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Comment by rpz | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I was expecting the article to discuss tuning/temperament! Has anybody listened to Bach or Chopin's preludes played on a well tempered piano? To me it feels as if those pieces were written to take advantage of the different purities/impurities of certain intervals in each key.

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Composers did take advantage of the interesting properties of earlier temperaments.

With a non-equal temperament each key signature has a characteristic tonality due to its particular series of intervals, and a key that is 'far away' from the home key that an instrument is tuned for can have harsher sounding intervals. Equal temperaments like 12-TET were favored at least in part because they opened up possibilities for romantic era composers interested in exploring new ideas in modal harmony and more elaborate song structures.

There's a recording of the WTC by Richard Egarr that uses the tuning system derived by Bradley Lehman from the squiggles on the cover-page of the WTC manuscript. (See http://www.larips.com/ for more about that.) It sounds pretty good to me, though I'm far from being an expert. (Caveat: Some but not all listeners, of whom I am one, hear an annoying mains-hum-like sound on the Egarr CDs. I don't know whether it's a thing that affects some CDs but not others, or whether it's filtered out by some reproduction equipment but not all, or what.)

In a similar vein, singing to a more "natural" tuning (i.e. quarter-comma mean tone) is insanely more comfortable. Adam Newley and 12Tone on youtube have excellent videos that explore this topic further!

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