Benedetti's Puzzle (mathematically impossible music)

Hey you in the comment section! you're looking pretty acute!

This is like a calendar without Leap Year.

some kid in school: ugh i hate math problems im gonna be a musician instead music:

“You can’t actually have mathematically pure music without the pitch drifting.” Great. Now the sopranos have an excuse. THANKS FOR NOTHING ADAM.

“You either die a musician or live long enough to see yourself become an extraordinarily intelligent music theorist with enough information about music theory to make a person depressed.”

Me: already not comprehending Adam: "Of course it can't be this simple"

Adam is getting crazier and crazier. Just like Vsauce before Michael forgot his password

the weirdest part is that i starting singing the soprano part on the piano while imagining the lower notes in my head in order to stay in tune, and after a bit i found my singing was actually becoming sharper and sharper, without me even trying. congratulations adam, you made me comma pump myself

I need an endlessly looped version of this so I can hear the drift over a longer period of time.

"I'm not sure why you would want to - maybe just to flex on your teacher" I've never heard such a succinct summation of jazz before.

This literally drove me crazy when I was trying to learn music theory. I never knew about this specific puzzle, but when I was studying intonations, and doing a bunch of math that other people have already done for no reason, it occurred to me that you could never mathematically tune a piano. I guess you can, but it at the time I didn't know this was a stylistic choice a musician could make, it just seemed to contradict what I already knew about tuning. This cosmic joke drove me insane, as from my perspective it seemed like every instrument was 'faking it', even if it was just by a tiny fraction of a semitone. The reason I stumbled upon this, was I was trying to discover every unique intonation pattern that could be made using some combination of twelve notes. So if you choose to play just a single note, there is only one intonation pattern. If you play all twelve, there is only one pattern. If you choose to play two notes, that number goes up, but it also corresponds with the number of patterns if you had chose to play 11 notes. I literally wrote out each intonation pattern by hand, and then went about trying to eliminate duplicates. So one pattern might look different from another, but if you shift pitches, they are essentially the same. When you get to 7 note intonation patterns you will find the major and minor scales for instance. That is not 14 intonation patterns, but rather two. I did all of this to try to figure out why we use the major and minor intonation patterns, when mathematically many other patterns exist. I wanted to know what made those patterns different. For instance, using seven notes you could form a pattern where instead of a major scale of C-D-E-F-G-A-B, your scale went C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F#. You could use that scale to form a key, chords, chord progressions, and all that good stuff. It sounds horrible, don't do it, but you could. But I knew that somewhere in all my math were other scales that did sound good. There were blues scales, and jazz scales. I wanted to try to play each of these unique intonation patterns as if they were a musical key, and see if there were any that sounded good, but had never been used before. Then I got admitted to a mental hospital. That is not a joke. The musical/mathematical stuff was more a side effect of my mental health problems than the other way around, but that did happen. I had forgotten about all of this stuff until watching this video. I had gotten into music practice finally, knowing full well my instrument would never and could never be perfectly mathematically in tune, but being content with 'close enough' and 'sounds okay to me'. Thinking back, I'm sure someone could write a program on a computer that calculated every unique intonation pattern, build a 'chord wheel' of sorts around them, and generated a few sample composition to test whether they had any practical merits to them. Unfortunately I threw all my math in the garbage, and decided to learn to play in major and minor keys before exploring the depths of what is mathematically possible. The reason I did that was realizing what was mathematically impossible.

1:45 How did NOT I realize that was All Star until now after watching this for the 5th time or so... ADAM YOU CHEEKY LITTLE-

"It's very pretty. What do you call this?" "Oh, this piece is called Licc My Comma Pump".

4:10 “Multiply by the inversion.” That, my friend, is called dividing.

7:31 - Adam, you messed up a ratio! No , not in the music. The aspect ratio of the choir video is 4:3; you have it stretched to 16:9 !

Me after school: "Finally I can rest from maths and watch Adam Neely" Adam Neely:

Therapist: "The Lick Comma Pump isn't real, it can't hurt you" Lick Comma Pump: 9:59

Everyone asks how is music, but no one asks why is music 😞

him: “yeah you can hear that the key has gotten higher we’re in Ab major” me, tone deaf, hears literally no difference: “I mean I’m a little lost but fair enough”

8:02 " you can't have mathematically pure music without the pitch drifting" unless you make one-note EDM bangers :P