Klang (music)

Rameau had misunderstood Joseph Sauveur's experiments, intended to demonstrate the existence of overtones, and believed that the harmonic partials arose from a resonance within the fundamental note, to which he gave the name corps sonore,[10] often translated as Klang in German.

As Henry Klumpenhouwer writes, Almost all tonal theorists have proposed that triadic structure arises from a fundamental, conceptually anterior, constituent pitch – such as radix, son fondamental, Grundton, Hauptton – that exerts unity on the collection by means of an array of intervallic relationships sanctioned by Nature.

[11]Klang, he adds, is technically the German word for 'resonance' or 'sound,' although in this context [of Hauptmann's Harmonik und Metrik] it refers specifically to the ontological entities of major and minor triads, whether generated acoustically or logically.

"[16]According to Nicholas Cook, the theory of the chord of nature is a striking manifestation of the recurrent strive, "to understand music as an ultimately physical phenomenon".

Should the experiment be began at the triple octave, that is the 8th part of the string, and the intermediary sounds be left out, the chord G, B, D, F, A♭, will be produced.

Some theorists (including Schenker or Maurice Emmanuel) considered that overtones higher than the fifth (or sixth) could not be heard and that no dissonance could ever be justified by the harmonic series.

[21]This statement has been one source of Jacques Chailley's evolutionary theory, describing music history as the progressive understanding and usage of higher overtones.

[23]The quotations above have shown the ambiguity of the word "klang", often taken to mean a "chord" but better understood as a complex or compound sound.