Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2016 April 26

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April 26

11th overtone starting on C

Is it F♯ or F?? I thought it was F♯, but one site says it's F. Georgia guy (talk) 14:32, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

See eleventh chord. There are a LOT of conventions for constructing an 11th chord, and depending on which convention you use (basically which musical mode or musical key you are working from) than the 11th from C could be either an F or an F#. Just saying "what is the 11th from C" isn't enough information to determine if it should be an F or an F#. It depends. --Jayron32 14:48, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

The 11th harmonic of C is almost exactly halfway between F and F♯, and it seems to me that one would get a better idea of its sound by thinking of it as F (F-half-sharp). If you insist on picking one, though, it is 2 cents closer to F♯ than it is to F♮. Double sharp (talk) 15:21, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

On the keyboard, we don't have this note. But do they have it on instruments such as the violin?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:30, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Sure; just put your finger on the fingerboard close to midway between where it should be for F and where it should be for F-sharp. Double sharp (talk) 15:35, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Natural horns, bugles, alphorns have it, for example. German Wikipedia actually has an article on this tone: de:Alphorn-Fa. English WP doesn't, unfortunately, though it does have a subsection "eleventh harmonic" in the tritone article. ---Sluzzelin talk 16:29, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

The technique of lowering the 11:8 (alphorn-fa) on natural horns by hand-stopping to 4:3 (the true perfect fourth) is not new at all, so the former pitch must have been known since the advent of natural horns and trumpets. They are even occasionally called for. In Mozart's A Musical Joke, the 2nd movement appears to have the first hornist mistake dolce for meaning "unstopped", and as a result boldly issues forth the quarter-tone-out 11th and 13th harmonics instead of the intended perfect fourth and major sixth! Double sharp (talk) 01:24, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• On the issue of half-sharps and the like: There are an infinite number of notes one can play on a violin; in just intonation and instruments tuned to such, it is trivial for a well-trained musician to match a tone by ear and then learn by muscle memory where to place one's fingers to recreate that note. For fretted stringed instruments or keyboard instruments, there are a finite set of notes one can play, generally these are tuned to a chromatic scale where each key is exactly one semitone above the previous key. This is actually impossible in true just intonation to do correctly, so a "fudge factor" needs to be put onto the notes to make the instrument tune correctly; this fudge factor is called a musical temperament and the one used in modern tunings is called equal temperament. On a piano, such a thing as a half-sharp is impossible to play. On a guitar or other fretted instrument, one can employ string bending to get to it. --Jayron32 16:50, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

(Unless of course you retune your piano, but that's a very expensive solution, and tuning every string up a quarter-step will put enough extra tension on the frame to make playing it a very risky proposition!) Double sharp (talk) 01:19, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Also, many popular synthesizers and Electronic_keyboards etc. allow one to easily change the tuning or scale, sometimes by very small increments such as a cent_(music) at a time. SemanticMantis (talk) 13:12, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Do any electronic keyboards offer meantone (or other non-equal) tuning, with a knob to choose how many of the black keys are sharps? —Tamfang (talk) 08:47, 1 May 2016 (UTC)