There are 12 semitones in an octave because western scales are based on the mathematical coincidence that 1.5^12 ~= 2^7 Because of consonance/dissonance, on mo

There are 12 semitones in an octave because western scales are based on the mathematical coincidence that 1.5^12 ~= 2^7 Because of consonance/dissonance, on most of our instruments, some of these 12 notes sound better in combination than others. Imagine you ran a clustering analysis to group the ones that sound better together and ended up with two clusters, a cluster of 5 and a cluster of 7. The cluster of 7 gives us the name "octave" as musicians double-count the first note when it is repeated at 2x the frequency at the top end of the scale. That's the TLDR of my jupyter notebook anyway where I try to start with biological principles and deduce the shape of the piano keyboard https://fiftysevendegreesofrad.github.io/JupyterNotes/piano.html https://fiftysevendegreesofrad.github.io/JupyterNotes/piano....