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4.1.8
Cutural Construction? No. Use Simple Ratios of Frequencies to Construct Scales
Substantial research findings show that, if you try to create music using the idea of "cultural construction," scales that have no tones in relationships of simple frequency ratios, your brain stops recognizing “musical” sound and hears chaos. Like the static you get when you move your analog radio dial between stations.
Infants respond to changes in pairs of tones only if the tones are related by small integer, simple frequency ratios—the tones that emerge from the harmonic series. Tones not related by simple frequency ratios simply do not elicit responses from babies. This strongly indicates that the human brain has a naturally-selected specialization for simple frequency ratios—that these preferences are not cultural constructs.
Not only that, infants remember scale tones when the intervals of the scale are of unequal size, compared with scales having intervals of equal size. This is consistent with the unequal-interval scales that emerge from the harmonic series. As you’ll see in Chapter 5, most scales used commonly worldwide have only five to seven different tones (i.e., not including the second octave note), which are unequally spaced.
Infants also have difficulty resolving tones that are close together. Tones spaced close together are not related by simple frequency ratios.
To summarize, your brain can make sense of, and prefers, scales of non-random but unequally-spaced tones—pitches related to each other in simple multiples or simple fractions of a fundamental frequency.