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Comment by averagewall | Hacker News Reader

It turns out it's really 7 notes, not one. If you're not already good at identifying tones, there no one-ness about it at all.

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Yeah, It's a single pitch class if you want to be pedantic.

As regards to one-ness, I'd be curious to know what proportion of people don't hear the relationship. Cause I guess I'd call not hearing octaves on a piano something like tone deaf, but maybe it's more learned and less innate than I think.

There's some evidence that perception of consonance and dissonance is innate:

http://www.brainmusic.org/MBB91%20Webpage/Evolution_Zentner....

Restricting your notes to octave intervals makes dissonance impossible, assuming you're using timbres made with vibrating strings or columns of air, or simulations of them.

Yeah, this is pure semantics.

We attached certain names to certain frequencies in western culture and made rules about 'proper music'. It is quite fascinating how culturally influenced we are on what is beautiful sound. Other cultures will have different frequencies and composition rules they consider good or artistic. Seven different D notes is how you say 7 unique frequencies, not one.

Can you point me to a culture whose music doesn't acknowledge octaves? It sounds interesting.

China I think.

Why was this downvoted? I was right. Traditional Chinese music is in pentatonic scale.

I'm no expert on Chinese music, but every Chinese scale I'm aware of is still based on the harmonic series and still observes octave equivalence.

In context, "have octaves" mean treating notes whose frequencies are powers of two as the "same", just shifted up. I believe the pentatonic scale still has this feature.

Thank you.

Chinese pentatonic scale is just a subset of major heptatonic scale used in western music.

Sorry, inherently hard to find again again on google, so no links, but I remember 2 different studies, one in Central- or Eastern Africa and another in the Amazon rain forest: People who where never exposed to harmonic music don't have an innate preference for harmonies over disharmonies. IIRC they preferred whatever was closest to what they knew, which was interpreted as a clue that music perception is heavily influenced by the expectations of the listeners.

It's how you say 7 unique frequencies with a specific mathematical relationship between each other. You can ignore the names of the notes, and it's still interesting, considered in those terms.

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