![]() ![]() Photo: Nina WesterveltĪt a moment when genders, as we’ve known them for eons, are beginning to proliferate-a moment when, uh, men and women are asking that different pronouns be attached to them, a moment when adhering to being cis-gender can seem dully unadventurous-a special stage gift has arrived tied with a figurative red ribbon. You can also submit answers by post to: The Last Word, New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES.Justin Vivian Bond, Anthony Roth Costanzo in Only an Octave Apart. New Scientist Ltd retains total editorial control over the published content and reserves all rights to reuse question and answer material that has been submitted by readers in any medium or in any format. Please include a postal address, daytime telephone number and email address. We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. To answer this question – or ask a new one – email should be scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena, and both questions and answers should be concise. With sound, each doubling of the frequency seems like the addition of an equal interval. Many aspects of human sensory perception are logarithmic, enabling us to perceive stimuli over a very wide range. This enables us to differentiate which instruments are playing the same note. The same note played on a bassoon or piano, say, will provide different qualities and volumes of overtones, depending on the characteristics of the instrument, what it is made of and the technique of the player. So we hear the cello’s bass C and can tell that it is a cello. These overtones become progressively weaker as they go higher. The sound also contains a C one octave higher, a G a fifth higher than that, a C two octaves higher and many more overtones and dissonances reaching eventually beyond the range of the human ear. We hear this low C note as the strongest note, but it has a series of harmonic overtones. ![]() Take the note played by the bottom string of the cello. It could be that grouping pitch cyclically into octaves isn’t innate, but is culturally learned through the kinds of music we hear. ![]() Traditional Tsimané music usually only involves the playing of a single note at a time. The Tsimané people in Bolivia, for example, don’t perceive a similarity between the same notes in different octaves. Since the brain creates pitch perception based on grouping harmonically related sounds, it isn’t surprising that we perceive related notes similarly. As such, these notes share a unique mathematical relationship with each other that they don’t share with other notes. ![]() The same notes in different octaves are harmonically related: a harmonic series based on a low “C” note contains the frequencies of every higher C. Pitch perception allows us to focus on a conversation in a noisy environment, for example. This grouping helps the brain to solve the “binding” problem: the challenge to put deconstructed sensory pieces back together. This helps us make sense of the flood of sounds around us, because many natural objects create sounds that are harmonically related. In essence, pitch is the brain’s way of grouping harmonically related sounds. Pitch is only perceived when a sound has a single frequency or evenly spaced frequency bands and periodic waves. We can distinguish if this sound is high or low, but we can’t assign it a musical note. We perceive some sounds as having no pitch – a knock on a door, for example. Pitch – how high or low a note sounds – is also the result of our brain’s analysis, but unlike directionality, pitch doesn’t exist in the environment. We perceive sound as coming from a specific direction, which is the result of complex neural computations rather than what the cochlea in our ear directly picks up. Sound exists only as a wave with an amplitude and frequency. “The sounds we perceive are our brain’s interpretation rather than an exact representation of the sounds around us” Our sensory organs pick up a range of stimuli from the environment around us, but what we actually perceive is our brain’s interpretation rather than an exact representation of what surrounds us. I have no musical training or skill, and accept that someone who does will label them as the same note, but that is a matter of nomenclature, not an indication that they are the same note. I hear two notes an octave apart as different notes. ![]()
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