Whenever I hear someone play an instrument, I can always tell when they’ve played the wrong note even if it’s my first time hearing it, why is that?
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How does the audience in [this clip](https://youtu.be/ne6tB2KiZuk?si=f-KerXUwbww4JI4o) know the next note to sing when they were never given the whole scale?
He started with only two notes that he demonstrated for the audience, and yet they are able to intuitively grasp which pitch to sing for each successive note higher or lower in the scale. Basically he gave them the ratio between the first two notes. Once the audience understood that ratio, they can use the same ratio to generate each successive note up or down.
A similar thing is happening when we hear a “wrong note” in a piece of music. Basically, the wrong note doesn’t follow the pattern that has been established by the song (ratio between notes in a scale or key), and we can hear that it doesn’t fit.
Being this sensitive to music may indicate you have perfect pitch.
People with it can tell exactly what notes they’re hearing even with complex chords.
So, if something is off they instantly know.
Some people think it seems like a super power but I think it sounds like a horrible way to go through life. There’s a lot of intentional slop in music that sounds good but I guess to those with perfect pitch it’s grating.
Anyway, look into it and see if you have it.
Have you seen the viral post about [the order of adjectives in English?](https://twitter.com/MattAndersonNYT/status/772002757222002688) It’s been floating around a while.
It’s an example of an ironclad rule in English that every native speaker follows, but hardly anyone actually knows (well, up until 2016 when that meme started going around).
Music works the same way. There are rules — or maybe we should say expectations —that music follows. When something violates those expectations, it sounds wrong to us, *even if we can’t name what we were expecting.*
Same thing happens in film, storytelling, design and other arts. There are conventions we have come to expect, but we don’t even recognize that we’re expecting them. We just know something is off when you break the rules, even if we can’t say what it is.
Your ears are “trained” from birth to recognize when a note or “tone” sounds off. You’re exposed to all sorts of sounds throughout your life. Music, specifically has been governed by a set of “rules” (more accurately suggestions) for a very, very long time and so we get used to what sounds “good” and what sounds “wrong.” This is all purely subjective. The concept of music theory allows us to understand how certain tones work with some other tones.
Keep in mind, there are a ton of bands or artists that make a career using “wrong” notes. (I hate to use the word “wrong” because again, music is completely subjective so nothing is truly “wrong.”) If you’re an avid listener of pop music, then jazz might be a bit off putting to you because of the different uses of chord voicings and harmonies for example.
I’ve studied music extensively throughout my life so if you want a more complex response I’d be happy to elaborate on more specific questions that you have. This is just the eli5 version.
We are, at our core, extremely advanced pattern recognition software running on the simultaneously best and worst wetware available
For those who are interested … Robert Greenberg’s lecture series introducing the basic theory of Western classical music is really entertaining and good, imho.
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-the-fundamentals-of-music
Just from having studied a few instruments I knew maybe 75% of it, but in bits and pieces. Having it all pulled together and presented in coherent way was a brain and ear-opener for me. Plus: it’s currently on sale.
Others have mentioned that you’re recognizing patterns that your brain has been used to hearing since birth – if you grew up listening to western music you’re likely used to listening to music based on the influence of Beethoven and other major classical musicians, who established standards for tuning instruments so that a work performed in Leipzig would theoretically sound the same when it was performed in Paris or London. Musical notation has been around since Ancient times – Aristotle described the math behind musical scales. But ancient notation was relative to an arbitrary starting note – the lyre or other instrument had one string tuned to a pleasant pitch, then the rest of the strings were tuned relative to the first string. There was no ancient canonical equivalent to the modern standard of tuning an A to 440 Hz.
One of the reasons that traditional Japanese music or music from other non-western traditions sounds odd to Western ears is that it doesn’t always follow the same rules for tuning and chords. It breaks the rules you’ve grown up with, so the pattern recognition parts of your brain get surprised by notes that seem out of place
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