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Comment by FLT8 | Hacker News Reader

> “We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us,”

If you've ever tried building an additive synth, this probably seems obvious. If you play two tones with exact ratios together, the brain has a tendency to interpret them as a single tone with a different timbre. By making the ratios slightly off (don't have to be by much at all), or by making the ratios vary a little over time (eg. Subtle vibrato), the brain is able to pick out the "consonance" as a chord, and it sounds far more interesting.

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It's almost as if Patterson has no clue about the history of tunings, in the West or elsewhere.

Perfect harmonic tunings sound incredibly exotic and out of tune to Western ears - not least because we're so used to slightly-imperfect equal temperament. We have decades of exposure to it, so it sounds normal. A perfect perfect fifth sounds very strange, even a little disturbing, and thirds are almost dissonant.

I don't think anyone who has even the first idea about this has ever suggested that harmonic tunings are a goal, an ideal, or even a practical possibility. (See also, Pythagorean Comma.)

Just intonation tuning of chords (but not melodies) is the ideal in barbershop music. Barbershop music also uses harmonic sevenths, which are not found in standard 12EDO equal temperament. I've never heard of anybody calling barbershop "strange" or "disturbing".

I don't think anybody is likely to call a perfect fifth or third those things either. You can easily check using the "Generate, Tone..." feature in Audacity. I recommend using a sawtooth wave, which contains prominent high harmonics that make it easy to hear subtle difference in tuning. The worst criticism I'd make of perfect just intonation is that it can sound boring, for the reason the GP post suggests.

My suspicion is that learning music theory (for any specific cultural norm) is a bit like learning about font kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/

Many of the auditory things that trained musicians describe as creepy or weird, seem unremarkable to me.

I would say that is because there is nothing to compare barber shop music too.

I am a big fan of Terry Riley's - Harp of New Albion exactly because its five-limit just intonation piano sounds so incredibly weird to my ears.

See also La Monte Young- Forever Bad Blues Band. I listened to it and it sounded "different" but not particularly weird (I was already listening to Phish, The Dead, and indian music, so I think I was prepared for blues in just intonation).

I don't think everyone is equally sensitive to this. Just intonation sounds a bit different to me from equal temperament, but it doesn't sound disturbing. Likewise, although I have heard a lot of Indian classical music that is not in equal temperament, so I am pretty acclimated to it, when I hear Indian classical music played on equal temperament instruments it does not sound that bad. Some subtleties are definitely lost, and I prefer the non equal temperament tunings for that kind of music, but I do not find it disturbing.

Related, a friend likes to say instruments that produce too pure sounds (too much like a sine wave) sound somewhat boring, because of their lack of timbre characteristics. I think this is a somewhat general property; although in general art is more of a language. I think a pure sine can sound right in the right context (e.g. perhaps how we remember fondly, and still enjoy, chiptunes and retro music), and it can have a particular meaning within that context that makes sense.

It is indeed a common complaint of many of the chiptune genres that they can sound boring, especially for audiences too old or young to have as much nostalgia for the hardware whose constraints set the genre constraints. The basic NES "instruments" were simple wave generators that were about as pure as waveforms get, plus one simple white noise generator.

I've met critics that even think that "pure" chiptune sub-genres such as the ones that stay within the bounds of physical NES hardware "can't" survive long-term. I think they are wrong both because I've heard some extraordinary things done within those constraints in my lifetime and for some of the reasons that "minimalism" will always be a viable subgenre of "Classical" (no matter how boring some people find that, too). But I understand where that idea comes from of how such a unique set of hardware constraints gave us some of the "purest" waveforms possible and why such pure waveforms are generally an anomaly in music.

Ah yes, [simple and boring](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lScTUyEsA4). You get 3 voices or whatever's on your chip, but you can also re-adjust them up to hundreds of times a second any way you like. Of course if you just leave them fixed for long times they will sound a bit boring.

"Imperfect" tunings are pretty common even in western musical instruments.

Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, for example, which are staples of pop and jazz, usually use what's called Stretch Tuning, wherein notes an octave apart are just slightly higher than 2:1 frequency ratios.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning

A “normal” piano with strings uses stretch tuning too.

Many synths have 'detune' knobs/settings specifically for the purpose.

OTOH fretless instruments (e.g. violin) allow for playing perfectly harmonized chords when desired.

Even playing a single note, having your oscillators a couple cents out of tune with each other contributes to a warm sound!

Old polyphonic synths like the venerable Oberheim OB-Xa would have their voices go slightly out of tune as the instrument warmes up. It's subtle, but once you hear it you start to notice the color it adds

This is intriguing and clearly not new as you say - my strobe tuner offers "sweetened" tunings for guitar. Going to have to experiment with this variation now...

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