Musical traditions, of which the western is only one, are cultural conventions based on a subset of physical facts about sound. There is also a psychological and psycho-social component involved. This is all to say, while i like the post, i find the approach technocratic and one sided, as it will give a false feeling of truth and an illusion of having ultimately understood music. It's a quest for absolute scientific truth in a realm where no such truth exists. I have observed similar understanding problems like the ones the post writer reports with other people, esp. those of a more skeptical, inquisitive and scientifically curious nature. For them, it's esp. hard that, while there is a scientific backing to music, there are also cultural conventions on top that you just have to accept. And these conventions are for example different between western and traditional indian, arabic or chinese music.

This is... Not a good article.

I should not have to install a browser plug-in to opt out of Google analytics (that's what's proposed as an opt-out option in the privacy policy).

Where's the "reject non-essential cookies" button?

For programmers and written by AI and mostly wrong... What a combo

If tasked with this, I would start with an image of a piano keyboard and ask: Why the hell does it look so weird ? Black and white keys in some infernally strange layout ? WHY ?

Which takes you very quickly to equal temperament and perfect fourths and perfect fifths. This tells us where the notes C and F and G are located on the chromatic scale, but then the rest are pretty arbitrary eh. Semitones from C to C go 2-2-1-2-2-2-1, but there is nothing heavenly ordained by this particular arrangement. E-to-F and B-to-C are a collective choice.

If I had been presented with this kind of explanation fifty years ago, I might have been less skeptical of the entire enterprise.

This article is quite well done, especially from a programmer's perspective, but falls flat (no pun intended) for me because of my terrible ear for pitch.

> Here are five notes. Every one is double the frequency of the one before it. [...] They are different pitches, and yet they sound like the same note.

Nothing about these notes seem similar to me. You could play pretty much any sequence of rising notes and (falsely) claim they're the "same note" and I'd believe it. This is one reason I've always had trouble learning music.

> √2 the awkward one -> 311.13Hz

That one doesn't sound particularly awkward to me. Again, I blame my inability to distinguish pitch.

The only instrument I was able to pick up pretty easily was drums.

If you’re a programmer interested in music, do check out Strudel, at least the examples at https://strudel.cc/examples. If you like those (I love them, so much art in a few lines of code), the docs _will_ get you started. Enjoy!

This is clearly interesting and contributing value, but it's also painfully AI prose to the point where it is hard to not dismiss it as likely false information.

Fun interactive examples though. With another human pass, this could be great.

Website is down I think..