Amusia Podcast

Описание: Hosted by Tom Janes and Blake Troise (AKA Protodome), Amusia is a show aimed specifically at music nerds of all backgrounds, each episode covering various music-related topics in detail.

In this episode, we explore equal temperament and why we use it.

Some notes on things discussed in the episode:

There is more information on the musical ability (or inability) of animals in Aniruddh Patel's course 'Music and the Brain'.

According to WikiPedia, the twelfth root of two or is an algebraic irrational number.

The information on the difference in ability in absolute pitch across cultures came from Oliver Sack's book Musicophilia. Here is what it says (in the chapter 'Papa Blows His Nose In G'):

One of the most intriguing correlations occurs between absolute pitch and linguistic background. For the past few years, Diana Deutsch and her colleagues have studied such correlations in greater detail, and they observed in a 2006 paper that “native speakers of Vietnamese and Mandarin show very precise absolute pitch in reading lists of words”; most of these subjects showed variation of a quarter tone or less. Deutsch et al. have also showed very dramatic differences in the incidence of absolute pitch in two populations of first-year music students: one at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and the other at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. “For students who had begun musical training between ages 4 and 5,” they wrote, “approximately 60% of the Chinese students met the criterion for absolute pitch, while only about 14% of the US non tone language speakers met the criterion.” For those who had begun musical training at age six or seven, the numbers in both groups were correspondingly lower, about 55 percent and 6 percent. And for students who had begun musical training later still, at age eight or nine, “roughly 42% of the Chinese students met the criterion while none of the US non tone language speakers did so.” There were no differences between genders in either group.

The information on the amount of true tone-deafness in the population, maybe as high as 5%, also came from Musicophilia (see the chapter 'Things Fall Apart: Amusia and Dysharmonia')

Here is the Amazon link to 'Beethoven In The Temperaments':
https://www.amazon.com/Beethoven-Temp...

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Here you can check out Protodome's music:
https://protodome.bandcamp.com/album/...

Here you can check out Tom's music:
https://tomjanes.bandcamp.com/album/b...