Why is the musical scale the way it is? 12 keys: 7 major, 5 minor?
In: 116
The naming and conventions (like black and white keys) are created by humans but there are fairly simple “natural” reasonings for the way much of the world’s music is created.
Sounds are essentially vibrations and things in nature vibrate in certain ways. The simplest thing to start with is a string stretched and plucked.
The loudest note is the fundamental frequency and there will be softer notes that are produced. These sound “nice” to us. These “nice” notes will be in simple ratios of the fundamental note frequency. So these ratios are 2:1, 3:2, 4:3, 5:4, 6:5, 5:3 etc. These collection of ratios form the basis of musical notes. For modern instruments, these are adjusted slightly to make instruments easier to tune and play along each other.
The current system of 12 notes allows music to be easily scaled up and down and still sound “nice”. Nearly all music is written to use a smaller subset of these notes. So music written in a major diatonic scale (do, re, mi..) will use 7 of these 12 notes predominantly. Music written in a pentatonic scale (a lot of Chinese and Indian music) uses 5 notes from this scale. Traditional “blues” music is also generally pentatonic.
Latest Answers