i.e. – Would octaves even behave the same in a high-pressure ammonia-rich atmosphere? By extension would alien music necessarily sound harmonious to us if we encountered it?
In: 6
Musical notes that sound consonant are universal.
An octave is a ratio of 2:1, so the peaks of the amplitude of each frequency will always line up perfectly. The medium does not matter, the ratio remains the same.
Sounds are physical in nature.
So a perfect fifth is the second most consonant ratio – that’s 3:2.
Half of an octave is the square root of 2 – 1.41/1. There’s no easy ratio there. As it happens, the resulting ratio is a tritone – quite dissonant.
Something to understand is that while pure musical ratios are universal, our western system of dividing an octave in to 12 equal ratios is not universal. It is a very good approximation that makes the most consonant ratios sound good enough to our ears, but it is a compromise (If you’re interested in this I can point you down a very interesting rabbit hole). If you’re vaguely curious as to how music may sound that isn’t composed in the 12EDO system we use in most of the world, look up Sevish – he makes microtonal music in many different scales. It’s very different, but he does a good job making music that still sounds musical, but is also rather more alien to what we’re used to. And one thing that his music can do that most of our music does not is have shifts in color that are outside of the norm of a simple key change. It’s really neat!
In other cultures they may use different scales and tuning systems… But the pentatonic major/minor scales are very nearly universal across music on earth. And I would be quite willing to bet that in alien cultures, they are probably quite common too.
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