Significance of tone

Liberation of Integration, Universality and Concord (Part #22)

All sound is composed of a complex of oscillations of a certain frequency (which determines the wavelength). Tones are characterized by four attributes revealed in their oscillatory wave form:

(a) Pitch, or high-low aspect, is a direct product of oscillatory frequency.
(b) Timbre (tone colour) is a product of the total complement of simultaneous motions enacted by any medium during its oscillation.
(c) Loudness is a product of the intensity of that motion; an eight-level continuum from pianissimo to fortissimo is used.
(d) Duration is the length of time that a tone persists.

Most musical tones differ from an ideal single oscillatory wave form. Any material undergoing oscillation imposes its own characteristic oscillations on the fundamental oscillation. The material would probably oscillate in parts as well as a whole. These partial wave forms bear harmonic relationships to the foundational motion that are expressible as simple integer frequency ratios of 1:2, 3:4, etc. One way of expressing this is to say that half the body (e.g. a stretched string) is oscillating at a frequency twice as great as the whole; a third of it is oscillating at a frequency three times greater, etc. Tones are in practice composites of such 'overtones' which are ignored by the untrained car. It is however the presence or absence of overtones and their relative intensities that determine the timbre of any tone.

Tone is primarily characterized by pitch, or frequency of oscillation. Man's aural perception of pitch is confined within a span of roughly 15 to 18,000 cycles per second, with 440 cycles per second having been adopted as the middle point on the keyboard. It is now useful to ask the question what is the frequency range of psycho-social event-pair patterns to which man is sensible? What are the 'tones' he can detect?

Clearly there are some event cycles whose frequency is so low that man cannot be directly sensitive to their cyclic nature. Detecting the cyclicity of such phenomena is anal;ogous to detecting the curvature of the earth's surface. The cycle of a human 'generation' is barely perceptible as such, and even a year or a month are long cycles to many. At the other extreme, one indicator is the period of seconds associated with fast conversational repartee. Even more rapid would be the mind 'experiments' of protagonists in any game or fight in which each runs through the action options open to him and the probable responses of the adversary (e.g. chess, fencing, business negotiation, etc). Cellular processes in man are however beyond the range of his sensitivity.

In this light is it possible that psycho-social functions are each associated with a characteristic event cycle frequency? And, when such functions are activated in a particular case, is this frequency accompanied by the presence of harmonic frequencies, namely associated functions? Before clarifying these possibilities, it is necessary to consider the whole question of harmony as it has been elaborated for music.