It's strange how once you get interested in a topic, you start seeing stuff about it everywhere. First the Clojure-based Overtone project, and now this...
So for example the simplest ratio 2:1 corresponds to an octave interval. Notes which are an octave apart sound so similar that we describe them with same letter. So concert A is 440Hz and the "A" note one octave higher is 880Hz.
The next simplest ratio, 3:2 corresponds to the interval known as a perfect fifth. So given the example of concert A at 440Hz again, one perfect fifth above concert A is the note E which has a frequency of 660Hz as (440 * 3) / 2 = 660.
We find the simplest ratios of frequency intervals present in music from cultures the world over. The traditional classical Western twelve-note scale consists of the 12 simplest frequency ratios. In some Eastern music we hear a pentatonic or five note scale, which consists of the five simplest frequency ratios.
So this aspect of music we can attribute to innate psycho-acoustics or even physics rather than cultural bias.
It's inextricable from cultural bias, though the physics obviously plays some role. The cultural bias comes into play more strongly around the question of how much dissonance is "good" vs. "bad", and how the more dissonant bits should interplay with the more consonant bits of music.
Certainly, "more consonant = better" isn't true in any culture I can think of.... Imagine an orchestra that tunes up, then they all play the note A in various octaves for 3 hours.
Possibly also worth mentioning that this isn't quite correct:
> The traditional classical Western twelve-note scale consists of the 12 simplest frequency ratios
You're thinking of the major scale, maybe? The ratios for a tritone, major 7th, etc. are more complex (and not the first 12 simplest...) and if you try to actually come up with ratios for an even-tempered scale you're really in trouble.
Why do some note combinations sound good.
http://irkenkitties.com/blog/2012/11/28/consonant-intervals-...
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You can read a lot in the subreddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/16h5fk/how_do_y...
http://www.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/16gl5h/a_questi...
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Equal temperament instruments present all kinds of problems, wolf intervals in the extreme (Pianos have inharmonicity/octave stretching, flutes effectively have octave stretching, guitars have all kinds of funkiness
The guy who wrote Overtone did so while he was learning music, but he isn't actually a composer. SuperCollider was developed mostly by academic musicians with a deep knowledge of experimental and traditional computer music practice. So it and the Quarks (packages) community have a wealth of code to explore.
http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/ http://quarks.sourceforge.net/
I've noticed this too. It's so strange and creepy at the same time. Whenever a topic interests me it seems to pop up in the news and everywhere, but I can't remember seeing it before at this frequency, also it never seems to appear again when I stop being interested in it.
I have done similar work in Java -- built a library exploring note relationships, and also handling basic notation display -- but one of these days I'm going to need to migrate everything from Java applets (I know, I know) to HTML5, so I'm collecting these kinds of resources that may prove useful....
The name selection isn't great, BTW... there's been a well-known music theory website at teoria.com for more than a decade. It's a generic term (just "theory" in Spanish), so this likely isn't a legal issue, but that's going to make it quite hard to find this in Google.
(For bonus points the search engine is written in Go).