There’s a wealth of material online (and in books) about equal temperament, the standard tuning technique for Western music over the past several centuries. It’s complicated stuff, but really amazing to think about once you get a handle on the basics. Here’s a link to one primer:
Musical notes are periodic oscillations in air pressure, which we sense through our eardrums. If we plot a graph of the air pressure as a function of time while a musical note is played, we will get a wave-like shape – called a waveform – that repeats itself, such as these three:
CONTINUE READING AT: http://www.yuvalnov.org/temperament/