The Dirty Secret of Equal Temperament's Emotional Power
The Dirty Secret of Equal Temperament Is That It Might Be More Emotional, Not Less Here’s what I expected to find: evidence that equal temperament — the tuning system baked into every piano, every guitar with frets, every digital synthesizer — is a kind of emotional lobotomy. That when we standardized Western music into 12 perfectly equal semitones, we traded feeling for convenience. The internet is full of this narrative. The 432 Hz crowd....