Some other musical post here made me wonder – why are notes what they are?
Why are there specifically 7 across all instruments? Why are they defined at their frequencies instead of shifting them all a bit to right or a bit to left? Is that just a coincidence or is there a reason? Are we missing a ton of music because we do not use notes for all the frequencies between the notes? And finally, why do notes repeat themselves, why is it ABCDEFG-ABC…, instead of just ABCDEFG-HIJ…?
Thanks!
In: Other
I can’t answer all your questions, but the repeating letters are because each octave is exactly 2x the frequency of the one below it, so all As sound “the same”, and will layer over top of each other perfectly
In standard tuning, the A above middle C is 440hz, the A above that is 880hz, and the A below it is 220hz
Why 440? That was just the standard pitch that various countries finally agreed on after having various pitches within a similar range. For example, the French and Austrians used 435hz. In 1975 the ISO standardized that A as 440hz and now that’s just what we all use
That’s just tradition basically. You could easily shift all the notes and still play music and the note system would still work. Whats important for harmonics is the relative distance between the notes, so you must shift them accordingly (the frequency must double from over the 7 notes, so you can only change them multiplicatively and still have working notes)
There is no reason to pick these frequencies. They were picked once and people used them. In other music traditions like in china they use other systems
You have a lot of interrelated questions, but I can answer one a bit:
>Why are they defined at their frequencies instead of shifting them all a bit to right or a bit to left?
We collectively decided in the early 1900s that A = 440 Hz, and then everything else is measured relative to that. Prior to that time, A might have varied up or down a bit in different places, and old organs still exist in Europe that are tuned slightly differently.
There’s a fringe movement that advocates for A = 432 Hz because they say it matches the natural frequencies of the human body (or something). This is mostly considered new age nonsense to everyone else.
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