One thing that stands out to me about choral music is how much smoother it makes dissonance sound. Eric Whitacre is one of the most popular living composers of choral music and he routinely uses huge tone clusters in his works. When sung by a choir, his pieces sound dreamy and atmospheric, but if you were to play them on the piano they would be much more challenging to listen to. I have a theory that choral music tends to be sidelined by more "serious" classical music for precisely this reason.

As an addendum, for anyone interested in choral music I highly recommend listening to Caroline Shaw. She is among the most interesting new voices in the genre. Her piece Partita for 8 Voices [1] won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. For a somewhat more accessible piece I also really like Its Motion Keeps [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDVMtnaB28E

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT1PqR97urc

▲

lucyjojo 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

dissonance is a function of the instrument (and the notes -- and other stuff), not only the notes.

so notes that are dissonant on piano are not necessarily dissonant with human voices.

a big reason for that is apparently overtone matching (and i guess that because of formants/resonant cavities of the human vocal tract, there must be a lot of matching overtones in more cases, maybe? i wonder if there is a youtube vid about that, there must be...)

▲

impossiblefork 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I wouldn't say overtone matching, but equal temperament leads to chords that sound terrible.

That's the comprise you get from trying to play with fixed notes even though you actually care about ratios.

▲

lucyjojo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

tldr:

big chances it does not make dissonance "smoother", but that the sound is less dissonant in the first place.

▲

kepeko 3 days ago | parent [-]

I wonder if human singer instinctively chooses another note, that is not 100% same frequency as in piano. You know, there are always imperfections in piano tuning even if it's done in today's standard way(all intervals are not perfect). I'm not a piano tuner but this is my understanding. Possibly trained singers can sing in a better harmony somewhere where piano gets it (very) slightly wrong?

▲

simonask 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not (just) instinctive. Good choral singers adjust their tuning purposefully to match the overtones of the harmony.

For example, if you are on the fifth in the chord, you adjust the tone slightly up. If you are on the major third, slightly down. Minor third, slightly up. These rules are consciously applied by choral singers, and are even genre-defining for things like barbershop.

▲

lucyjojo 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

because pianos are real physical things, high and low strings have overtones that do not match the harmonics (and in different ways), so for stuff to "sound good" piano tuners tune on overtones and not fundamentals.

on a more fundamental level our perception of pitch (the musical psychoacoustic thing) also vary with loudness and frequency (physical reality)...

add to that, that at low frequencies we have difficulties tracking the pitch in the first place (so we rely on overtones/harmonics) -- which makes it even more important to tune on evertone (because our heads can recreate/track the note through psychoacoustic effects... so we will ear it "nice" when without the overtones we would be lost)

funny extra fact, our ears are cavities with resonances and distortions... (some musicians exploit that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryanne_Amacher )

i might be wrong on some points since i starting learning about music 2 years ago as a hobby but i think it is mostly correct. the whole thing is fascinating.

▲

bubblyworld 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I suspect there's something to this. I find with guitar you can do something similar if you tune by ear, getting the strings to resonate with each other rather than perfectly matching a tuner. To my ears it produces a richer sound.

	▲	lucyjojo 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		yes these are called sweetened tunings. apparently it's often done in pro recorded music. my peterson tuner actually has these tunings embedded inside. https://www.petersontuners.com/products/strobostomphd/

▲

aworks 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Caroline Shaw is one of my favorite contemporary composers, despite her mostly writing for voice.

Smoothing out the dissonance may be a bug, not a feature. I live for timbre and new sounds. Choral music can have the feel of overly polished rocks.

And funnily enough, as I wrote this, music of Bernard Parmegiani started playing. This gave me a (mostly) good jolt, following the more atmospheric music of Alan Hovhaness.