On the Sensations of ToneHermann Helmholtz
On the Sensations of Tone
by Hermann Helmholtz · first published 2013
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2HN commenters
2016–2025first – last mentioned
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I urge anyone interested in this topic to read Helmholtz's "On the sensations of tone", a fascinating 19th-century tour-de-force trying to understand music sensation as coming from physical principles, deriving the standard western intervals and consonance/dissonance from first principles…
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on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books or essays written at least 100 years ago?” ↗Next to this interesting article and comments, I think mention should be made of von Helmholtz's XIX century book "On the sensations of tone". He is considered to be the father of acoustics, and derived the consonance/dissonance of the notes in the diatonic scale from first physical principles. He extracted and computed what is described as…
on “Deriving the piano keyboard from biological principles using clustering” ↗…random or arbitrary, it has some nice dual mathematical and musical properties: intervals between the notes in the scale have special frequency ratios that sound pleasing to the ear (read Helmholtz's "On the sensations of tone" for a fascinating physically-based take on why it is like that -- he is known as "the father of acoustics", and that book contains the distillation of 8 years of deep, smart research way before we had…
on “Piano Keys” ↗