From the discussion under this comment it seems its a lot more complicated than that, and lots of people think they know how it works and then lots of other people disagree with them. So all very murky
Maths and physics are a terrible way to learn the artistic side of music, but if you are interested in "why does a fifth chord sound nice" or "why are the black and white keys on a piano in that particular pattern" you can get interesting (partial) answers by looking into the maths of frequency ratios and the physics of overtones and how they affect the cilia of the inner ear. Music differs between cultures but there are some universals such as the Octave (edit: by which I mean doubling of frequency, not how its divided up) and nearly all cultures have some form of music ... There is something universally human about it, and so its a doorway to studying how our minds work.
> but there are some universals such as the Octave
Universal in the sense that a number of rocks or a number of sheep can be doubled just as a frequency can?
The notion that there are 8 sub divisions to a doubled frequency interval isn't universal. Balinese Gamelan doesn't even neccessarily have an agreed number of "notes" in an "Octave" from one village to the next.
There aren't 8 subdivisions in an octave in western music either. Well, there are in any given scale, but there are also many scales. "Octave" is a misleading term. Given that it's just a doubling of frequency, the term is sort of as good as any other, and that douibling exists in pretty much all cultures that have developed string, pipe or other resonant body based music (including hitting hollow logs and plucking vibrating reeds / sticks / tines).
It's pretty much the foundational idea of any modality. No matter how you divide it up, the purest harmony is doubling or halving.
The commenter presumably was talking about octave equivalence, which is reportedly present across all or nearly all historical musical cultures that we know about. It’s also supposedly present in some other mammals.
reportedly present, yes .. but the debate is still hot on universal.
I was asking to tease out some PoV perspective, again Gamelan doesn't neccessarily have powers of two, or 12, etc divisions of a doubling (or Octave, if we're using that term); it's a non western style of percussion that has a suprising number of local variations (it's essentially near unique to Balinese culture) in divisions and tunings.
The Octave wikipedia entry includes:
Octave equivalence is a part of most musical cultures, but is far from universal in "primitive" and early music
Yeah, that sentence on Wikipedia is a bit unclear though. It might be merely claiming that, for some musical cultures, we don’t have a written record of an explicit notion of octave equivalence or tone name circularity.
But I suspect there’s a clear biological mechanism which makes it easy to mistake one octave for another from any source of roughly harmonic sound. This is due to the similarity in the overtones of two harmonic sounds that differ by an octave. I would be surprised if this mechanism isn’t universal, although its on various musical systems can obviously vary a lot.
Universal in the sense that a number of rocks or a number of sheep can be doubled just as a frequency can?
Yes thats what I meant, the doubling of frequency. It might seem trivial but the fact that doubling frequency sounds "right" to humans is actually quite interesting. Why does it sound "right"?
Interference is most of the answer. With frequencies f and 2f you get the smoothest interference patterns, even if the tones have a lot of harmonics. This applies reducingly to increasingly fractional ratios.
> So yes, the 12-tone scale is a universal thing -
I don't follow the logic here though. It's certainly true that a 12-tone / Chromatic scale is ubiquitous within the Western Music tradition .. but the universe is reportedly a little larger.
Even Western Music includes exceptions like the 9-note augmented scale, though the argument can be made that it's a 12-scale with 3 bits "missing" - not a case that can be made about a non-western 7 note percussive scale.
All scales in all cultures are based on octaves and fifths. (E.g., the ancient Chinese musical scale also has 12 tones.)
Also the so-called "Western music" standardized on 12 tones very late in the process, long after the Chinese figured it out.
> a 12-scale with 3 bits "missing"
That's all scales, even the "non-Western" ones. Microtonality is added to the standard 12 tone to add tone effects. (Synthesizers in pop music do the same trick.)
To confirm the claim that "all scales in all cultures are based on octaves and fifths" one might study the scales.zip scale files and find those that do not contain octaves and fifths, which should naturally be zero if the claim is true.
Note also that certain musical traditions were suppressed or eradicated due to their unfortunate habit of using dissonant notes such as minor seconds, as opposed to the consonant traids favored by a particular group recently in power around the world. Happy Easter!
Thank you, I am somewhat aware of the knobs present on a synth, though fail to see the relevance given that various other instruments do not have dynamic retuning options. Which 12 tone scale did you have in mind (for there are many) and why do you think 12 (for there are many other numbers, some of which are used by various scale systems) is a natural property of the world? Perhaps with a more cogent argument you could make a better case for your opinion.
129.74 is not really close to a power of two. 31-tet scales have a better approximation of a 5th (and an impressively better approximation of a minor 7th).
The obvious exception in the western system would be the blues scale, which arguably has 9 tones (7 equal tempered notes, plus a just tempered 3rd and 7th).
And Indian ragas break all of these rules. They have scales that don't have 8 notes, scales that don't use equal temperament, and even a few scales that don't repeat on octaves.
Equal temperament is a different issue. The 12 natural tones are necessarily approximations and can't be represented exactly due to the 1 percent difference.
Its impressive work from CF that lots of people in this thread are unsure whether its a joke or not, like a delicately balanced april fools for the hn crowd
On the contrary, nobody here is suggesting Microsoft isn't really diverse. They're suggesting that Apple is going to start to eat into their SMB market.
Nobody at Microsoft is saying, "we don't care if Apple chips away at SMB because we have Call of Duty"
Microsoft offers Office for Mac. It's a thing they do. It's the full fledged Office suite. They see a Mac user the same way they see a Windows user - a source of revenue.
Not always. There's no Minecraft for Mac, they even prohibited Macs running the iPad version. It's essentially been ported to Apples APIs but purposely withheld from macOS.
Anyone on Bedrock Minecraft is probably there for the cross-platform multiplayer. The Java version doesn't substitute for that. (MS made Bedrock and Java incompatible so they can rent-seek on closed mod and server-hosting "marketplaces"; can't let people share things and have fun without paying a middleman after all, think of the wasted "productivity"!)
I turn off OneDrive so I dont think I have seen those. But in what way are those ads? OneDrive is part of Windows, like iCloud is part of the Apple ecosystem
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