Musical Scales with Pythagorean Intervals

Musical intervals in speech.

Throughout history and across cultures, humans have created music using pitch intervals that divide octaves into the 12 tones of the chromatic scale. Why these specific intervals in music are preferred, however, is not known. In the present study, we analyzed a database of individually spoken English vowel phones to examine the hypothesis that musical intervals arise from the relationships of t...

Finding Alternative Musical Scales

We search for alternative musical scales that share the main advantages of classical scales: pitch frequencies that bear simple ratios to each other, and multiple keys based on an underlying chromatic scale with tempered tuning. We conduct the search by formulating a constraint satisfaction problem that is well suited for solution by constraint programming. We find that certain 11-note scales o...

The Appreciation of Musical Intervals

Triadic comparisons of musical intervals.

An analysis is made of the perception of musical intervals. Two kinds of stimuli were used; intervals consisting of two simultaneous simple tones (sinusoids) and intervals consisting of two simultaneous complex tones (fundamental plus harmonics). Subjects judged the stimuli by the method of triadic comparisons in an incomplete balanced design. Multidimensional analysis was performed according t...

Confidence Intervals for the Pythagorean Formula in Baseball

In this paper, we will investigate the problem of obtaining confidence intervals for a baseball team’s Pythagorean expectation, i.e. their expected winning percentage and expected games won. We study this problem from two different perspectives. First, in the framework of regression models, we obtain confidence intervals for prediction, i.e. more formally, prediction intervals for a new observa...