Dave's Free Press: Journal
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal
violence, pornography, and rude words for the web generationen-usZ The bad-tempered clavier
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/id/LJIMPORT-The-bad-tempered-clavier
I have recently been listening to DJ J.S.Bach's bitchin' dance album "The Well-Tempered Clavier". And I looked it up <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-tempered_Clavier>on Wikipedia</a>, where I found out that grown adults spend their professional lives argufying and theorising about what the curlicues in DJ Johann's hand-writing can tell us about the precise frequencies at which he tuned his instruments.<p>What none of them seem to have realised is that Bach <em>had no way of knowing what those frequencies were</em> and that while the knowledge existed for contemporary natural philosophers to have taken a stab at figuring out the relative frequencies (eg that this C is twice the frequency of that C) they would not have been able to make usefully accurate measurements of the one or two Hz differences - which are down in the quarter of a percent range - that these stupid academics are arguing about.<p>In fact, I can't really imagine a Baroque-era experimenter getting results more accurate than within 5%. And 5% is as near as damnit a semitone.<p>Grrr 2006-03-04T21:33:00Z