Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
Not so deep as far as I'm concerned. See above. 
And what about the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" they played melodies. |
What struck me upon watching "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" was the remarkable coincidence that intelligent life from another star system used the same tonal system as Western music.
The octave is universal. It's simply the nature of the mathematics that if you divide a frequency by a certain amount you end up with the same note at a higher pitch, but each culture divides that octave differently. People in the Western world have been exposed to the 12-tone scale for so long it seems only natural, but other cultures have traditionally divided the octave differently. Traditional Japanese music uses, I believe, a 5-tone scale, while traditional Indian music (like that of Ravi Shankar) uses a 17-note scale.