System ui tuner note 8 series#
The series goes on indefinitely, with the pitches getting closer and closer together. Here are the first sixteen pitches in a harmonic series that starts on a C natural. (See Harmonic Series II: Harmonics, Intervals and Instruments Standing Waves and Musical Instruments and Standing Waves and Wind Instruments for more about how and why musical sounds are built from harmonic series.) The relative strengths of the harmonics are what gives the note its timbre. And every musical note you hear is not a single pure frequency, but is actually a blend of the pitches of a particular harmonic series. For example, a bugle can play only the notes of a specific harmonic series. The harmonic series is not just a useful idea constructed by music theory it is often found in "real life", in the real-world physics of musical sounds. These sets of pitches with closely related frequencies are often written in common notation as a harmonic series. To find other notes that sound "in tune" with each other, we look for other sets of pitches that have a "simple" frequency relationship. In fact, most people would find the effect very unpleasant and would say that the notes are not "in tune" with each other. If a note had a frequency, for example, that was 2.11 times the frequency of another note (instead of exactly 2 times), the two notes would not sound so good together.
Two notes that are exactly one octave apart sound good together because their frequencies are related in such a simple way. A simple mathematical way to say this is that the ratio of the frequencies is 2:1. When note Y has a frequency that is twice the frequency of note Z, then note Y is one octave higher than note Z.
In order to feature these favored intervals, a tuning tradition may do one or more of the following: use scales in which the notes are not equally spaced avoid any notes or intervals which don't work with a particular tuning change the tuning of some notes when the key or mode changes.Īlmost all music traditions recognize the octave. It also leads many other music traditions to prefer tunings other than equal temperament, particularly tunings in which some of the important intervals are based on the pure, simple-ratio intervals of physics. This often leads to some "tweaking" of the tuning in real performances, away from equal temperament. The "equal" ratios of its half steps are the twelfth root of two, rather than reflecting the simpler ratios produced by the sounds themselves, and the important intervals that build harmonies can sound slightly out of tune. But a careful hearing of the music, or a look at the physics of the sound waves involved, reveals that equal-temperament pitches are not based on the harmonics physically produced by any musical sound. (To a scientist or engineer, "equally-spaced" means that the ratio of the frequencies of the two notes in any half step is always the same.) This tuning system is very convenient for some instruments, such as the piano, and also makes it very easy to change key without retuning instruments. "Equally-spaced" to a musician basically means that each of these notes is one half step from the next, and that all half steps sound like the same size pitch change. In this system, an octave (say, from C to C) is divided into twelve equally-spaced notes. Meanwhile, here is a reasonably nontechnical summary of the information below: Modern Western music uses the equal temperament tuning system.
If you need to review the mathematical concepts, please see Musical Intervals, Frequency, and Ratio and Powers, Roots, and Equal Temperament. If you do not know what intervals are (for example, major thirds and perfect fourths), please see Interval and Harmonic Series II: Harmonics, Intervals and Instruments. If you wish to follow the whole thing but are a little hazy on the relationship between pitch and frequency, the following may be helpful: Pitch Acoustics for Music Theory Harmonic Series I: Timbre and Octaves and Octaves and the Major-Minor Tonal System. To understand all of the discussion below, you must be comfortable with both the musical concept of interval and the physics concept of frequency. You will find below an introduction to a variety of tuning systems, including: Pythagorean, mean-tone, just intonation, well temperaments, equal temperament, and wide tuning. Do we have to choose just one tuning system? Join the discussion at Opening Measures