#music

On musical tuning systems, the arbitrary anchor of A440, and why every piano in the world is slightly wrong.

What happens to a song when you change its speed — and why the answer is stranger than it sounds.

The Trautonium was a synthesizer invented in 1929 that almost nobody remembers — except it shaped the sound of one of cinema's most famous films, and then vanished.

Solfège was invented to solve a specific problem. The solution worked so well it became invisible — and then it became permanent.

Cassette tapes became a vessel for something the music industry never intended — personal memory, migration, and meaning that no streaming service can index.

A 2,000-year-old Celtic war trumpet was just played again — and the gap between the sound it makes and the sound it once made is the most interesting part.

How a 10th-century melody was reconstructed from manuscript notation that nobody knew how to read for centuries — and what the silence between then and now actually tells us.

The restored Robert Johnson recordings reveal something true about all audio preservation: what you're hearing was never the original to begin with.

On the theremin, the instrument you play without touching — and what it reveals about the gap between intention and sound.

A 1,000-year-old musical setting of Boethius has been reconstructed and performed — and what's strange isn't that it survived, but what it survived as.