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Minor second. A semitone, also called a minor second, half step, or a half tone, [3] is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, [4] and it is considered the most dissonant [5] when sounded harmonically.
The cent is a logarithmic unit of measure used for musical intervals. Twelve-tone equal temperament divides the octave into 12 semitones of 100 cents each. Typically, cents are used to express small intervals, to check intonation, or to compare the sizes of comparable intervals in different tuning systems.
A semitone is any interval between two adjacent notes in a chromatic scale, a whole tone is an interval spanning two semitones (for example, a major second), and a tritone is an interval spanning three tones, or six semitones (for example, an augmented fourth).
This is a list of the fundamental frequencies in hertz (cycles per second) of the keys of a modern 88-key standard or 108-key extended piano in twelve-tone equal temperament, with the 49th key, the fifth A (called A 4), tuned to 440 Hz (referred to as A440). [1] [2] Every octave is made of twelve steps called semitones.
Meantone refers to meantone temperament, where the whole tone is the mean of the major third. In general, a meantone is constructed in the same way as Pythagorean tuning, as a stack of fifths: the tone is reached after two fifths, the major third after four, so that as all fifths are the same, the tone is the mean of the third.
Equal temperament is the division of the octave in twelve equal semitones. The frequency ratio of the semitone then becomes the twelfth root of two (12 √ 2 ≈ 1.059463, 100 cents). The tone is the sum of two semitone. Its ratio is the sixth root of two (6 √ 2 ≈ 1.122462, 200 cents).
Starting on any degree of the mode gives the same sequence of intervals, and therefore the whole tone scale has only 1 mode. Messiaen's mode 2, or the diminished scale, consists of semitone, tone, semitone, tone, semitone, tone, semitone, tone, which can only be arranged 2 ways, starting with either a tone or a semitone. Therefore, mode 2 has ...
Since one semitone equals 100 cents, one octave equals 12 ⋅ 100 cents = 1200 cents. Cents correspond to a difference in this logarithmic scale, however in the regular linear scale of frequency, adding 1 cent corresponds to multiplying a frequency by 1200 √ 2 (≅ 1.000 578 ).