Engineer's comma

This page presents a novelty topic. It may contain ideas which are less likely to find practical applications in music, or numbers or structures that are arbitrary or exceedingly small, large, or complex. Novelty topics are often developed by a single person or a small group. As such, this page may also contain idiosyncratic terms, notation, or conceptual frameworks.

Interval information

Expression	[math]\displaystyle{ \pi/3 }[/math]
Size in cents	79.84035¢
Names	pi over 3, engineer's comma
Special properties	reduced
Harmonic entropy (Shannon, [math]\displaystyle{ \sqrt{nd} }[/math])	~4.32957 bits
Comma size	medium

Pi over 3, or the engineer's comma^{[idiosyncratic term]}, is a transcendental ratio of 79.84 cents.

The name "engineer's comma" was proposed by Eliora. The naming reason is that in the STEM student community it is common to light-heartedly joke about how engineers round π down to 3.

Temperament

π/3 occurs in the Pitave system, which uses a an increase of frequency by a factor of π = 3.14... as an interval of equivalence. Tempering it out means that the pitave is equated to the tritave, 3/1.

Trivia

1 step of 15edo is a very close approximation of this interval.