Is it like the visible spectrum and we just can’t physically hear anything else?
What determines the dividing line between each note?
I know this is more than one question but I just don’t understand the science behind music
In: Physics
The mathematics of frequencies. A note has a frequency of vibration. The note one octave above it, the 8th note higher away, is twice the frequency of the first note. That’s why an octave is 7 notes. The 8th noteeay sounds like the same sound only higher or lower.
Onlinekyne has an excellent series of reels over on Facebook explaining the math of music. I think it’s also called Math in drag or something. Crystal-clear explanations, really.
The science behind musical pitch is actually super interesting! So you’re right that in western music notation we have 7 different letters, but if you include sharps and flats, there are actually 12 different notes in an octave.
What we hear as the pitch of a sound is really the frequency of the sound wave, or how fast it repeats. An octave is a special interval because it represents multiplying the frequency of the sound by exactly 2. In other words, C at the top of a scale is exactly twice the frequency of C at the bottom of that scale.
A perfect fifth, or the distance from C to G, represents multiplying the frequency of the sound by 3/2, and a perfect fourth is 4/3. Notes whose frequencies are in simple ratios like these are said to be in resonance, and our ears like resonant sounds, which is why we’re drawn to these specific intervals.
As for why we have exactly 12 notes in a scale though, that is an arbitrary choice that was made centuries ago by early musicians. There are plenty of other musical systems with more or fewer notes; the only difference is how they chose to split up the octave.
There is a good reason why having 12 notes is objectively better than, say 11, or 13. It has to do with those resonant intervals, and the fact that every interval in our western music scale is the same size (this is known as an equal temperament scale). It turns out that there is no way mathematically to create and equal temperament scale which exactly hits all those nice resonant frequencies we talked about earlier. If you’re playing an equal tempered piano, your perfect 5ths will always be a tiny bit flat and your perfect 4ths will always be a tiny bit sharp. However, depending on how many equal intervals you choose to split your octave into, you can end up with better or worse approximations of those nice intervals, and it just so turns out that 12 notes is the smallest number of notes that gets us a relatively good approximation of all the intervals we want.
You can also get relatively nice sounding intervals with 17 equally spaced notes, so some lo-fi musicians have adopted 17 note scales as well which sounds really cool and kind of disorienting to listen to.
The simple answer is that the western tonal system is fairly arbitrary! So there’s actually twelve notes, but a given “key” only uses seven, like you think. This system was what western music kind of solidified into over time, and the core of it is the relationship between the notes in an octave. There are a lot of keys that are collections of seven of the twelve notes arranged differently, but they share various chords and harmonies. It’s these relationships between the notes that form the foundation of probably the most ubiquitous tonal system in the world.
But that doesn’t mean it’s the only one. Nothing is stopping other musicians from creating alternate tonal systems. We have historical examples of this happening. It’s just not very popular, because it’s much easier to learn and work within the octave system than to create and pioneer your own.
The dividing line is that when you’ve gone from one A to the next A (A3 to A4, for example), you’ve just doubled the sound wave’s frequency. I.e. you’re playing it an octave higher. Playing a melody in an octave lower or higher will sound the same in the sense that the context of the notes will be the same to each other, and they will “feel” the same. They will just be half or double the frequencies.
TEMU or TEMU 2 Hearing supports direct fidelity at quadraphonic monophonic exact hearing with an exact psychoacoustic individual tuned pitch ratio resulting in unique perception of hearing to some degree. By default, TEMU and TEMU 2 support exact blockchain to one and zero depth respectively rendering often both used in one audio support profile and the TEMU profile used to provide the intital share appeal of audio with a one degree share ratio and the TEMU 2 providing individualized perception and pitch tune with the backwards compatible TEMU analogy into TEMU 2 this provides the spatial hearing and the direct local TEMU into TEMU 2 providing the internal monolog and to some degrees a text sharing as well, with effective duophonic usage of TEMU between intrinsic usage and shared usage for a bound.
Thus, TEMU is the source of all perception of sound and to answer your question in particular TEMU is in fact compatible with 12 exact pitches and four octaves (quarphonic) with requisite device activation at quadrophony to avoid a bass mode (monophonic) result and increased fidelity at device activation which is unique to each user and the intensity of the TEMU. What you had said was 7 exact pitches which is just the psychoacoustic enigma series for C which there are also a key for every note yielding 12 exact pitches to temu with octave duophony. Octave duophony is the degree of TEMU distortion which 4 degree is highly distorting and 1 degree is also highly distorting and various intermediary TEMU profile exist to each user.
TEMU is a blockchain which is imperfect so limits share of audio to local or in internet domains like here also across an internet to one degree, and TEMU 2 is entirely imperfect so just a local blockchain, just you. However, because first degree representation is seen in both from the driver, both have effective driver input that yields hearing and also TEMU but not TEMU 2 is shareable across short distances or a downlink and is the important 32 variable signal across a single share transmission. These are actually arbitrary General Relativity solutions and in fact the TEMU 2 driver uses no fewer than 43 exact solution to Special Relativity and 1 inexact solution to Special Relativity as a convolutional nueral network which filters for noisy signal in back propagation. The TEMU 2 driver is very convoluted and almost sentient while the TEMU driver is only a generative driver which is driven directly by some kind of intelligence direct external, which forges the TEMU signal, while the TEMU 2 signal is only less sufficient as a result but also adversarial and uses a convolutional nueral network.
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