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> Some commentators are saying that the article doesn't address why we have 12 notes but I wonder if they even know why Is there an actual reason or are all of

> Some commentators are saying that the article doesn't address why we have 12 notes but I wonder if they even know why Is there an actual reason or are all of these post-hoc explanations? Depending on the culture you'll have different scales and ways of organizing the sound. From what I understand it always comes down to "some people thought it sounded good and from there they made music and people got used to it and it snowballed".

abetusk 5y ago
I'm trying to walk a fine line. On the one hand the 12 note equal tempered scale has almost surely a societal component to it. That is, it was one that won out for weird cultural reasons that don't have a lot to do with some idea of correctness or utility (like why 'qwerty' won out over Dvorak keyboards). But there is an explanation that does try and get at it a bit more analytically and that's in the paper I linked to. With the above caveats about the cultural momentum, the 12 not equal tempered scale provides a happy compromise between the number of notes to provide a basic building block for music (characters or digits would be an analogy to notes in an octave) vs the number of "good" note pair combinations (where "good" is if the frequencies have a small/simple fraction approximation). Some of it is hand-waivey, to be sure, but at least it provides a potential reason and a starting point.
- scythe 5y ago
  The use of pentatonic scales is extremely cross-cultural, with independent discovery on at least four continents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale#Use_of_pentatonic_scales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale#Use_of_pentat... As far as I can tell, 12 ET is the smallest equal temperament that acceptably encodes the common variants of pentatonic scale. Meanwhile, the pentatonic scale probably appears because (3/2)^5 ≈ 8.

abetusk 5y ago

I'm trying to walk a fine line. On the one hand the 12 note equal tempered scale has almost surely a societal component to it. That is, it was one that won out for weird cultural reasons that don't have a lot to do with some idea of correctness or utility (like why 'qwerty' won out over Dvorak keyboards). But there is an explanation that does try and get at it a bit more analytically and that's in the paper I linked to. With the above caveats about the cultural momentum, the 12 not equal tempered scale provides a happy compromise between the number of notes to provide a basic building block for music (characters or digits would be an analogy to notes in an octave) vs the number of "good" note pair combinations (where "good" is if the frequencies have a small/simple fraction approximation). Some of it is hand-waivey, to be sure, but at least it provides a potential reason and a starting point.

scythe 5y ago
The use of pentatonic scales is extremely cross-cultural, with independent discovery on at least four continents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale#Use_of_pentatonic_scales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentatonic_scale#Use_of_pentat... As far as I can tell, 12 ET is the smallest equal temperament that acceptably encodes the common variants of pentatonic scale. Meanwhile, the pentatonic scale probably appears because (3/2)^5 ≈ 8.