"Cents are the most universally used interval measure"
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“Cents” sounds like pocket change, but Ellis is talking about the sly genius of standardization: a tiny unit that lets musicians, instrument makers, and theorists speak the same pitch language without agreeing on the same instruments, scales, or even cultures. A cent is one hundredth of a semitone in 12-tone equal temperament; it’s not a sound you naturally sing or hear as a discrete step. It’s a measuring tape, not a melody. Calling it “universally used” is Ellis staking a claim for a shared technical vernacular at a time when musical practice was anything but unified.
Ellis lived in the 19th century, when Western tuning was hardening into modern norms while scholars were also collecting and comparing “exotic” tunings with colonial-era zeal. His work helped popularize the idea that you could translate wildly different pitch systems into a single comparative grid. The subtext is confidence - maybe overconfidence - in quantification: if you can assign a number, you can make traditions commensurable, analyzable, and, in the wrong hands, subordinate.
The line also reveals a writer’s instinct for the practical. Interval ratios (like 3:2 for a perfect fifth) are elegant but cumbersome for everyday comparison; cents turn logarithmic pitch perception into manageable arithmetic. Ellis isn’t romanticizing music. He’s insisting that precision is the price of cross-cultural conversation - and that the most “universal” tool in that conversation may be the least musical thing about it.
Ellis lived in the 19th century, when Western tuning was hardening into modern norms while scholars were also collecting and comparing “exotic” tunings with colonial-era zeal. His work helped popularize the idea that you could translate wildly different pitch systems into a single comparative grid. The subtext is confidence - maybe overconfidence - in quantification: if you can assign a number, you can make traditions commensurable, analyzable, and, in the wrong hands, subordinate.
The line also reveals a writer’s instinct for the practical. Interval ratios (like 3:2 for a perfect fifth) are elegant but cumbersome for everyday comparison; cents turn logarithmic pitch perception into manageable arithmetic. Ellis isn’t romanticizing music. He’s insisting that precision is the price of cross-cultural conversation - and that the most “universal” tool in that conversation may be the least musical thing about it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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