The riddle of the Pythagorean Comma is one of the oldest mysteries in the science of sound and forms the cornerstone of Natasha Mostert's suspense novel, The Other Side of Silence.
The problem of the Pythagorean Comma is a complex one and any discussion of this topic is usually highly esoteric. But it is a fascinating and thought-provoking phenomenon.
Music is one of mankind's passions. How ironic then that we should find ourselves living in a world, which is out of tune. Literally out of tune. It is impossible to tune any modern musical instrument to acoustic perfection. Even a piano tuner in laboratory conditions will be unable to tune a piano one hundred percent perfectly. The reason is buried in one of the oldest and most mysterious puzzles in the science of sound and one that modern man with all his cutting-edge expertise in acoustic technology is unable to solve.
Think of it, if you will. We are living on a planet filled with musical instruments that are all off-key. On a piano, for example, only the octaves are perfect. The fifths, fourths, thirds and so forth are not - they are 'tempered', 'adapted' - robbed of their purity. The reason lies in a strange-sounding phenomenon, The Pythagorean Comma: a mathematical blip, an imperfection in musical intervals, and the reason why musicians have no choice but to make use of equal temperament and a flawed musical scale.
True, the tempered scale is so close to being harmonious that we can live with it. Besides, we don't really know any better. We're not exposed to anything but imperfect music anyway, and have been since birth. Any-one with normal hearing would be able to recognise 'tempered' from 'pure' if asked to do so, (e.g. distinguish between a tempered fifth and a pure fifth), but as musical theorists like to say, our upbringing has left us sadly 'earwashed'.
Now imagine what it would be like if we were able to get rid of the Pythagorean Comma and produce a perfect musical scale. If we were to wake up one morning to a world where every instrument is an instrument that is tuned perfectly. It will be as though we've been looking at a beautiful picture that is just slightly blurred. And all of a sudden, the entire picture will slide into perfect focus. But this is unlikely to happen. Brilliant minds over the centuries had grappled with this problem to no avail. Pythagoras gave the world a scale based on perfect fifths that was acoustically flawless but did not allow for musical innovation, so it had to be abandoned. In the sixteenth century the Pythagorean scale was replaced with the system of just intonation, but this did not take care of the Comma problem either. The German composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, came up with a compromise solution. His system of equal temperament - the tuning system that has become the norm - allows for modulation, but is acoustically flawed. Every solution that was dreamt up over the millennia has turned out to be flawed in some or other respect.
Who knows, maybe this is one mystery not meant to be solved. Maybe the ancient sages had it right. They believed that a broken musical scale is there to remind us of our fallen state of imperfection. Mortal music is flawed...and so is man. We should do well to remember it; we: easily tempted to hubris, curious, always over-reaching.
Natasha Mostert's thriller The Other Side of Silence poses the question what would happen if the mystery of the Pythagorean Comma was solved. If the Pythagorean Comma should be eliminated, the world will be in possession of a perfect musical scale. This could have cosmic implications. Perhaps the Comma is forbidden fruit. Perhaps man is not meant to ever find a solution to this problem.
But in The Other Side of Silence, four friends are setting out on a quest to solve the puzzle of perfect tuning, unaware that this could have cataclysmic consequences. They have discovered in the Pythagorean Comma the master key to the building blocks of the universe. If this key is ever turned, it could well push the world to the brink of chaos...
