Subject: RE: harmony vs. melody
From:
Don Firth
Date: 27 May 05 - 05:38 PM
When I was at the Cornish School of the Arts (a sort of conservatory—art, music, dance, drama) studying music during the Sixties, one of the courses I took was "The Physics of Music." Fascinating!
If you were to play, say, middle C on a flute, and then on a clarinet (or a guitar or a harp or banjo or ukulele) the fundamental note would be the same, but it's the overtones (harmonics) that make the difference. In addition to the fundamental note (in this case, middle C), they also produce a C an octave above, a G above that, another C two octaves above the fundamental, an E way up, and still other notes up in dog-whistle range. With a stringed instrument, you can also pick up sympathetic vibrations from other strings. Assuming your guitar (for example) is in tune. Play the 6th string (E), then quickly dampen it. You will probably hear the 1st string (also E) humming a bit.
Some overtones are stronger than others, and it is the relative strengths of these overtones that make a clarinet sound different from a flute, or a guitar sound different from a banjo. If you were to run the sound through electronics so you could filter out the overtones, the amazing thing is that, with no overtones, you would not be able to tell a guitar from a banjo or an oboe from a flute. You probably could tell a guitar from a flute, however, because the guitar tone would begin to die away after plucking the string, whereas the flute tone would sustain as long as one continued to blow—but not because the tones sound different! I saw this done on a Nova program on music some years ago.
This is one of the things that give a 12-string guitar such a sound of authority. The octave string reinforces the first and most powerful overtone.
The same thing happens with human voices. Your ear is sensitive enough to hear the overtones thrown by someone's vocal folds and either reinforced or suppressed by their mouth, nasal passages, and chest. That's how you can recognize voices immediately: "That's Joan Baez." "That's Ethel Merman." "That's the lady next door."
The most consonant (or pleasing to the ear) harmonies are other notes that are in the overtone series of a particular note. For example, the melody note you're singing is an E, and you chose to play a C chord on the guitar at that particular moment. The C chord consists of C, E, and G (with other strings "doubling" the C and the E). All the notes, including the one you are singing, are in the overtone series of the root note of the C chord.
But that doesn't mean you have to play only chords that have the melody note in them (as long as you do fairly often). Non-consonant notes add a little "lemon juice" or interest to a harmony.
Don Firth
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