Where does harmony collide?

The combining of simultaneous pitches into chords, and the study of how those chords are built, connected, and voiced across a piece: harmony is the vertical dimension of music, set against melody, which is one line in time, and rhythm, which is its pattern of durations. Rameau's 1722 Treatise on Harmony grounded this study in the chord and its fundamental root, and showed how progressions of chords give tonal music its direction. The referent here is an audible relation among pitches sounded together, described by chords and voice-leading, not a rule about vowels in a word, a doctrine about non-interacting substances, or an ideal for how a society should hold together.[1]

Unit

A chord and its place in a progression, scaled by the intervals between its pitches

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed by labelling chords, identifying their roots and functions, and tracing how the separate voices move between them

A rule in the sound system of a language that forces the vowels within a word to agree in some feature, such as whether the tongue is front or back or whether the lips are rounded, so that a suffix vowel changes to match the stem it attaches to: languages like Turkish, Finnish, and Hungarian are governed by it. Nevins's 2010 Locality in Vowel Harmony set out how this agreement spreads across a word and what limits its reach. The referent is a constraint on which speech sounds may co-occur in a spoken word, tested against the shape of real words, and it has nothing to do with pitches sounded together, a claim about the universe, or concord among people.[2]

Unit

A phonological rule requiring the vowels of a word to share one feature

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by recording which vowels can occur together in words and how a suffix vowel alternates with the stem it follows

Leibniz's doctrine that the simple substances making up the world, his monads, never causally act on one another, yet each unfolds in exact correspondence with all the others because God set them in agreement at creation: a mind and its body appear to interact only because their independent series were tuned in advance, like two clocks kept in step without a connecting thread. Leibniz stated it in his 1714 Monadology, and Kulstad's 1993 analysis weighed the competing readings of what it claims. The referent is a metaphysical account of order without interaction, defended by argument, and it is far from a way of combining pitches, a rule about vowels, or a goal for social life.[3][4]

Unit

A metaphysical doctrine that independent substances correspond without ever interacting

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Argued rather than measured, by weighing it against causal interaction and occasionalist accounts of how mind and body relate