Why are there only 7 musical notes? Was it decided to divide sounds like that or are there no more in nature?
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It was decided by people…and it’s not the only choice. The familiar (to most Western ears) ABCDEFG scale is called the heptatonic (“seven note”). The intervals between notes vary, and the different combinations of whole tones and half tones is what gives you the different “modes”. There’s nothing magic about these choices, they’re just convention. There’s also multiple pentatonic scales…pentatonic is, among other things, why most people so can rapidly identify “Japanese” classical music.
There’s technically an infinite number of possible notes in an octave, but human hearing doesn’t have enough resolution to distinguish them all so the number of practical notes is a lot smaller (but much larger than the number of notes in typical music).
Octaves are physical & biological…when you double the frequency (half the string length), it “sounds” like the same note to us. Technically, it has the same harmonics. But how you divide the notes between octaves is arbitrary.
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