Misconceptions about xenharmony: Difference between revisions

Musical instruments which produce harmonic series timbres are so rare and so unusual that, to a first approximation, essentially all the world's musical instruments avoid this kind of construction. There is nothing new about this conclusion: A. J. Ellis first stated in 1885 that his survey of world music showed that "The music of most of the world's cultures is not based on mathematics nor or integer ratios, but is very contingent, and arbitrary, and entirely unique to its own society." (Ellis, A. J., "On the Musical Scales Of Various Nations," ''Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts'', Vol. 3, 1885, pg. 536). The mathematical acoustics of most vibrating bodies have been known to be nonlinear and to produce inharmonic partials for most vibrating objects for well over 100 years: see Lord Rayleigh's two-volume ''Acoustics'', 1895, for details.