Why are there only 7 musical notes? Was it decided to divide sounds like that or are there no more in nature?
In: Other
Enough comments have been made to help with the cultural aspect of western music and how intervals are legitimately culturally based but also influenced by harmonic physics.
That being said. I think it’s important to also bring up that rhythm is also in this category. Much of western music theory regarding rhythm is based on how we wrote it down and how westerners had a hard time notating African and others world music rhythms so they just thought it was noise instead of being much more complicated polyrhythms and micro rhythm. It perfectly normal for many cultures to have a meter that involves multiple pulses or vice versa. Western notation just didn’t know how to write it out or thought it was random. The term “swing” ultimately is a biproduct of this. Lots of interesting music theory history involved with this topic let alone actual harmonic frequency notes.
I’m gonna be the off beat one who says that there actually are more than the traditional “7 musical notes” (12 if you’re taking other’s explanations as well). There’s microtonal music as well but my limited understanding is that western traditions created a dominant music style that makes other styles sound out of tune.
See Adam Neely for an example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4KIwA8O9LU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4KIwA8O9LU)
That’s just the western scale. There are other musical scales and there’s also microtonal music out there. American blues music is also microtonal.
A lot of music from the middle east use quarter-notes in their scales, which is half a semitone. This can be seen easily on fretted instruments as they have an additional 4 (I think) frets per octave.
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