zlacker

>>surpri+(OP)
I had a computer architecture prof (a reasonably accomplished one, too) who thought that all CS units should be binary, e.g. Gigabit Ethernet should be 931Mbit/s, not 1000MBit/s.

I disagreed strongly - I think X-per-second should be decimal, to correspond to Hertz. But for quantity, binary seems better. (modern CS papers tend to use MiB, GiB etc. as abbreviations for the binary units)

Fun fact - for a long time consumer SSDs had roughly 7.37% over-provisioning, because that's what you get when you put X GB (binary) of raw flash into a box, and advertise it as X GB (decimal) of usable storage. (probably a bit less, as a few blocks of the X binary GB of flash would probably be DOA) With TLC, QLC, and SLC-mode caching in modern drives the numbers aren't as simple anymore, though.

>>pjdesn+Fw
I can see a precision argument for binary represented frequencies. A systems programmer would value this. A musician would not.

>>waffle+mD
musicians use numbering systems that are actually far more confused than anything discussed here. how many notes in an OCTave? "do re mi fa so la ti do" is eight, but that last do is part of the next octave, so an OCTave is 7 notes. (if we count transitions, same thing, starting at the first zero do, re is 1, ... again 7.

the same and even more confusion is engendered when talking about "fifths" etc.

>>fsckbo+uJ
The 7 note scale you suggest (do re mi fa so la ti do) is comprised of different intervals (2 2 1 2 2 2 1) in the 12-fold equal tempered scale. There are infinite ways of exploring an octave in music, but unfortunately listener demand for such exploration is near infinitesimal.

>>waffle+MX
don't you mean 11-fold? ... oh wait, they aren't even consistent

>>fsckbo+w11
They sum to 12

>>waffle+7o1
actually they multiply, 12th root of 2, to the 12th

>>fsckbo+wC1
12th root of 2, to the 12th = 2 :D The collection of 7 intervals I provided, 2 2 1 2 2 2 1, which are a differential representation of "(do) re mi fa so la ti do", sum to 12. Those intervals are linear within the log2 scale you identified as having a 12th root of 2 basis, or in other words, are the major diatonic (7 note) scale which are a subset of the 12-tone equal tempered scale. The laws of logarithms can help explain why these intervals are additive, whereas the semitone basis (12th root of 2) is multiplicative.