Physicists say of light that, depending on how you look at it, it can be viewed either as a particle, like a grain of sand, or as a wave, like the ocean. There are “photons” of light (particles), and “beams” of light (waves). Certain aspects of music seem to have a similar quality, a type of “wave/particle duality” of their own.
Like a particle, a note of music can be taken as an individual phenomenon; a single, isolated “thing.” In Western music, only twelve tones and their octaves are used. The tones in between these twelve tones are called microtones; each a tone in its own right, but largely unused in the west, since instruments aren’t usually designed to play them.
In an effort to extend the range of possible tones (or just because they like the sound), musicians sometimes detune their instruments, or “bend” their notes. The bending of a note results in a smooth, unbroken slide from one note to another. How does the note get from where it starts to where it finishes? Does it go through all the series of microtones in between? If so, what does this do to the individual character of these tones, the in-between tones that occur along the way from starting point to finishing point? They appear somehow to be “smeared out,” and no longer isolated entities. In appearing to flow into one another, these “particles” of sound appear to take on a wavelike aspect.
Is this a trick of time, or of our perception of it (imagine a musical scale being played so fast that the notes blur into one another, and are no longer distinguishable)? Might it have to do with a limited auditory capacity (who knows but that a goldfinch wouldn’t hear each microtone as clearly distinguishable)? Is some other factor being overlooked? Or is there no validity to the notion whatsoever?
