ABSTRACT
The study of musical sound in the West began with Pythagoras (ca. 570–497 B.C.) over twenty-five hundred years ago. Musicians' bodies interact with instruments to create vibrations that travel through the air. Music intrinsically involves qualitative experiences of the brain and body and its meaning depends on the social and cultural context that relates sound to experience. Although the perception of pitch and consonance are among the oldest topics in Western science, they are still areas of active investigation. Music–like all sound–is made up of waves. Complex sound waves, such as those made by vibrating strings or human voices, generally consist of a fundamental frequency, plus a number of other frequencies called harmonics, or overtones. A number of authors have suggested that the complexity of musical sound sequences implies the existence of a set of rules that govern musical structure, parallel to the rules of language. The most universal and widely studied characteristics of musical structure are tonality and metricality.
