Personal Reflection on Auditory Presentation

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Last week, our Smells and Bells class had an auditory showcase, where a few students taught the class about the wonder of sound. They brought music instruments, crazy videos of wacky people sounding out the word “minimum”, and a harp player to showcase her talents.
As someone who is not very well versed (ha) in anything music or sound oriented, much of the presentation was thought provoking and fascinating. Never had I thought of how the scale was first musically arranged.  I had assumed it was based off frequency or pitch, but never had I considered that the number of notes and octaves themselves are arbitrary. In other places around the world, they do not use the same 12 note-Western style that is mostly taught in most of Europe and America. In the Middle East, there are tempered scale systems dividing into 53 and in Southern India a scale split into 72 notes. Many other scales using different pitches exist as well – pentatonic, Hejaz scale, Saba scale (just to name a few). I never realized how much depth the history and culture of music contained. Music is a lot less rigid than I had originally understood.
Branching off from my originally perceived rigidity of music, it led me to ponder about the importance of preserving the knowledge of different scales across the world. While there are a lot of genres and one can make with the common Western-Traditional-Scale, one will never truly experience the originality and freshness of a song composed of a “foreign” scale if they were to completely be replaced by the western traditional scale. There are perhaps notes, note combinations, music – that many will never be able to listen or hear if not for the sound of a non-traditional scale.

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