Re: need help with microtone

Paul Bennett scripsit:

> There's certainly something peculiar in the human auditory system
> that makes us percieve a doubling or halving frequency to be "the
> same note but different". I have no idea what the evolutionary basis
> for that might be, but it's there nonetheless.
It's not perceptual but physical.  When any physical object (other
than an electronic oscillator) produces a tone, it invariably produces
overtones as well at higher frequencies.  It is the pattern of overtones
that allows us to distinguish one instrument from another.  The first
overtone appears at exactly twice the frequency of the fundamental.
So it is no accident at all that we hear a tone and the corresponding
tone at twice the frequency to be "the same".

> As an aside, if the conculture this scale is for is non-human, you
> might even be able to manipulate the value of "2" in the formula I
> gave, although it'd probably make it near impossible to tune any
> existing instrument in to that scale in a meaningful way. Maybe a
> violin, or some other fretless stringed instrument would work nicely
> enough.
I doubt all of this very much, since the generation of overtones is
a consequence of the behavior of stretched strings, not anything about
the human ear.

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