Musical Temperament Puns

Recently I began listening to a podcast called The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps and Pythagoras was the topic of one episode. It briefly discussed his mathematical approach to music and, looking around a bit, I learned more about the concept of musical temperament. Eventually I came to this chart.

thought one

I noticed that a perfect fifth vibrates at ~1.5x the frequency of its first scale degree note; it's the halfway point between two notes an octave apart.

• C0 = 16.35 Hz
• G0 = 24.50 Hz
• C1 = 32.70 Hz

There are similar patterns for different intervals. I guess, then, that each different type of chord occupies a certain ratio of frequencies, and that when people are doing ear training, they're really just getting better at slicing these frequencies up in more intricate/precise ways.

This is really interesting to me, but it goes over my head. In terms of practical application, or just generally thinking about music that I'm listening to, is there anything worth noting here? Or maybe just some interesting rambling that's on your mind?

thought two

Maybe there isn't a mathematical reason that a tonic chord feels like a tonic, and that if I had been raised in a different musical culture, a different chord might feel like home?

How much of this is musical cliche / what I'm used to, and how much of it is explainable mathematically?

I was reading the Featured Article on Wikipedia about the piano music of Gabriel Fauré, and wouldn't you know it, I clicked on some blue links and ended up over at the wikipedia page for Musical Temparament. I tried reading it, but it just doesn't 'click' for me, I don't understand it. Equal, mean, well, what do all the temperaments mean and what is temperament in general?

Im a musician and would be curious to know the evolution of tuning and temperament.

We now mostly use equal temperament and tune to A 440Hz. But i have heard and read that this wasn't always the case.

Can anyone explain musical temperament? equal temperament, just tuning, the Well-Tempered Clavier... it's all a mystery to me.

I was wondering what temperament was used in traditional Japanese music, especially gagaku, as I don't think they used equal temperament, or did they?

https://youtu.be/U2c-qKztUvc

Hey y'all! I composed this film score for the final assignment for my First ever Composition course. I decided to explore some microtonality and composed this in 31-Tone Equal Temperament. Check it out and let me know! The first part has dialogues with with the video, but if you want to just just look at the sheet music and hear the music alone, then skip to 4:10. Let me know what y'all think!

Thank you!

Like, do they have a different set of rules or...?

Finally got the money together to invest in an upgrade to my starter guitar, a LTD EC-256.

Coming from that single-cut style, as well as having been hands on with friend's instruments, I was convinced I was going to buy an LP classic.

Stopped by my local independent guitar place yesterday and this had just been traded in:

https://m.imgur.com/ZkFqyri

Sat down with it on a whim and instantly fell in love. It was a little out of what I had intended to spend, but as I've read on here so many times, sometimes you just connect with an instrument and this was the one!

Here's the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6mkyAtwrcw

TLDW: If you use a circle of flat major-second-ish intervals to generate your notes (instead of a circle of fifths), you end up with some interesting scale structures and harmonies. You can play these new scales and harmonies in MuseScore using this plugin:

https://musescore.org/en/project/porcupine-tunings

Please feel free to let me know if you have any feedback, and to ask any questions you might have!

It's well-known that Bach wrote his name in musical notes in his last great organ work, The Art of Fugue (in German, B is B flat and H is B natural, meaning B-A-C-H spells out a musical phrase). It looks like he did the same at the start of his last great choral work, the Mass in B Minor.

I'd love this community's opinion!

https://link.medium.com/WIi7XJPMnhb

Cross-posted from my blog at https://jonahfranks.blogspot.com

I was recently watching a college lecture where the professor prefaced a discussion of game theory with "and the concept of a prisoner's dilemma is one of those things I am confident saying you are not an educated person in any meaningful sense if you have never taken the trouble to understand or learn it. The idea that we can map out the conditions under which cooperators will defect given individual incentives, even despite the fact that the collective incentive can be to cooperate for a higher payoff, is so fundamental to understanding the problems of the 21st century (like Climate Change) that I think it's only fair that we set our bar/expectations for the educated person high enough that they would know this enough to be able to act on it."

