Post #2042983

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• @Cognessence@social.linux.pizza 2026-05-05 22:03

  Forgive a rambling expansion on that, but...where "two wrongs make a right" doesn't work in ethics, in music/sound it can describe a real perceptual effect of combining two elements that are individually unstable/“incorrect"/dissonant to produce a higher-order coherence. The auditory system often likes two unstable elements that become pleasing, if they create a pattern the brain can predict locally (even if globally “incorrect.”) "Rightness" in other basic examples is not in either tone individually, but in their interference pattern. An obvious one, but when two slightly detuned notes play together, they create that beating - a throb our ears perceive as rough. But add a third note whose beating frequency with one of them exactly cancels the beating with the other, and the roughness disappears. Two sources of acoustic ugliness literally subtract each other into smoothness. In equal temperament above that - if you take two tritone relationships and stack them as a dominant 7th chord (say, G7: G–B–D–F), the F and B are a tritone apart, and the G and D♭ (the substitute chord) share the same tritone. When you substitute one for the other, two harmonic "wrongs" - two pulling, unresolved tritones - collapse into a single, smooth resolution. I especially like this in throat singing, where overtones clash and then suddenly lock into an electric harmony. A heavily distorted guitar is a cascade of odd harmonics that have no clean relationship to the fundamental. But if you layer two massively detuned, distorted guitars, their individual dissonances interlock and create a roaring, oceanic texture that feels conventionally lush. It works on a structural level too - in phrasing, musical conversation, etc. I enjoy it when one voice in music is hyper-detailed, fragmented, over-articulated, and another smeared, sustained, under-articulated. Each alone may feel excessive or insufficient, but together they complete a perceptual spectrum. The listener integrates them into a single field where detail and continuity coexist.

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