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My knowledge about music theory is scant (read: vanishingly little) but I often wonder about the types of music I like which have a bluesy sound, with the voices sliding up or down, not hitting the standard pitches.

I'm thinking of Amos Lee or Darrell Scott or even Liam O Maonlai doing this bluesy number called "Work Song" (funny to hear these Irish/Scottish singers sounding like they were on Beale Street!)

Very much worth the clicks.

Or anything with a slide guitar/dobro.

What is it that makes it sound --- I don't know. It melts my soul or something.

It sure can't be autotuned, can it!??

I took some theory in college a LONG time ago, so I'm far from an expert. The ideas behind music theory and counterpoint are that certain approaches to songwriting and melody and harmony produce 'better' music, i.e., a dissonant chord resolving to a consonant chord that is pleasing to the listener.

Part of the problem, nowadays, is what is pleasing to one person is not necessarily pleasing to a different person. Some people love classical but hate punk, some people love punk but hate jazz, some people love jazz but hate country, and some people love country and hate world music, and some people love world music and hate polkas.

All of that said, a study of music theory is (in my opinion) time well-spent insofar as it helps the soul with its unyielding query of "why." Your mileage may vary.

Soul can’t be autotuned, nor can the slight imperfections that distinguish a human performance from a mechanical one.

If you want to understand the physics of music, the place to start is by looking at the overtone series, and the relationships of frequencies produced by it. The relationships between notes on a diatonic scale can be written in whole-number fractions.

A note vs. its octave is a 1:2 relationship. A note vs. its fifth is a 3:2 relationship; vs. its fourth, 4:3; and so on. It is the closeness of the relationships which creates a consonant, or peaceful/at rest sound.

In physical terms, consonance is inverse to the number of times each tone has to cycle before they start at the origin (zero point on the y-axis of their sine waves) together a second time. One cycle = same note. Two cycles = octave. Three cycles = fifth. And so on.

So yes, all the notes on a diatonic scale are multiples of the original frequency, brought down (by halving frequencies repeatedly) to the same octave.

Ooh, I know the answer to this one.

Ok, as some others on the thread have noted, we get all the notes in our musical scale from something called harmonic overtones, which are these extra notes that are also playing whenever you hit a note on a stringed instrument like a guitar or piano. So if you play a guitar string open (not pressing down on any of the frets on the neck), you get the loudest note, which is the sound of the whole length of the string vibrating, but you also get a quieter note that is the same as if only half the string was vibrating. You’ll also get an even quieter note that is the same as 1/3 of the string vibrating, then 1/4, etc, on to infinity.

So our 12 musical notes are made up of those “overtones” and take advantage of the natural harmonies that occur between them. The funny thing is, though, some overtones in the sequence do not occur exactly on one note or the other of our musical scale, but are actually between two of the notes. This is because when we made our musical scale we didn’t put our notes EXACTLY where the overtones were, but just roughly where they were, because if you put them exactly on the overtones, then that instrument only sounds good playing in a single key of music. So arrange a keyboard to play exactly in the key of C and it will be off key if you try to play it in the key of F. So we “tempered” the tunings by changing them to be slightly out of tune in every key, but not dramatically so in any particular key.

Now the consequence of this tempered tuning is what you are noticing with blues music, jazz, etc. There are a couple overtones that are kind of important that quite match up with the musical scale anymore, because we of how we tuned the instruments. However, you can still play them if you just use some tricks. So for a guitar player to play those overtones, they bend the string a little while playing, which makes it very slightly out of tune and allows them to reach that missing overtone. A singer can just slide their voice off the normal scale and find it. For a keyboard player, we can’t do either of those things, but we can play the key above the missing tone and the key below the missing tone at the same time, or slide from one to the other, and get some approximation of that “blue note” as they are called.