Ya whatever . . .




LOL . . . I stand corrected. I guess I fail to see how understanding all the mathematics is going to help anyone construct a better solo or write a better song. An electrical engineer gets the same toast as everyone else. Peace out, biz-atch! :)

Heh, just kidding about that biz-atch thing. :D

as far as i´m concerned i expect a theory forum to talk about music theory/history and not how to write a better solo or song - we have other forums here that handle these topics (guitar basics, songwriting, Technique & Style)

The answer to your question.
Steven pinker wrote about overtones, the fundamental note.
U see in nature when a monkey makes his mating call, u only preseeve the one note, The fundamental. But in way he sang out 8 notes at once, each one double the frequency of the last(why? becauce it proved to be easy for evolutionaryly construct voice box to reproduce) these notes are mind compreend on a sub concience level. These overtones can be heard on they´re own. Theses notes have been re-arranged and now comprise our scales. You probably got more then what u baggined for but this point zero on why we have the inventory of notes that we do.
This is a very incomplete explantion, i´m sorry. And my english is pretty bad, i´ve been attending a brazilian school for the last 3 years.

of course alot of overtones are included in almost EVERY tone you hear - that is what makes a piano sound like a piano and a horn sound like a horn - you can tell what instrument it is even when they play the same note - its the color of the tone and it depends on the overtones (not only , but to a very very big part)

O.K. guys, I dont' follow the scary science and for the moment I'm not even going to try to much as I'd love to understand but perhaps some of you would be interested to see Edward Lucy's site on tuning. He recons that 12 tone even-tempered tuning should be supplanted with a tuning system based more completely on overtones which he explains at some length on his website; along with all of theory there are also some transcriptions of popular melodies like Fur elise etc into Lucy Tuning. He even provides ratios of fret distances so people can make Lucy tuned guitars. Personally the challenge looks to scary to comprehend; 18 or 21 semitones per octave and hundreds more scales doesn't seems unatainable for me but it gives me a queesy feeling that we're using out moded (pun intended now i've spotted it) methods. Check it out, it's brilliant!

http://www.harmonics.com/lucy/ltindex.html