On Newton and Temperament

[SwamiJuan@aol.com]

On Newton and Temperament

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, "Let Newton be!"
And all was light.  (Pope's epitaph)

Some rather interesting research on acoustics by Newton has only recently
come to the attention of historians.  In 1702, after using a prism to break
white light into it's component colors, Newton tried to correlate the seven
colors with the seven notes in the diatonic scale.  However, he discovered
that light travels much faster than sound, which gave him the idea
accelerating sound to produce an "equal velocity" tuning, the first known
super-sonic temperament.  Although certainly colorful, this new tuning failed
to attain "warp one." Further research revealed that nothing travels faster
than light, with the exception of bad news (which obeys only its own laws).
 Undaunted, Newton constructed a temperament based on bad news.  Although
word spread rapdily, it was not very popular in the early 18th century (such
a tuning would have to wait until the 20th century to find wide acceptance).
 A temperament based on bad news intervals had the distinct disadvantage of
 when the music arrived, nobody wanted to hear it.