ABSTRACT
When a piece of music is played, what the listener hears is not really a large number of unconnected sounds, but rather an interweaving of melodic lines that are clearly separable and relatively independent one from the other within the musical context. If, of all the theoretically possible adjectives, it was precisely these that were chosen to designate certain zones of the musical scale, there must be a reason. The relation of tonal identity that connects all the even-numbered notes and all the odd-numbered notes does not produce a phenomenal unification because the two factors that are at odds with it are stronger than it. These factors are: the tonal proximity between the notes and temporal proximity, which binds each note equally to the one immediately before and the one immediately after it. The joint action of tonal proximity and temporal proximity mean that there is no unification among the notes that are the same as one another.
