This brief is an excerpt from my "Music Theory Iceberg" video, which you can watch completely here:
Brief edited by Rob Goorney
Deutsch's scale illusion EXPLAINED
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Deutsch’s scale illusion EXPLAINED
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This was delightful, educational, calming and entertaining. Thanks!
The proximity of the notes also contribute to the effect. If we take a melody countermelody pair with more leaps in them and alternate between the two lines to create two lines, it’s possible we won’t get the same effect as strongly.
I didn’t hear a third melody
skill issue
Were you wearing headphones?
Tchaikovsky played with this kind of thing. In the last movement of the sixth symphony, the melody and harmony lines alternate between the first and second violins. Also, in some of the horn lines (not sure which piece) he has horns do octave jumps in opposite directions, so the same notes an octave appart a both being played all the time.
That’s exactly what I thought about, didn’t know it had a name.
Hah! – I see you also fell into David’s trap … I mean internet rabbit hole … and Tchaikovsky’s vehement argument with the conductor of the premiere about the musical layout between 1st & 2nd violins – which were left/right separated in 19th century stages. Cool! .😎
@Franz Schmidt, except it isn’t just between 1st and 2nd violins that you get the division of melody and harmony – he also does the same thing at the same time between violas and cellos. Unless you order your string players really weirdly as Violin 1, Viola, Violin 2, Cello (or Violin 1, Cello, Violin 2, Viola), which simply never happened, at least one pair of instruments (normally viola and cello) will be next to each other – so with Tchaikovsky, it’s not the spatial separation that is the most important thing
Excellent explanation! I’ve got to go get my headphones now and try it again.
This is a cool phenomenon…I often hear this happening when listening to Steve Reich and following the score…I always called them collateral melodies but it’s the same as the Deutsche illusion…one interesting thing I noticed though, the melody on the right ear, sounds like it could be the answer, or consequent to the opening left ear melody, the call, or antecedent…really cool
Metallica did a lot of harmonizing between guitars like this but more B-A’s , I dig it, Rock on.
I was listening, not watching the notation. He played the left ear’s piano line. Then he played the right ear’s piano line. Then, in the pause before he played them both back together, I was replaying the piano in my mind. It was soooo weird… I heard both lines combined, and the combined top line clearly, as the melody. And then I misremembered that top line melody as being what was earlier played into my left ear, the first ear. In that short time, I couldn’t clearly hear/separate the contour of the combined harmony line, the lower line, but the top line was so obvious, in my mental playback, that I assumed it was the first thing I’d heard in the video. I didn’t even know our brains could do hear 2 simple (i.e. memorable, I guess?) lines of identically timed and timbre notes consecutively, 1 in each ear, and then our minds can stitch the 2 lines and stack them together so that we hear a chord melody. In hindsight, it’s obvious that we can do that, because we always put together the signals from our left and right ears all day long. I never thought of trying to use that ability in this way, or maybe even to try to train it to work with more complex, or less related, musical lines. That’s cool.
The weirder part was, apparently, when my brain stitched the two lines together, it changed my memory so that I misremembered the top line melody as being the tune that was played, at the beginning, into my left ear. Next, when the video played both lines stacked together, I thought, “I don’t hear a new melody. I still hear the first line as being the melody. ” Then I wondered why you put the higher note of each pair in the left ear, and the lower note in the right ear, and how you expected that to cause an illusion that would make a new melody? Then the video looped, and you played the left ear again, and it started with an upwards interval, and th… WHAT?!! It starts upwards?! Is this a trick, a new video?
But nope. That was stunning, like jaw droppingly so.🤣
I guess also, when using parallax for distance measurements, and for stereo hearing, the time difference between the two ears is miniscule… not like 15 seconds🤣. And then, the info our brains usually stitch together, the separate left and right ear signals, are usually highly correlated. This example is correlated in many ways… but not as much as usual, and separated by soooo much time. IDK how to explain this ability fully, but I guess we can train it. Probably some people have a more active auditory imagination. I knew a guy who had a head radio going on much of the time. Which was a little annoying, because life cues were suggesting new songs, so he’d sing some signature riff, vocal, or whatever, like 5 to 10 per minute could pop up. Then so.etimes I swear he was just noodling🤣
Gotta love that editing tho
I’m upset that I repeat both lines over and over again but can’t break the illusion
I bet it would still work fairly well if the timbres are different. The melodies would be “hocketed,” but I bet they’d still be comprehensible.
This is so fascinating
Look at Handel in Messiah. Between the voice parts he keeps swapping the melodic line making the listeners believe each Hallelujah is getting higher but really the soprano goes down in pitch to a harmony line while the tenor goes up in pitch on the melody, et c. A very similar illusion. And Handel shall reign for ever and ever
I think this effect was used by Vivaldi on the rv580 2nd movement and it is related to the ‘third note’ effect, used by Bach organ works, if I remember well.
This is all over 1980’s era King Crimson, between Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew’s intertwining guitar parts. Thats just the beginning of what those gents did with guitar patterns, but I digress…
This is my favorite thing in what I know about theory
Jun Senoue (composer for the Sonic series) utilizes this trick a lot for his guitar-centric tracks, it’s really cool
What would we consider the difference between this effect and dissonance?
Melody is that which sounds sharper and stronger than the rest of the harmonic notes. I didn’t know that a melody was now called a “scale” and that this psychoacoustic property of directing attention to the higher registers, which are stronger, is the “German scale”; and that, at the conjunction of all this, he calls it “illusion.” I prefer to use the minimum of concepts; “melodic psychoacoustics.”
So this is just harmony with extra steps?