MeetMeAtTheMovies
@MeetMeAtTheMovies@hexbear.net
- Comment on An identification key 1 week ago:
does not cause gonorrhea
[citation needed]
- Comment on Protest as Chick-fil-A opens first London restaurant 1 week ago:
bigotry is out of step with British values
Is that so, TERF island?
- Comment on Protest as Chick-fil-A opens first London restaurant 1 week ago:
The chicken at BK just isn’t as good
- Comment on Just one more square bro 1 week ago:
Isn’t there a difference between “the most squares fit into a square” and “a collection of squares optimized for maximum small-square area inside of a larger square”? If there’s a difference in solutions, what would the solution for the latter actually be?
Mathematicians halp plz
- Comment on Dear Faith II 1 week ago:
The most competent white collar workers I know use exclamation points to the near exclusion of all other pronunciation. This is wild
- Comment on Dear Faith II 1 week ago:
According to the APA website, it’s more about accessibility and the cost of printing color vs grayscale
- Comment on Dear Faith II 1 week ago:
God forbid women have hobbies.
- Comment on It's literally science 2 weeks ago:
Tall back pain person here. Gonna try this
- Comment on Lemmings, please give us your info dump. 2 weeks ago:
Okay so sounds can be broken down into individual tones called sine waves. The math that lets us do this doesn’t care about how tonal or noisy the sound is. It takes arbitrary input. However, human brains and ears (as well as those of many other creatures) seem to optimize for tonality of some type.
The simplified explanation is that we like when the frequencies of the tones that make up a sound are in whole number ratios (the harmonic series). However, there’s a tolerance for frequencies which are close to those ratios but not perfect. And when harmonics don’t fall perfectly within the harmonic series, we can instead prefer intervals between notes which are slightly “out of tune” compared to what the harmonic series would dictate. For instruments like strings and woodwinds where the vibration of the air happens along a more or less straight line, the harmonics tend to be close enough to the harmonic series for this not to matter a ton. But for instruments with different resonant features (bells are a common example), the effects of this are more pronounced.
There is also some math which makes tuning instruments solely to the harmonic series impractical. This combined with the tolerance for consonance I mentioned before has led to a rich sea of different traditions which play around with tuning in different ways. The western tradition alone has a long history with how a twelve note chromatic scale ought to be tuned. It turns out that equally diving the octave into twelve notes just so happens to be a good approximation of a lot of harmonic series intervals, but some intervals are less perfect than others. It’s all a series of compromises.