Universal in the sense that a number of rocks or a number of sheep can be doubled just as a frequency can?
The notion that there are 8 sub divisions to a doubled frequency interval isn't universal. Balinese Gamelan doesn't even neccessarily have an agreed number of "notes" in an "Octave" from one village to the next.
It's pretty much the foundational idea of any modality. No matter how you divide it up, the purest harmony is doubling or halving.
I was asking to tease out some PoV perspective, again Gamelan doesn't neccessarily have powers of two, or 12, etc divisions of a doubling (or Octave, if we're using that term); it's a non western style of percussion that has a suprising number of local variations (it's essentially near unique to Balinese culture) in divisions and tunings.
The Octave wikipedia entry includes:
Octave equivalence is a part of most musical cultures, but is far from universal in "primitive" and early music
Cheers for the response, appreciated.
But I suspect there’s a clear biological mechanism which makes it easy to mistake one octave for another from any source of roughly harmonic sound. This is due to the similarity in the overtones of two harmonic sounds that differ by an octave. I would be surprised if this mechanism isn’t universal, although its on various musical systems can obviously vary a lot.
Yes thats what I meant, the doubling of frequency. It might seem trivial but the fact that doubling frequency sounds "right" to humans is actually quite interesting. Why does it sound "right"?
So yes, the 12-tone scale is a universal thing - you want both octaves and fifths in your scale.
(12 is actually too much, so usually that's pared down to something like 4 or 5 or 7 tones, this is where you get cultural variation.)
Math checks out.
> So yes, the 12-tone scale is a universal thing -
I don't follow the logic here though. It's certainly true that a 12-tone / Chromatic scale is ubiquitous within the Western Music tradition .. but the universe is reportedly a little larger.
Even Western Music includes exceptions like the 9-note augmented scale, though the argument can be made that it's a 12-scale with 3 bits "missing" - not a case that can be made about a non-western 7 note percussive scale.
Also the so-called "Western music" standardized on 12 tones very late in the process, long after the Chinese figured it out.
> a 12-scale with 3 bits "missing"
That's all scales, even the "non-Western" ones. Microtonality is added to the standard 12 tone to add tone effects. (Synthesizers in pop music do the same trick.)
https://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/
Note also that certain musical traditions were suppressed or eradicated due to their unfortunate habit of using dissonant notes such as minor seconds, as opposed to the consonant traids favored by a particular group recently in power around the world. Happy Easter!
The microtonalities or strange scales (like gamelan) are evolutions of the natural octave/fifths grid.
Every synthesizer has a "detune" knob.
What is your source for this opinion?
Gamelan predates the Hindu-Buddhist culture that dominated Indonesia in its earliest records and thus represents an indigenous art form of Indonesia
How do you know anything that comes prior to recorded history?
The obvious exception in the western system would be the blues scale, which arguably has 9 tones (7 equal tempered notes, plus a just tempered 3rd and 7th).
And Indian ragas break all of these rules. They have scales that don't have 8 notes, scales that don't use equal temperament, and even a few scales that don't repeat on octaves.