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frequency can be used to measure things that really feel like they should use different units.
"how often should my OS check the state of the keyboard"
"middle C"
this is technically a coherent answer
"how fast are we actuating this motor"
"middle C"
is actually where floppy disk music comes from
"what's the frequency of this radio"
"D27"
"how about this CPU"
"F#27"
@astrid @lily ok but bloody web designers actually do this shit
they say shit like "our website is designed around a minor third interval" to mean that headers are 20% bigger than body text and just please shut the hell up, no, first of all that's a preposterous thing to do and second of all you haven't defined if you mean an just intonation minor third or an equal temprement minor third because if you've designed the whole thing around the fourth root of two then your devs are going to at best ignore it and at worst murder you
@astrid @lily it really isn't. Not least because they'll never get to the ×2 interval because their minor third isn't ⁴√2, it's 1.2, so stacking four of them will give you ×2.0736. And one of their favourite intervals is ϕ — the whole point of musical intervals is to be (or approximate) neat, simple ratios and the whole point of ϕ is to be as far away from any of those as it can. It's arguably the most violent possible discord you can produce with two notes. It's not just a pointless analogy, it's actually *fighting* them.
@astrid @lily @andrewt What I particularly like is /why/ people get all golden ratio on music (*):
An octave has: Five black notes. Eight white notes. Thirteen notes. 5, 8, 13, Fibonacci, Φ!
Unfortunately, the 8 and 13 double count the first/last note, and it's really about the twelfth root of two.
So you've got a whole branch of musical numerology based on incorrect 1-based indexing!
((*) Sorry, Andrew, if this is what you were referring to, but I didn't see it explicitly mentioned.)
@sgf @astrid @lily oh my god what, no, i've never heard of this nonsense? what the hell?
like half of all the one-digit integers are Fibonnaci numbers
0 
sort of
1
2
3
4 
5
6
7
8
9
it's hardly a surprise that the 5 and the 8 hit, and the 13 is just those added together so that one's free
and that's assuming you count from C. what if you're playing in C#? Then an octave has six black notes and seven white notes, those aren't Fibonacci numbers! there are three non-fibonacci numbers lower than 9 and you've hit two of them.
why do all the maths cranks focus purely on ϕ and cantor's diagonalisation theroem
@andrewt e.g. https://www.goldennumber.net/music/ ! It's one of those things that just gets repeated around by people who don't really get the maths.
To be fair, "black and white notes" are more accurately 8 notes in a tonal scale (really 7), selected from 13 notes (really 12) in the octave. "Black and white" is just explaining that in the context of C major.
@mattmcirvin @sgf @astrid @lily @andrewt - Bartok sometimes used the Fibonacci numbers in his work, but also some have seen them there when they're not:
https://mathcs.holycross.edu/~groberts/Courses/Mont2/2012/Handouts/Lectures/Bartok-web.pdf
@johncarlosbaez @mattmcirvin @sgf @astrid @lily @andrewt so irrational smdh 
@mattmcirvin @astrid @lily plus ça change
@andrewt @astrid @lily It actually might be interesting to use the golden ratio as an intentionally dissonant interval, like the tritone but more so. (I guess it's about 833 cents, a third of the way between a minor and major sixth?) But it's probably no more interesting than any other kind of dissonance. There's an infinite supply of intervals derived from it that are just as dissonant.
@andrewt @astrid @lily the golden ratio thing is already annoying on its own because there's a bunch of claims about it being aesthetically pleasing in geometry, but any time someone's attempted to verify this scientifically people invariably bias in favour of ratios that are slightly higher (i.e. Slightly longer rectangles)