Music theory for nerds

Music theory for nerds
eev.ee

edit: just a comment about the temperament- before the octave was equally tempered intervals were rational fractions of the root. after the equal temperament was developed instruments could go across different keys without sounding too dissonant. the well tempered clavier was a series of preludes and fugues that JSB wrote for the equally tempered scale that goes across all the keys on the same instrument (the prelude in c major which is the very first piece in the collection is the famous one in Forrest Gump). but sometimes you want to return to the pure temperament - like if a passage focuses on a particular key for a while - and in the brass and wind instruments it is easy to squeeze the embouchure a little bit to slightly tweak the tuning of a particular note.

>How would that work for music that also uses notes outside the scale? These seem more like questions of composition, which I definitely don’t know anything about.

From wikipedia:

Although transpositions are usually written out, musicians are occasionally asked to transpose music "at sight", that is, to read the music in one key while playing in another. Musicians who play transposing instruments sometimes have to do this (for example when encountering an unusual transposition, such as clarinet in C), as well as singers' accompanists, since singers sometimes request a different key than the one printed in the music to better fit their vocal range (although many, but not all, songs are printed in editions for high, medium, and low voice).

There are three basic techniques for teaching sight transposition: interval, clef, and numbers ...

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposition_(music)#Sight_tr...