thought it would be fun to post a more academic reading about music theory that lines up with dialectical materialism really well. i think it’s pretty readable, but if you have limited interest i would skip either to section 1.1 for a brief understanding of spectrogram analysis of overtone clusters, or 1.9 for the dialectical analysis of spectrograms. i don’t think it’s necessary to read section 2 or later unless you’re interested.

for a brief summary: what is sound? what makes one sonic event sound different than another? ranging from different instruments, to the noise of construction work, to the beeps on your electronics. the answer lies in overtones: every pitch that you listen to isn’t just one pitch, but actually a whole host of pitches that form an organic or dialectical system.

the pitch that you actually hear (referred to as the "fundamental pitch) is the bottom-most pitch, with all other pitches being layered on top with higher frequencies. what makes sounds sound different from each other is different combinations or relative dominance of overtones over the fundamental pitch (as well as some other variables, this is an oversimplification). for example, traditional pitches that you might play on any instrument display what’s called the harmonic series over the fundamental: an octave above, then a fifth above, then a fourth above, then a third above, etc etc. what you might call unpitched noise might have hundreds of pitches over the fundamental, most of them not fitting with the harmonic series.

spectrograms allow you to see what overtones are above the fundamental, their strength relative to each other and the fundamental, and other important variables that help to determine or describe timbre differences. spectrogram analysis is therefore the analysis of how and why different sounds sound differently from each other, and is the object of the article. in her analysis, and by using robert cogan’s new images of musical sound as a starting point (which i might also post a summary of sometime, is good), the author inadvertently uses dialectical oppositions in order to describe different components of timbre and their material relation to overtones. this begins in paragraph 1.9, with lots of good sonic examples.

these oppositions are really what’s interesting to me. bright/dark, pure/noisy, full/hollow, etc. not just that they are things that people experience when they listen to sound, but also that they have very specific physical attributes that can be measured and understood, when timbre has historically been a somewhat metaphysical field of music theory. you can experiment with the overtone series/cluster of your own voice (or any other sound, really) by using the free trial of a program like vocevista.

there are a lot more ways to apply diamat to music, both in terms of its sound, but also its construction and production, but i find this a particularly interesting way. like a lot of sociology that inadvertently pulls from marx, it’s funny that dialectics is featured so prominently here without any mention of it (cogan goes no farther than hegel, hahahaha). hope this is interesting to some of you.