
Exoplanet Puzzle Cracked by Jazz Musicians - Errorcod3
https://www.quantamagazine.org/exoplanet-puzzle-cracked-by-jazz-musicians/
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camtarn
Does the chord sound kinda ... off to anyone else? I'm wondering whether this
is because the note ratios aren't _quite_ right to fall into a western twelve-
tone scale, or whether it's just me!

Also - the headline isn't really very accurate. The puzzle (how the planets'
resonance intervals could have remained stable over a long period of time)
isn't actually fully understood; it's just that a paper has explained how it
could stay stable for longer than previously thought. And the jazz musicians
weren't even involved in that paper - they're only really involved in
communicating why the problem is interesting.

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Ericson2314
Yeah chord sounds like shit. _Just tuned_ , as it is called with perfect
intervals, it should sound wonderful, and anything else wouldn't really be
stable in the way the astronomy portion of the article seems to say.

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Ericson2314
For the record, equal temperament is needed to make certain complex chord
_progressions_ sound good, but individual static chords always should sound
best with just intonation.

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yellowapple
With certain instruments (voice, strings, and trombones, namely; valve/rotor
brass instruments with finger-actuated tuning slides can pull this off, too,
depending on the arrangement), just intonation should work for nearly all
chord progressions, since the instrument is not constrained to particular
pitches and thus can freely move around to adjust for each chord in quick
succession.

~~~
Ericson2314
Right I wouldn't call that just intonation though, since pitches do not have a
static fundamental frequency.

I'd love to write a program that, given some midi, finds the perfect such
dynamic tuning. Then something else can either synthesize with that directly,
or fake it with the pitch weel.

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grzm
While there is a puzzle as to why the orbits of the planets have the
relationship they do and how stable it appears to be, in no way is it accurate
to that the musicians have somehow "cracked" or explained it. They've taken
the pattern and arranged music based on it. That is cool in and of itself, but
this title reaches much too far.

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Ericson2314
Drums sound interesting to me because of the phase offsets—the polyrythms
alone aren't so exotic. I wonder if those match the planets'.

