It is known that when it comes to paintings and sculpture, points exist “next to each other” in space, and differences occur in colors – everything is based on matter. Literature is a more complex subject in terms of parallelism – although several equal sentences cannot be presented at one time, there are many parallel threads that sometimes intertwine. When it comes to music – this is something that is a mystery to me and has several aspects:
Parallelism of sounds at the level of physics
It seems obvious – there are sounds of different colors, of different frequencies, and the musician takes care that they work according to his will, that is, that they either resonate together or occur independently. For me, it is a miracle that human hearing has such selective spectral resolution.
Parallelism and at the same time “symbiosis” of sounds (perception)
This parallelism, however, has one additional aspect concerning perception – not only can each sound be heard separately, but they also resonate together, giving a measurable aesthetic value. And it almost shocks me that the sounds occur together and separately at the same time.
Parallelism of melody with chords and rhythm
It is a matter of the structure of the piece but also of the sound. The composer feels what the final effect should look like, but can you understand how it is that in one time interval in one piece the basic frequencies of the melody notes, “tone packages” (chords) with, among others, percussion change in parallel?
Parallel melody lines
You can hear it in F. Chopin’s Nocturne op. 9 no. 1, in J.S. Bach’s polyphonies, and in Gregorian chants. When I first noticed it in my life, I felt like I was in space. Listening to the aforementioned nocturne for the first time, I noticed that my brain can analyze several “competing” melodies in parallel and simultaneously…
The brain supposedly thinks in parallel, but I am amazed by the fact that it also feels in parallel!
In mathematical terms, the matter of the image is simple – it is enough to define points on the plane. With music, mathematics is complicated – we have one numerical dimension in time, which is selected in the spectrum only at the level of perception and interpretation. Among other reasons, contrary to the wishes of Pythagoras, Leibniz or Hegel, mathematics will not encompass music. I believe that the indirect reason is that artificial intelligence “can” pretend to be a painter, but “can” not regale us with its musical compositions.
Not so simply music
I will only add that I am simplifying the matter of the structure of a musical piece very much, and for example I will give the avant-garde music of St Celfer (John MacDougall Parker), who disrupts the musical structure with almost every fragment and goes outside its framework, only to return to it after a while (in short). His works contain sounds that change color and harmony during the duration of the tone. What is ordered sometimes smoothly changes into chaos, only to change form to another after a while. Parallelism in his case is a multi-layered affair – what seems like a melody can become a chord and vice versa. I noticed this especially in the album shown below: