On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 13:57 -0400, Charles Linart wrote: > The Western scale is only seven notes. Ever heard of an octave? The > Eastern (pentatonic) scale has five notes. > > If notes are notes only because I've been "conditioned" for them, why > do the same notes show up in music all over the world? Probably has > something to do with the limitations of the human voice and the human > ear. Whatever the explanation, the bushman and Mozart incorporate the > same 12 fundamental harmonics in their music. The sound of a yak > belch can be part of a rhythm, but it is utterly useless as a > component of melody -- unless it happens by chance to be a note. but thats just it, isn't it? who says melody is the important part? as for the explanation, its not all that hard. its mostly to do with the number of ratios between two different frequencies you can fit into a single doubling (an octave). if you want harmony, then there are limits to this number because the ratios need to have certain properties. if you don't care about harmony (or at least, don't care about it as much), then there are less (or even no) limits on the ratios, and thus the number of "notes" per octave. and your comment on the bushman & mozart? given that most (all?) of mozart's music uses tET and most indigenous music around the world tends to be in just intonation, i doubt that they share the same 12 fundamental harmonics, unless you want to fudge and map two quite different harmonics to each other "because there's the same number". --p _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
