GB wrote:I don't know which instruments are being played here, but while you can play the same notes on say a clarinet, and a bassoon, the bassoon plays them in a lower register.
Years ago I heard that the way music works is that Middle C is 256 Hertz.
Later I think it changed to A is 440 Hertz.
If I remember correctly, 440 Hertz was the tone broadcast on at least some television channels a while after close down so as to remind people to turn off the television set, which is practice meant that the tone woke up a person who had gone to sleep in an armchair while watching television.
So, does what Geoff wrote mean that, say, middle C is a different frequency on a clarinet than on a bassoon?
Something that has puzzled me about music.
Is that 440 Hertz a more or less arbitrary standard, chosen rather than being like, say, whether a certain number is or is not a prime number?
I can easily imagine that an octave is a natural phenomenon that is applied in music.
However, is there a reason why there are a certain number of notes in an octave, rather than some other number, and why the black notes on a piano are some of them and not others?
I remember from school that a lady music teacher would say about fourths and fifths and demonstrate with a piano.
She used to give us tests where she would play two notes and we had to write down the, I think she might have called it the interval.
A fourth and a fifth in music seemed to be different from a fourth and a fifth in mathematics, but maybe I was missing something.
Is it that, like for some people red and green look the same, that for some people it is not possible to distinguish those distances between notes?
I can usually tell that one note is a higher pitch than another, but that is about it. I don't think that I can detect that something is an octave in difference.
Maybe to some (most?) people, the difference between a fourth and a fifth is as obvious as the difference of red and green is to me.
William