This got me thinking: what is your list (or solitary individual entry for what could become a larger list) of things every 21st Century person who likes to think of themselves as having achieved a serious education should know, but probably doesn't? I say "probably doesn't" because a list of what an educated person should know in general would be too long and (for the most part) too obvious for my purposes here (i.e. please don't say something like "the earth orbits the sun"). I also want people to emphasize knowing things that are considered groundbreaking in their respective fields and that may even have a practical or important connection to a larger issue, particularly the larger issues that we will be counting on the "educated (but common) person" to address in this century.

Pick any discipline you want, but try to meet my criteria. Here's mine! (A list like this is bound to sound opinionated and self-congratulatory because it's an attempt to list the things you think you already know but that many others don't, but for the same reason that the "rationalist" community has chosen a vaguely positive adjective for itself, and only aspirationally rather than narcissistically, I want you to put aside the self-conscious worry that you sound self-indulgent and just do your best to outline the greatest ideas an education can impart for someone aspiring to a true education)

These are not in any particular order from most to least important, but more "what occurred to me first," and it is bound to be horribly incomplete or include things it shouldn't--that's where you come in!

Here goes nothing:

1. **Graham Oppy's concept of rational belief-formation

I thinks it's great! I love when mathematics is aplied to things like this. I just intonation; not just because of how it sounds but because of the exact perfect ratios.

Some while ago I enjoyed reading Ross W. Duffin's book How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony - And Why You Should Care and subsequently I'll occasionally browse Soundcloud, etc., for examples of music in different temperaments not 12-EDO. Two such accounts are Inside People and Sevish.

As well as continuing my own occasional browsing on YouTube, Soundcloud and other platforms, I wondered if maybe there were any online examples that other redditors might recommend.

At the moment I'm particularly intrigued by 55-Division, and the prospect of 9 divisions for a tone and 5 divisions for a semitone. This allows different pitches for, say, F# and Gb, since the distance between F and G would not be equally divided. It also opens the possibility that F# is pitched higher than Gb, which seems peculiar at first glance. I'd suspect the most interesting examples to hear would perhaps not be diatonic, as that would limit the exposure to the temperament's core properties.

Can you suggest anything cool?

Does anyone read this ?

Much has been made about the tempos of Beethoven's work, but what about the temperment? E♭/C minor had a distinct sound in his lifetime and I want to hear Eroica with the set of intervals Beethoven preferred to 11 others!

https://preview.redd.it/gu1hepdg88871.jpg?width=1500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=60346abe2f8d0501bb802eb2562596dc0b24b778

Eidola's highly-anticipated new album, The Architect, is scheduled to be released everywhere September 17th on Blue Swan Records, under exclusive license to Rise Records, Inc.

PRE-ORDER BUNDLES/VINYL/MERCH NOW AVAILABLE!!!

Watch the music video for "Counterfeit Shrines", out now!

See Eidola on tour this fall supporting Dance Gavin Dance! Tour dates and tickets.

TRACK LISTING:

1. Hidden Worship
2. Counterfeit Shrines
3. Caustic Prayer
4. Empty Gardens
5. Occam’s Razor
6. Perennial Philosophy
7. Forgotten Tongues
8. Unequivocal Nature
9. Alchemist Ascendant
10. Elephant Bones
11. Mutual Fear – featuring Jon Mess
12. Ancient Temperament

Eidola is:

• Andrew Wells - vocals, bass guitar, guitar, piano, strings
• Matthew Dommer - vocals, guitar
• James Johnson - bass guitar
• Matthew Hansen - drums, percussion
• Sergio Medina - guitar

Additional personnel:

• Kris Crummett - producer at Interlace Audio, Portland, Oregon
• Ian Cooperstein - additional production
• GiGi Zimmer - recording engineer