eli5 what just intonation is
In: 3
I am not a pro musician but I am a writer, so I’m going to take on the challenge of explaining like you’re actually 5.
Imagine cutting up a pretty, frosted marble birthday cake. If you cut it into 12 exactly equal pieces, everyone at the party is going to agree their pieces are fairly divided. They could trade pieces and no one would be annoyed by their serving.
But some of them might not like that their piece of cake was cut right through a frosting flower, and others might wish they had a piece with more chocolate or more vanilla, and the birthday guest might pout because she wanted the piece with her name on it.
So you could maybe cut the cake ever so slightly *not* even, so that the slices aren’t perfectly interchangeable, but now the guests get along nicely.
The cake is an octave. The slices are notes. The characteristics of the cake are sound waves and the guests’ willingness to agree or to throw fists is how nice chords sound, because the sound waves fall into pleasant ratios or not.
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