just intonation

n. Music

A tuning system having intervals that are acoustically pure.

[just, harmonically pure.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

just intonation

(Music, other) a form of tuning employing the pitch intervals of the untempered natural scale, sometimes employed in the playing of the violin, cello, etc

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

I accepted the invitation with a worldly grin and a perfectly just intonation, because I really didn't care what I did.

View in context

(A lengthier rebuttal by David Doty, who composes in and promotes just intonation, is "From the Editor: A Response to Julia Werntz," 1/1 11:2 (Winter 2003): 2, 17-8.) Werntz's contention that "historically ...

Correspondence

His aesthetic encompasses these extremes and more: the seemingly static but subtly changing nature of the American Southwest, the purity of just intonation, the precision of mathematical relationships.

Quintext: Five Textures for String Quartet and Bass

He never wavered from the view that Pythagorean tuning was the proper theoretical basis for music (he of course recognized that tempering of intervals was necessary in practice) even though he lived to see just intonation all but take its place.

A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians

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