TET

First posted on August 9, 2018

Twelve-tone Equal Temperment (TET) was invented to allow musicians to play in arbitrary keys on a single instrument without retuning. In particular this allowed musicians to perform pieces which visited multiple different keys with only smaller temperment related tuning compromises. However, computers have no limitations of needing to retune, so there is no strong reason, other than traditions and accustomed ears, to stick with TET in computer composed and generated music. My (to be explained) hypothesis about the importance of IMD in music theory predicts that a minor seventh chord should be the most consonant tetrachord, but the minor seventh in question is not particularly close to the TET minor seventh interval. Why not compose on high level, the level of chord function, and translate down to notes and frequencies only at the last possible step with as much context as possible, then we can translate to more theoretically optimal frequencies and not to the persribed TET tones.