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Comment by andrewzah | Hacker News Reader

No.

There are systems that have more than 12 notes.

Plenty of instruments hit these "microtones". E.g. string instruments with frets can bend strings, and string instruments without frets can just play those notes.

Genres of music like the blues frequently utilize these microtones.

12TET is just the custom in western music, but we can absolutely discern smaller intervals.

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yes, there are more than 12 tones, obviously. But If you play two neighbor microtonal tones together, you hear only one beating.

You can play with a 31/43/53 note keyboard yourself to see that you’re incorrect.

http://terpstrakeyboard.com/web-app/keys.htm

You can not differentiate two microtones playing together at the same time. Unfortunately, I could not test this with your link, because I could only play one after another.

You must not play an instrument because this is completely absurd.

I play the piano for a long time. And I have a clavichord that I tune myself and can tune microtonal to make such tests, which I do.

I can clearly hear different microtone combinations when playing multiple neighbors at the same time on the linked 53 note keyboard.

I'm sure at some point those tones will converge into a single note to human ears, but the fact that a 53-note keyboard exists shows that people can absolutely hear smaller divisions than just the 12 standard notes.

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