For example, if I played a song really, really slowly. Say, one note per hour, I doubt people would be able to recognize it as music and have the same chemical, physical, and emotional response than if it were played “normally”. When does music become just sound and vice versa?
**Have there been any experiments on how slow music can be before we stop “feeling” the music?**
In: Other
The simplest answer is when you perceive enough of a pattern to what you are hearing to make what has happened to be familiar and to be able to have some idea of how it will continue. Another post mentioned a performance of “As Slow as Possible” being done on an organ in Germany. This would fit, not because you can perceive the changes in the melodic line as music, but you will hear the ongoing sounds as a drone. Listening to anything that repeats, with or without some variation, will start to sound like music when the makeup of the repeating pattern becomes clear.
RadioLab had an episode where they talked about the premier of “The Rite of Spring” which used chords that didn’t fit in the tonal vocabulary of the day. Most of the audience didn’t enjoy the piece, and legend has it that a duel was fought over whether it could be called music the next day. Polychords are commonly used in music, both classical and popular, today and people don’t have the reaction. They talked about how the unfamiliar sounds caused the tension reaction, but now that it is just another tool, people don’t react the same.
Latest Answers