3 ms·
IMO the perfect fifth interval sounds boring. Equal temperament fifths at 2^(7/12) = ~1.4983 are close enough (and actually amazingly close to 3/2) to be recogn
by vortico 7y ago
IMO the perfect fifth interval sounds boring. Equal temperament fifths at 2^(7/12) = ~1.4983 are close enough (and actually amazingly close to 3/2) to be recognized as a fifth, and they offer a nice chorus/unison effect that many synthesizers even have a specific knob for. Slight error in close ratios gives beautiful movement in complex chords, otherwise you'd be hearing a repeating waveform with a period of lcm(1, ratio_1, ratio_2, ...). Well-designed temperaments don't try to use nice fractions. Most of them don't use fractions at all, and this sounds nice because slight dissonance sounds beautiful. See http://huygens-fokker.org/scala/ http://huygens-fokker.org/scala/, the state-of-the-art tool for creating 12-tone temperaments, as well as xenharmonic and microtonal tunings with non-12-tones.
- sulam 7y ago> Scala was developed in Ada... <head explodes>
- asimpletune 7y agoI don’t understand why <head explodes>, can you explain more?
- ColinWright 7y agoJust guessing, but there is also a programming language called Scala[0], and this person just had a type resolution failure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(programming_language)
- nineteen999 7y agoMaybe because Scala is also the name of a programming language as well as the linked software tool? Don't know, I'm just a bystander guessing.
- edejong 7y agoIt sounds boring but... I don’t know how to bring it into words, perhaps holy? Especially on synths without any other modulation going on, but still rich overtones it feels extremely ‘solid’ and pure. Perhaps primary (as in color). Especially in melody the function of each note is more pronounced. Still boring though...
- DennisP 7y agoI once attended a piano concert in which the piano was tuned to just intonation. It was anything but boring. I guess partly it's because I've played piano all my life, and some of the chords were downright startling.
- joppy 7y agoIt’s anything but boring when you start adding in more harmony (like an equal temperament major third), and move away from pure sine waves to something with more complex timbre like a piano or a human voice.
- boomlinde 7y agoIMO this is only half of the picture. Yes, maybe a perfect fifth sounds boring if the timbres have perfectly harmonic overtones and no undertones, but that is never the case with actual musical instruments in an acoustic space. The waveforms aren't periodic in the first place.