iSound

On tuning & creativity: Throughout history we have thought up many visual, numeric, and verbal ways to represent the beautiful vibrations that make up music...their direct speeds, the ratios between them and even ways to show how to tamper (temper) them. The earliest written tuning instructions come to us from the time of Hammurabi and are written by cuneiform in the language called old Babylonian. An example of this in the British Museum (U. 7/80) uses the term "unclear" to refer to the tri-tone, and recommends making it "clear" by sequentially raising tones by a half step. The reverse side of the tablet tells how to lower the "unclear" ones until all seven steps are returned to the original.

Pythagoras is said to have brought the "monochord", or single string, from Mesopotamia and/or Egypt. This method is as useful today as it was several thousand years ago. Today using the metric system for marking off the proportions on a mete...