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But what I should talk about now is Pythagoras. Most people know Pythagoras for his theorem about triangles. Greek culture was obsessed with the number three. Thats where the "trinity" in Christianity comes from too. Pythagoras was also a 3 fanatic, and invented what we call Pythagorean tuning. Pythagorean tuning could be described like this:
1. Take a tone (1/1)
2. Multiply that tone by 3/2
3. You have a new tone! 3/2! Now multiply that one by 3/2
4. You have a new tone! 9/8! Now multiply that one by 3/2
5. You have a new tone! 27/16! Now Multiply that one by 3/2
6. You have a new tone! 81/64! Keep doing this until you just dont want to anymore.
Pythagorean tuning is just one big scale of 3s in the numerator, and 2s in the denominator. Its not very diverse, or expressive, but it became immensely popular because it was simple and it had the number three in it. And greek culture just kind of assumed the number 3 was something good.
Ptolemy I think lived about 500 years after Pythagoras. He came up with just a ton of scales. He recognized that pythagorean tuning wasnt necessarily ideal. He came up with the whole Do, Re, Mi Fa, Sol, La Ti. That was one of his many scales. Do Re Mi, could be rewritten as 1/1, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 5/3 15/8. But again, Ptolemy came up with a tone of scales, some of which went up to 11 limit tuning.
Pythagorean tuning basically spread everywhere. It even reached India, but it never caught on. Indian music is tonally richer and I suspect that from their perspective there was no merit in pythagorean tuning. At that point they had already developed a very deep and complicated music culture.
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