Ancient music developed in China

Posted by Merv and Merla Watson

Music of the western world has built on ancient Chinese discoveries of harmonics. 3000 years ago
while making a close study of the movement of the planets and stars, Chinese court astronomers
discovered harmonic principles that they translated into frequencies for structuring musical instruments. Using strings made from cat gut, they experimented with various string lengths and came upon sounding patterns such as a sounding string when halved in length, produces and octave sound. That is, each division of a sounding string produces harmonics. Taking this information, they applied it to a string instrument and by varying the sounding length of a string, made divisions that eventually led to multiple stringed instruments.

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