How equal temperament ruined harmony
by Ross W. Duffin · first published 2007
12mentions
7recommended by
10HN commenters
2011–2026first – last mentioned
70% recommend30% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Explains the history and trade-offs of equal temperament and why tuning systems shaped how older music was composed and sung; suits readers curious about tuning, intonation, and historical context.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
First paperback printing; Also on Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Temperament-Ruined-Harmony-Should-ebook/dp/B001ULOPUY/
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If you're really interested in this, I highly recommend checking out the book How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) by Ross Duffin.
on “Music Theory for Beginners” ↗I also really appreciated "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)" by Ross Duffin.
on “Piano Tuning” ↗…abstracted away from composition and provides a more general description of tuning systems. The next two are composition focused, explaining how tuning system is an option for musical works. 1) The book "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony" provides excellent historical context on why ET was a great solution and how we kind of got stuck with it. While it could be read by anybody, having a bit of musical knowledge OR physics of acoustics…
on “What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation” ↗If you find this remotely intriguing, I highly recommend Ross Duffin's book How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care) https://search.worldcat.org/title/How-equal-temperament-ruin...
on “Werckmeister Temperment” ↗I'd recommend "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony" if you are interested in the nuances and trade offs of the imperfections of tuning.
on “Chord progressions of 25,000 songs” ↗You might find the book "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony" interesting, which presents a reasonably strong case that pre-1900s western music treated enharmonics as distinct pitches ("enharmonic" in the old sense seems to have referred to the distinction). Singers…
on “How to create minimal music with code in any programming language” ↗I highly recommend the book “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)” if you are interested in this subject.
on “Why can't you tune your guitar?” ↗…highest string is tuned correctly as the major third (and some octaves) above the lowest string. Otherwise, the interval would be a Pythagorean major third (81/64) which is somewhat dissonant. (In "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony," Duffin recounts how in the late 1800s, even the best piano tuners in Britain were unable to get exact equal temperament, being off by about 1 cent per note in such a way that favored common keys. And,…
on “Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People” ↗…something like 120 years old, and is perhaps a consequence of the industrial revolution and the demand for mass manufacture of musical instruments having uniform qualities it produced. Further reading: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by Ross W. Duffin (2008). My layman's takeaway from the book: Equal Temperament is a compromise tuning that allows a piano to access all major and minor modes, at the cost of the keys on the outer…
on “What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation” ↗…Singers and violinists can and do adjust intonation so each chord sounds (justly) in tune. The exception is if they were trained with equal tempered instruments (which is common nowadays - see Duffin, “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony”) or if they are playing with pre-quantized (fretted/keyed) instruments, in which case they would match the existing temperaments. So the linked article, while it shows some beautiful shapes linked to…
on “Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales” ↗…references to stuff that Mozart said). The book does say that equal temperament was known for centuries before it was used, but the people who first discovered it simply didn't think it sounded good. [1] "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care)" by Ross W. Duffin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament
on “Piano Keys” ↗…makes sweeter major thirds (closer to 5/4 than 12-EDO's 81/64) at the expense of more dissonant perfect fifths, which tends to work out OK for post-medieval western harmonic practice. [1] Ross Duffin, "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony"
on “Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People” ↗