At 19:19 07/02/2016, David Pickett wrote:

>The fatal flaw in the argument above (which I seriously doubt has 
>ever entered a school text book) is that the unit of a second is not 
>fundamental: it is defined  "conveniently" by reference to other 
>physical phenomena, and the ear does not depend upon this 
>definition.  Instead of Hz, we could use a different unit.  Let's 
>call it the Marconi and define 1 Marconi as 1 cycle/pic where a pic 
>is a different measure of time than the second. (1 Marconi = 1 cycle/pic)

I think that another major flaw in the argument is that harpsichords 
do not emit pure sine waves; each note has a series of harmonics. No 
one with any experience tunes by comparing the fundamental sounds of 
two strings; we tune by listening to the beating of harmonics, and so 
a difference of 0.3Hz in a fundamental multiplies to a much larger 
difference between the respective harmonics of the notes.

We approach these matters from the simple physics that we learned at 
school and naive ideas about psychophysics, but careful analysis 
shows the existence of higher-order effects - much more interesting 
and much richer musically. 

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