Complexity: Difference between revisions

Complexity of a just interval and complexity of a tempered interval should always go together
Complexity of a temperament: - badness (moved to the dedicated article)
 
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A commonly used temperament complexity measure is [[Tenney–Euclidean temperament measures #TE complexity|Tenney–Euclidean complexity]], which works nicely for multirank temperaments and equal temperaments alike.  
A commonly used temperament complexity measure is [[Tenney–Euclidean temperament measures #TE complexity|Tenney–Euclidean complexity]], which works nicely for multirank temperaments and equal temperaments alike.  


For an [[equal temperament]], a simpler definition of the complexity is the number of notes per octave, which means that [[12edo|12et]] has a complexity of 12, etc. For unusual mappings where 2 is mapped to a strange number of steps, that does not work. Norm-based complexities such as TE complexity are foolproof and equave-agnostic, however. For example, the TE complexity of 31et is 30.98, which is close to the edo number as expected for a patent val. But if one were to take the TE complexity of {{val| 1 1900 2785 3370 }}, which is technically a tuning of 1et, they would get 1038.83, which matches the complexity of the tuning much better than the naive approach of simply taking 1 for the complexity, and means that that val is roughly equivalent to 1039et in complexity.
For an [[equal temperament]], a simpler definition of the complexity is the number of notes per octave, which means that [[12edo|12et]] has a complexity of 12, etc. For unusual mappings where 2 is mapped to a strange number of steps, that does not work. Norm-based complexities such as TE complexity are foolproof and equave-agnostic, however. For example, the TE complexity of 31et is 30.98, which is close to the edo number as expected for a patent val. But if one were to take the TE complexity of {{val| 1 1900 2785 3370 }}, which is technically a tuning of 1et, they would get 1038.83, which matches the complexity of the tuning much better than the naive approach of simply taking 1 for the complexity, and means that that val is roughly equivalent to 1039et in complexity.
 
Complexity and [[error]] are both usually treated as undesirable characteristics, but there is a trade-off between them in that very low complexity temperaments (e.g. small [[edo|edos]]) typically do not have low error, and very low error temperaments (e.g. [[microtemperament|microtemperaments]]) typically do not have low complexity. [[Badness]] is a way to combine complexity and error such that a search for low-badness temperaments yields results with a particularly good trade-off between complexity and error.


== Links ==
== Links ==