3 ms·
Harmonics. They resonate well together because they have some common frequency. 13 equally spaced notes wouldn't match on multiples of 2, 3, 4 and 6. Example:
by tajen 12y ago
Harmonics. They resonate well together because they have some common frequency. 13 equally spaced notes wouldn't match on multiples of 2, 3, 4 and 6.
Example: The major scale (C, D, E, F etc) are the notes 0/12, 2/12, 4, 5, 7, 9 and 11. You'd expect the 6th note to sound nice, wouldn't you? Wrong: The scale is logarithmic.
A nice C chord is made of 0th, 4th, 7th/12, which are 523Hz, 659Hz, 783Hz. Notice how the second frequency is 125% higher and the last 150% higher. So they have harmonics in common and it makes them sound well together.
- darkmighty 12y agoYes (from the little I know) a major aspect in our hearing is that nature doesn't produce pure sinusoids. Mechanical vibration materials is bound to have a series of resonances multiples of some basic frequency. So if you have a single person, or single object, emitting sound, you expect to see this nice harmonic lineup. When the fundamental frequencies don't have a pair (a,b) s.t. a * f1=b * f2, their harmonic multiples don't match and you can tell something is odd. For f2=125% f1, for example, every 4th harmonic from f2 lines up perfectly; for f2=150% f1, every 2nd harmonic lines up; for f2= 200% f1, every harmonic actually lines up. I guess it's like looking at combs with different spacings and finding ones that superpose neatly.