ABSTRACT
Introduction: The Roots of Who We Become
I begin the chapter with the story about how I first became fascinated by music, and how this led to a music career in which I developed a particularly facile ability to manipulate line (melody). One important conclusion from this journey was learning how to manipulate consonance and dissonance over the course of a theatrical journey, the ultimate subject of this chapter.
The Evolution of Line
We pick up our story once again with advances of our anatomically modern Homo sapiens ancestors about 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. We consider the earliest evidence of human art, a major leap forward that accompanied the migration of humans all over the planet. We consider the difficulties of precisely determining the origins of music and its relationship to ritual, but cannot overlook obvious connections.
Consonance and Dissonance
The discovery of flutes in this period points to the growing human understanding of the influence that consonance and dissonance would increasingly have in music. We begin by describing consonance and considering how the nervous system processes it as a temporal phenomenon. We then proceed to describing dissonance, and consider the unique way the nervous system processes it. Finally, we consider how the brain processes consonance and dissonance.
Consonance and Dissonance in Theatre
In the final section, we consider how we use consonance and dissonance in theatre to tell our stories and manipulate the emotional and attentive states of our audience. We pay particular attention to how we use consonance and dissonance linearly, in melody, and simultaneously, in textures, a subset of which is harmony.
Conclusion: Consonance and Dissonance in Time
In the conclusion we remind our audience of the temporal characteristics of consonance and dissonance, ensuring that we have not lost the opening premise of this book, that sound and music are primarily temporal phenomena. We quickly review the chapter, and make promises about what lies ahead.
