Acoustics & Music Theory
why it sounds like that
Concept

Continued fraction — where it appears

The expansion of an irrational number as a nested fraction, whose truncations are the best rational approximations to it. Applied to the fifth it produces the sizes at which a chain of fifths nearly closes — 12, 17, 29, 41 and 53.

Named by 2 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

How far a chain of fifths is from closing, after each number of fifths. The distance from a whole number of octaves after each number of pure fifths, in cents, out to 60. It is never zero, because a fifth is 3/2 and no power of 3 is a power of 2. The running minima are 1, 2, 5, 12, 41, 53 fifths, and the residue at each is that division's comma: 23.46 cents at 12, 19.84 cents at 41, 3.62 cents at 53. A 3-against-2 polyrhythm asked the same question closes exactly and at once — 3 pulses of the 3 are 2 of the 2, to the last microsecond — because 3/2 is a ratio of whole numbers and log2(3/2) is not.

A comma is a polyrhythm that never closes

Seven earlier essays have rested on a common grid. Two cycles have one when their ratio is a ratio of whole numbers, and the fifth against the octave is not — provably, from unique factorisation. So there is no grid, no composite and no least common multiple, and what is left over instead is the sequence 2, 5, 12, 41, 53 with a comma attached to each.

tuning · Polyrhythm The sizes a chain of a pure fifth will make. Chains of a pure fifth of two to 12 notes, each folded into one octave and drawn on a 1200-cent line. A chain has exactly two step sizes at 2, 3, 5, 7, 12 notes and three or more at every other size in this range. The five-note and seven-note cases are the chain's pentatonic and its diatonic set, and they are neighbours in a series rather than two separate facts.

The only sizes a fifth will make

Stack pure fifths and fold them into an octave, and at almost every number of notes the result has three or more different step sizes. At 2, 3, 5, 7, 12, 17 and 29 it has exactly two — and at no other size below thirty. The pentatonic and the diatonic set are not two discoveries. They are neighbours in one series, and it is the comma's series.

scales · The diatonic set

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Chain of fifthsDiatonic scaleEqual temperamentLeast common multipleMoment of symmetryPentatonicPolyrhythmPythagorean commaStep patternWell-formedness

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