2011-11-20, Name That Frequency! Of Equal-tempered Musical Scales and Such

For those of you with a musical and/or mathematical bent (or maybe just plain *bent*!), here's an article I just posted on my website, http://chuckoates.com/

 .

"Have you ever wondered how the frequencies for musical notes are determined? It turns out that an exponential function, specifically 2^(n/12), is heavily involved in the modern 12-note chromatic equal tempered scale, successor to the old just-toned scale used before the time of J.S. Bach.

Here’s a link to a discussion of the equal tempered musical scale and its use in practical piano tuning, http://bit.ly/udaTpq

 , as well as Prof. Oates’s Excel spreadsheet investigating some of the formulas presented in the above discussion,http://chuckoates.com/CollegeAlgebra/Module-4/Musical-Scales,Just-toned-and-Equal-tempered.xls

 .

Enjoy! (My current College Algebra students will.) :^)

Chuck Oates's Website, Main Page

chuckoates.com

Last Updated: Sunday, 20 November 2011, 2250 hr CDT (GMT - 5:00), Version 9.55a: Added musical scales calculations and explanatory reference. --CLO

 ·  · Share · November 20 at 11:06pm

• 
  

  Akash Patel and Chetna Patel like this.
• • 
    

    Chuck Oates You may need to tell your browser to Open the downloaded spreadsheet when you click on the last link above.
    

    November 20 at 11:07pm · 
  • 
    

    Chuck Oates Another physics/math of music link:http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html
    

    

     .
    

    
    

    Frequencies of Musical Notes
    

    

    www.phy.mtu.edu
    

    

    
    

    November 20 at 11:32pm ·  · 
  • 
    

    Chuck Oates For those of you deranged enough to care about accordion tunings, accordion reed ranks, and such (well, I never made any claim of sanity), see http://bit.ly/vL4n1J
    

    

     and possiblyhttp://bit.ly/s49v5a

    

     .
    
    For those of you who don't know what an accordion is (!), seehttp://bit.ly/viFEXS

    

     .
    
    A-musettedly yours,
    Chuck
    
    P.S. Yes, my (grand-)parents, bless their hearts, started me in my somewhat dubious musical career on a accordion when I was about 7. My left hand *still* doesn't work worth a hoot on a piano or an organ! %^0
    
    Give me the ubiquitous piano or let me rattle the windows with a pipe organ, electronically simulated or otherwise, but an accordion? Puleeease! dOb (ear protection emoticon)
    

    Accordion FAQ: Tuning
    

    

    www.cs.cmu.edu
    

    

    
    

    Note that throughout this article, I am only talking about tuning of the right-hand side of an accordion since typically there are no tuning variations encountered on the left-hand side of accordions.

    November 21 at 12:21am ·  · 
  • 
    

    Chuck Oates Well, their hearts were definitely in the right place; it's just that there aren't a lot of polka party gigs these days, even on the Great Plains. Ja, ja, ja ... *shakes head*
    

    November 21 at 9:32am