Your essay claims 12-TET is a compromise — every interval slightly wrong so all keys can work. Claims get tested. This page plays the same chord progression two ways: equal temperament (your piano) and just intonation (pure whole-number ratios, the 3/2 and 5/4 your W2 math promised). Which one do human ears actually prefer? That's an experiment — and you own the data.
Every trial shuffles which tuning is A and which is B. Nobody — including you — knows which is which until the reveal, and the reveal stays locked until 10 votes are in. If voters knew, expectation would contaminate the vote. That's the whole reason this counts as evidence (R3) and a quotation doesn't.
| Will listeners prefer just intonation, equal temperament, or fail to tell them apart? Your written prediction: |
write your prediction to unlock the lab ↓
How a trial works: press Play — you hear progression A, a pause, then progression B (same chords: I → IV → V → I, different tuning, random order). The voter picks. Headphones help; family members make it a real study.
votes: 0
In equal temperament the major third is ~14 cents sharp of the pure 5/4 — with rich timbres you can hear it as a slow beating (wah-wah) inside held chords. Just intonation kills the beats on I and IV… but its chords only work in ONE key. That's the trade your essay is about: purity in one key vs usability in all twelve.
Copy the revealed summary line into your worksheet's experiment box. Then write ONE honest sentence about what the vote can and cannot show (10 family votes is a pilot, not a peer-reviewed study — saying so out loud is what real researchers do; it's your Unit 3 limitation clause writing itself).