These two passages are indeed different and then stumped my ear training group in gym. I’m not convinced I would have gotten this, but some of you got it right away. Reading through the guesses, there are a lot of clues as to what’s really going on.
The difference isn’t just pitch, it’s temperament. A tuning system. This is the Pythagorean system, and it’s not the way your music arrives when you get it off the shelf.
If this sounds a little out of tune to you now, that’s because it is. But this is the way your instruments are tuned, and for the vast majority of you, this is how you listen to music. Now to make this more apparent, I’m going to adjust the way Logic interprets pitch.
I designed this tuning table to adjust the notes of the scale so they align as closely as possible to the pure ratios that exist in the harmonic series. There is absolutely a purity of tone here. There’s an absence of beating between the frequencies that some of you thought was an LFO.
Let’s switch back to equal temperament and tell me if you can tell the difference. So no pun intended, but here’s the rub. This tuning may sound more true.
It’s all well and good until I try to play a pitch or a chord that’s too far away from the one that I started with. Like this one. Even though this one sounds pristine.
So we tolerate a little bit of sour to be able to play in all keys.
