Pythagoras of Samos
Pythagoras of Samos was an Ancient Greek polymath. He is credited with a vast number of ideas across mathematics, philosophy and music theory. It may be possible that many of these ideas could have preceded Pythagoras and his name was simply the name they got attached to. Whether that is true or not, what is more important is that generations of music theorists and composers after Pythagoras believed that they were building on his work. So whether or not Pythagoras himself contributed hugely to music tuning theory, the idea of him certainly did.
In tuning theory, Pythagorean has come to be almost synonymous with a 3-limit, pure just intonation approach to tuning. However, there are a few other terms that involve Pythagorean and Pythagoras that refer to other concepts.
To this day we use terms like:
- Pythagorean tuning
- Pythagorean intervals, chords, and scales, such as:
- Pythagorean means