the harmonies and dissonances heard at live performances. This is because the reverberation of the performance venue causes late arriving echoes of each note to be heard simultaneously with the direct sound and earlier echoes of successive notes. As most public venues for performing music present most of the audience with a predominance of reverberant sound, this is a critical element and a shortcoming of recordings. The only type of recording which can fully capture this aspect of musical sound is binaural recording made where the listener would sit in the audience. Unfortunately those recordings are made at the sacrifice of other critical aspects of music, spatiality and directionality which is completely lost when heard through headphones as intended. When heard though loudspeakers, such binaural recordings sound as though the performers were in a tunnel and the listener hearing it from outside. This is because all of the reverberation comes from the same direction as the instruments. Reverberation of each note in a concert hall can last two seconds or more, in a large church or cathedral from five to eight seconds. These sounds typically constitute at least 90% of what is heard by the audience, often much more than that if the listener is not seated close to the musicians. Unless and until these sounds can be accurately recreated, it is impossible to claim high fidelity for recordings and playback of concert music.

    Harmony means agreement. In life there is a dangerous notion that harmony is always desirable because harmony brings peace. Taken to its logical extreme it also means strict conformity to an arbitrary norm, stagnation, lack of innovation, a dead monolithic existence. It is only through dissent and diversity that invention and creativity are possible. The demand for complete harmony is the product of a tyrannical mind, infantilism which insists on obedience to its will. A stereotypical example is North Korea where you march when the government tells you to march, weep when it tells you to weep. This is also the essence of religion, conferring complete power to its priests over its adherents. The punishment for heresy ranges from ostracism to execution depending on the circumstances. It’s a good reason not to become a member of any of them, including Audiophile-ism. My motto in life; neither a follower nor a leader be. March to the beat of your own drum.

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