from Hacker News

Pythagoras was wrong: There are no universal musical harmonies, study finds

by _justinfunk on 2/28/24, 1:09 AM with 6 comments

• by bugeats on 3/1/24, 2:42 PM

  Woah woah, slow down there. Pythagoras applied his aesthetic desire for pure ratios to an idealized model for musical intervals. Funny enough, this ended up being the reason that the west discovered that such an approach does not scale (figuratively and literally). We literally call this delta between the ideal tuning and the limits of a fixed-pitch tuning a “Pythagorean comma”. This comma became the basis for a lot of tuning systems (meantone, etc) developed by the west. It’s only in the last hundred years that, in my opinion, forces of industrialization and mass production erased all such effort and replaced it with the boring compromise that is 12 tone equal temperament.

  Other, far older, musical cultures took things in a different direction and ended up building systems on pure ratios that just become more complex in their relationships (Indian shruti, Turkish makam, etc).

  This does not mean that Pythagorean ratios are irrelevant. They remain a great tool for analysis of universal human experience of music. The authors of this paper are literally doing just that.

  Birds generate pure ratios in their songs. Smacking a metal anvil (as Pythagoras discovered) naturally generates pure ratios. They’re everywhere. If anything we need MORE of this understanding in Western music, which is missing out on some really tasty (low integer) intervals like 7/4, 8/5, 10/9, 7/5, many of which have naturally emerged in the West via genres like Blues.

• by karmakaze on 2/28/24, 6:42 AM

  I also recall reading there was a group of people where even the interval of an octave wasn't notable.