![]() ![]() This is not very hard to understand if you think about the logarithmic curve of the way partials are laid out. ![]() Basically, the lower a note is registrally, the more likely you are to perceive it as important. There is one more factor, and this has to do with the physics of sound. So to summarize all of this, when you hear a 1-5 relationship in music, it reinforces the 1 as being strong and gives it more tonal gravity. Even in music that rejects tonality, this relationship is abundant, because it is so fundamental to the way we hear and perceive music, it is nearly impossible to avoid. But this is the beginning kernel of explaining why 5 leads to 1 in tonal music. So for all practical purposes, the 5th (which is the 3rd partial, don't want to cause confusion) is the only partial worth worrying about. You can theoretically do this with other partials, not just the 5th, but as the partial number goes up, the strength of that partial goes down drastically. The G is generated from the C, therefore reinforces it as being a strong note. Is it the root of a triad? The 7th of a dim7 chord? A pitch in some ordering of a 12 tone row? However if we play a C-G dyad, it is clear that C is the important note, because we are giving it some context. So for instance, if you play the note C on a piano, it is a little ambiguous what the function of the note is. The fifth is generated through playing the root, and provides clarity of context. So every time you hear a pitch, there is an inherent relationship, of a weaker 5th and a stronger root. The most prominent harmonic of any pitch other than the octave (which would be the same pitch class) is the fifth. Duration is a bit more tricky, but the shortest most concise explanation I can give, is that the longer a note is held and/or the more often it is repeated, the stronger we feel it as being an important note. The things that contribute to mass in a tonal sense are intensity (or volume) and duration. The larger the "mass" of a pitch, the more we feel its gravity. Think of tonal gravity as being analogous to real gravity. There are a couple of reasons why we feel it. So obviously this can get a bit confusing as to why we feel the tonal gravity of certain notes and not others. Do this process again and it becomes mixolydian, then dorian, then aeolean, then phygian, and finally locrian. For ease of explanation, let's take a Lydian mode with all white notes (the most common one anyway): Move the tonic note up a fifth, and if you use the same collection of notes, it becomes ionian mode, or the diatonic scale. Lydian is just the one where the first note in the collection is the tonic note of the scale. Well first of all, Lydian mode is not the only mode based on stacked 5ths.
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