As you know, we have an innate sense of musicality and we can sense when certain tones are off key and wrong. Im curious to what degree can we sense it? Is there a limit of deviation from the correct pitch where we can’t recognize that the note is off pitch anymore and it starts sounding normal?
In: 6
It depends.
In practical terms the intervals between pitches in music work because of their approximate ratios rather than their absolute values actually having their own meaning. And if you recall from math classes, ratios between 2 numbers change depending on what the numbers actually are. An octave in music is a 2:1 ratio where the interval is the note that’s twice as high as the other note. Most musicians tune using a reference pitch of A4=440Hz, its octave is 880Hz and there are 440Hz between the two. If you started at 880Hz that note’s octave is 1760Hz and the distance is 880Hz. But in terms of music notation and what we consider notes, the same 12 notes are present in each octave. So dividing 440Hz by 12 gives a number roughly half the size of dividing 880Hz by 12. We can more easily identify the tuning between notes that are close together and higher in pitch but have more difficulty identifying the interval of notes that are further apart or lower in pitch.
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