But I don't know why you would expect inherent effects to be absent. Even if we are maximally generous and take at face value that many cultures don't care about harmony, the overall evidence still favors harmony because the cultures that don't care (at least according to the article you linked) were at most indifferent toward harmony and dissonance. If the preference were arbitrary, there ought to be as many cultures that actively prefer disharmony.
I'm still not satisfied with the claim that there are multiple cultures with a preference towards harmony [the way harmony is understood in western classical music theory] and no cultures with a preference towards dissonance [the way dissonance is understood in western classical music theory]. Extreme metal is very dissonant on purpose and while that is only a subculture, it is one that is pretty vigorous pretty much everywhere in the world. Jazz was the most popular genre in the developed world for a while and remained very popular for a while longer, and the sense of harmony in jazz is completely different from western classical music (i.e. judging by western classical music standards, it is very dissonant). Ultra Bra was an insanely popular pop band in Finland for the very brief period during which they were active, to the extent that with only four albums released they're still one of the top 20 best-selling Finnish bands of all time in Finland and the lyricist went on to become a MP and later a minister and the chairperson of her party with her momentum from the band — and they sounded like
this.
There are countless of cultures across the world whose traditional music is dissonant to a degree that would be highly unusual in western classical music, like
Japan,
Tunisia,
Turkey, basically as soon as you get away from the immediate influence of Central/Western European music tradition, you start running into stuff that sounds pretty spicy not just as a way to make certain parts of the song more dramatic, but all the time as a default setting. Even Eastern European music is somewhat like that, although it has more of a resemblance to western classical music than e.g. these three examples.
And the important thing here is that the distinction between harmony and dissonance is itself cultural. If I come up with an example song that conforms to western music rules and a different example that breaks those rules and then ask someone from an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe to rate them both, it might very well be the case that the hunter-gatherer prefers the song that conforms to
some rules over the song that doesn't conform to
any rules at all, but this does jackShiT to demonstrate that these rules in particular are superior to all the other ones that exist, none of which were included in the experiment.
At this point, we probably also need to address the elephant in the room, that is, white supremacism. Most of the early writing (academic and otherwise) on the objective qualities of music was specifically written to show that the music of white people was better than other music. Even nowadays, a lot of it still secretly has that same hypothesis going on in the background even if they don't say it out loud anymore (and some may not even consciously realize it themselves). There is a publishing bias against studies and articles that contradict the idea that there is something uniquely profound about western classical music. There's a great
video by Adam Neely that delves a lot deeper into this, but in summary, there is a thinner line than you might think between looking for objective ways to determine music quality while taking for granted the assumption that the things western classical music does are obviously good, and race realism.
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Topic: The Necro Wars (Read 356084 times)