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4.1.4The Meaning of Overtones In Finding an Organizing Principle for Scale Construction
Recall that "overtones" means tones that comprise the harmonic series. And recall what happens when you pluck a guitar string that you’ve cut in halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, and so on, by damping the string over various frets. You get a whole series of soft overtones—overtones that sound different from the fundamental.
As the guitar-string-damping experiment reveals, each overtone not only sounds different, it also sounds good. Brain-friendly. So it would be a reasonable guess that a brain-friendly scale might have something to do with the relationships of overtones to each other.
Hmmm. Maybe relationships among the overtones hold the secret to finding an organizing principle that will yield a useful scale, a group of tones in a brain-friendly ordered relationship.
Time to bring back the overtone series and have a look at overtone frequency relationships (Table 8 below). Frequency relationships among the first few overtones, the strongest ones, are of greatest interest. They’re the ones you can hear by damping a guitar string at various fret positions.