i'm making a cool fact thread with regular guest appearances to farm posts

since this is the cool debute i'm going to post two cool facts ready


fact 1: 90% of (youtube) music theorists are wrong about harmony. they present eulers approaches to quantifying consonance and whatever.... like ratios actually mean anything like that WHEN work over the past few decades have shown definitively that the mind doesn't do any weird ratio calculating but just listenes to the overtones. overtone alignment, density, and beating effects are how the brain understands consonance and dissonance, and any other approach is fundamentally wrong, bitch


fact 2: the perfect fourth IS in the harmonic series

A 440
880
1320
1760

see it's right there between 1320 and 1760, 4:3

and if you divide 1760 by 3 you get 586.6, which JUST SO HAPPENS to be D, so when you play A and D together the overtone at 1760 from each note aligns and blends together to make that frequency louder

funnily this means that ratios actually show the first overtone alignment between the intervals they represent, which is why harmony theories based on ratios work as well as they do (even if they ultimately fall very short)

The Facts About Consonance Music Theorists Don't Want You To Know

for more sick harmony knowledge google william sethares


more facts tomorrow