Tradition from church music led in Italy (then shortly after France and Spain) to naming notes of the reference major scale by conventional syllables: Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La Si (this corresponds to C D E F G A B) coming from the latin lyrics of a very well known piece of that time. The anglo-saxon notation obscures the history a little. Why is C major the reference scale for natural tones ? Two points that may have not been completely answered. Wendy Carlos experimented a lot with this, and made such scales as the Gamma scale with a slightly mind-boggling 34.29 notes per octave. There are equal temperaments other than the 12 tones per octave that will sound fine, but they don't generally have a integer number of notes per octave. The five tones that are in between the basic seven are, as expected, called "half-tones". But when you split it into 12 notes, you get close enough to the seven notes of just intonation for it to be bearable, except to some unlucky few supposedly burdened with overactive perfect pitch. You can indeed split the octave into 11 or 13 notes if you should wish to do so, but to most people it will sound out of tune. It splits the scale into equal intervals, meaning you can transpose a tune into other keys, and also means you can do dramatic chord changes and other interesting things. So out of this came then the equal temperament.
Also, musicians were exploring the limits of what you could do with just intoned instruments. You can't transpose the song to fit the singer. This means that if you want to sing along with the instrument, you have to find a singer whose range fits the song in the scale the instrument is built for. If you play a tune on the wrong scale, it will sounds out of tune. These theories were important because it meant it was possible for different instrument makers to make instruments that could play scales together, thereby making orchestras.īut just tuning has a problem: you can basically only play the scale that the instrument is built for, because the intervals between the notes are different. This theory had its problems, however, and was improved upon by later people, eventually ending up on what is called a " just intonation"īasically, notes sound harmonious if the frequency of the notes is close to a simple interval, like 3/2 or 5/4. Why some notes sounded right and others wrong wasn't of great concern for most of humanity's history, until Pythagoras, (yes, the guy with the theorem) noticed that it had to do with intervals, and made a music theory based on perfect fifths. Originally, instruments were made to simply play notes that sounded "right" together. This requires an excursion into musical history.
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