History of tonal temperament
from /villagepump/History of the temperament.
History of tonal temperament
Invention of [Pythagorean tuning
Around 580-500 B.C., Pythagoras discovers that "when the length of the strings is 3:2, the sound is also beautiful.
Christianity adopts and popularizes the Pythagorean scale in religious music.
Development of polyphonic music (polyphony) in the 11th-15th centuries
Pythagorean scale has a bad sounding part.
Invention of pure temperament Bartolome Ramos
A Pythagorean scale that shifts a bad sounding part of the scale to a good sounding combination.
In the pure temperament, there are two types of whole tones, the greater whole tone (9/8) and the lesser whole tone (10/9).
1636 Invention of equal (or even) temperament Malin Mersenne.
12 semitones of equal width form a scale
Emphasizes mathematical beauty over beautiful sounding integer ratios
Do# and Le♭ are now the same note.
Transposition is now possible without tuning the strings.
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