seven colors, seven planets, seven n

[Schmidt, Dan]

Brian McCary sez:

| If Newton did want corrospondance between the notes of the
| scale and the colors, and from Malcolm Saunders' comments, it
| sounds like he did, then it seems to me he was trying to force
| to a somewhat arbitrary scheme, since there are eight notes in
| an octive.  Otherwise, of course, it would be a septive, right?
| The note we all forget in these evenly tempered times would be
| the flatted seventh, which, in the key of C, those retentive
| Germans occasionally refered to as H, at least through the time
| of Beethoven.  It shows up all the time in pop music, in
| dominant seventh chords just before the resolution to the tonic
| (some sort of short story in that theme...) and corrosponds to
| the 14th overtone in the harmonic series, where the eighth
| through the fifteenth overtones make up the notes of the
| octave.  I can't recall when the harmonic scale was abandoned
| for the 12 note tempered scale, but for some reason, I thought
| it was after Newton.
|
| Which just goes to show that scientists are just as prone to
| ritualization and fetishism as anyone else.  I believe it was
| Kepler who "proved" that there where only five planents,
| because there were only 5 perfect solids, which fit the known
| planitary orbits....

Well actually -

One doesn't speak of the number of notes in an octave, it's the
number of notes in a scale, which is seven.  An octave is just
the interval from one note to "the same note an octave up", which
has double the frequency.  The "eighth note of the scale", if
there were one, after you go through the seven, is the same as
the first.

When you indicate that a passage is to be played an octave up,
you write "8va", but when you want it to be played two octaves
up, you write "15ma", since you started counting from 1, not 0.
So a note and its octave transposition are seven notes apart.
The 8 in octave is really 1 + 7, not 0 + 8.

As long as I'm being anal, the other musical stuff quoted here
isn't entirely accurate either.  H in German (still) is what we
call B; their B is our Bb.  The flat seventh existed and was used
before equal temperament; in fact, the natural seventh is a more
recent invention.  Listen to Gregorian chant and it's generally
(always?) in a mode with a flat seventh.

The fact that there are two kinds of sevenths has nothing to do
with the "missing eighth note of the scale" or anything.  Any
given scale in a "normal" mode (i.e., not octatonic or nothin')
has seven tones.

Dan Schmidt  |  dfan at lglass.com  |  http://www2.lglass.com/~dfan