How Western Music Tuning Came About: What is Equal Temperament?

(Image source: Animenz Piano Sheets- Youtube)

What is Equal Temperament?

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This is simply the system of tuning in which frequency intervals are generated at the same distance or ratio apart. It has to do with the octave being divided into 12 equal semitones. Essentially, you get to have all your notes at the same distance apart.

From the 12 semitones, each represents an interval between two tones with their frequency ratio as the 12th root of 2.
This temperament is one of the major things that differentiates modern music from the traditional ones, which used to be Just intonations.

12 Semitones

(Image source: themusicworkshop.com)

Development of Equal temperament

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There are many people that believe the notion that J. S. Bach’s work, The Well-Tempered Clavier was designed to promote the idea of Equal temperament in Music. This, however, is not the case as it was believed to have been formulated in 1635 by Mersenne.

Still, it was much later in 1750 that it became the standard in music following the realization of the complexities involved in earlier temperaments. By 1800, it began spreading from Germany to other parts of the world including England and France.

With The Well-Tempered Clavier, there are some that believe Bach wrote the work with the intention of promoting the ideas of equal temperament since he believed in the temperament and used it. Others think the work attempted to show the capabilities of the temperament. There are those again, that think from the term “well-tempered,” it is clear that he was only referring to the system that would work well in all keys equally. The only point of agreement in this debate, is that The Well-Tempered Clavier is one of most popular achievements the Baroque era.

Advantages of Equal Temperament

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The idea of Equal temperament has made it possible for the use of the scale introduced here, to tune other musical instruments including pianos and others that have relatively fixed scale.

With the equal temperament scale, each note has a frequency in the chromatic scale which relates to the frequency of the notes next to it by a factor of the twelfth root of 2 (1.0594630944....).

(Source: https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Equal_Temperament.html)

More so, the equal tempered scale is the same in all musical keys hence there is the ease of compositions without the need to keep changing the musical intervals. This is one of the main things that has made this temperament the standard in western music for over 200 years now.

It is on the keyboards that you will mostly get the importance of temperament since it is only designed to play the assigned pitches on different keys without leaving the player with the ability to alter it.

If Bach had known that digital technology would make changing keys literally just a button press, maybe this wouldn't have been invented.

Steemians, what do you think about this tuning process. It seems crazy that they came to it, but seems absolutely ideal for modern music to be in different keys.

YouTube links

J. S. Bach 2 picture source: thegreatcoursesplus.com
J. S. Bach picture Source: AntPDC (YouTube)