The Hardwired Modal Archetype

Mode and rhythm are two complementary and inseparable features of music. Modality is brought to life by rhythm, which distinguishes its areas, exploits its potential, and energizes the evocative power of its unequal intervals. I believe humans may have an innate archetype for mode-rhythm interaction which is not learned, but discovered upon dealing with music through either education or experimentation, during which time nonsensical gestures are gradually pruned. This is why we may be impressed with a "self taught" genius, as we are simultaneously awed by the uniqueness of the individual's discovery (and therefore our humbling inability to come up with the same thing ourselves) and gratified by how the solution somehow just "works" on a subconscious level.

Several aspects of existing modal music support this notion:

1. While there are indeed many modes and tuning systems in the musics of the world, step intervals are widely recognizable across traditions, indicating that there is some innate threshold to what constitutes a step. The church modes of European music, the Indonesian modes (including pelog), the Arabic modes, and the Hindustani modes constituting the pitch set of the ragas all have 7 notes, unequally spaced by widely recognizable steps over and octave. Furthermore, the pentatonic modes existing in many cultures, whether seen as subsets of other modes, products of the harmonic series or derived in some other way, generally maintain step size in groups of notes that are similarly widely recognized. It is, therefore, quite rare to see
pitches as part of a set used in any music that are spaced particularly far apart, or that there would be any more than 7 notes used within an octave at any given time (momentary use of alternative pitches, such as sharped or flatted notes would not count to contradict the 7 note maximum, as they can be explained either as expressive variation or a complex modal modulation - such exceptions are sometimes articulated in existing theoretical documentation).

2. While stylistic variety among world musics is abundant, some features of modal music have analogs in other traditions. For example, ornamental gestures such as trills, mordants and appogiaturas seem to function in similar ways among various styles. Also, general tendencies in contour tend not to be exclusive to particular styles.

In order to verify and support empirically the above hypothesis, the following fairly simple experiments can be conducted:

1. A catalog of ornamental gestures in two or more musical traditions can be generated and compared. This study, however, will need to go beyond simply saying that these gestures "exist" but go so far as to demonstrate how they affect areas of the mode.

2. A test for the threshold of step size must be conducted in order to determine the point at which humans are no longer able to perceive steps and hear pitches as skips of a wider interval. The results of this experiment can be compared to an observation of skips in existing modal music.