There can be little doubt that understanding how music works can help you to make better music; or, at the very least, make things easier when you’re at the composing stage of your project. Here, we ...

The basic definition of a scale is a set of musical notes arranged in order. Most people are familiar with the C major scale as being the one where you start at middle C on the piano and just play all ...

For singers and their audiences, being "in tune" might not be as important as we think. The fact that singers fail to consistently hit the right notes may have implications for the development of ...

Many musical cultures choose scales that establish simple frequency ratios (2:1, 3:2, 4:3) between notes. It is commonly believed that this choice is solely explained by the intention to maximize the ...

The use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech, according to researchers. The particular notes used in music sound ...