Nature

One can hardly look for universals in music, and then propose a provisional inventory, without questioning their naturalness. Putting aside spatial and temporal distances, archetypes seem to be the only beings that reproduce themselves by spontaneous generation. But the multiple meanings of the word nature, and the disrepute they have caused, lead us to point out at least a few semantic markers. One example makes the ambiguity of the term clear: for centuries it was believed that music was opposed to noise by essentially acoustic criteria, like art to nature. The quality of the sound alone would either have given it cultural dignity or thrown it into the chaos of noise. The whole of the Middle Ages spent its time thinking about the proportions of intervals, using only the scientific tool of the monochord inherited from Pythagoras. Of the features that characterised the rapidly developing polyphony, the accuracy of intervals was probably not the most significant. These had had much more relevance in a context of purely melodic modality. But the monochord had become a habit, and besides, no other tool was available. The progress of acoustics from the seventeenth century onwards radicalised the difference between “musical” sounds, with a fundamental and harmonic partials, and inharmonic sounds, whose partials are not in simple relation to the frequencies of a fundamental.