[sonorous_sub]

I think you could make the piece more interesting to the casual reader by grounding the subject in its history. It's been suggested by the book below that the dominance of equal temperament in western music is a relatively recent innovation, something like 120 years old, and is perhaps a consequence of the industrial revolution and the demand for mass manufacture of musical instruments having uniform qualities it produced.

Further reading: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by Ross W. Duffin (2008).

My layman's takeaway from the book: Equal Temperament is a compromise tuning that allows a piano to access all major and minor modes, at the cost of the keys on the outer ring of the circle of fifths to be somewhat out of tune. An ET "C Major" "sounds best", and the further you move away from it in either direction, the worse the key sounds. Also, the fact that Beethoven and Mozart were aiming for just intonation and/or meantone in productions of their works seems to be sort of an inside secret among music maestros, with rigid adherence to equal temperament slyly pushed on competing rookies to keep them trapped in the lower ranks by virtue of their resulting weaker performances. But the subject is highly contentious in western music for sure.

[smrq]

I haven't read this book, but that takeaway doesn't sound right. In ET, all keys are equally out of tune--that's a natural consequence of it being equal. In contrast, it's just intonation in which chords become progressively further out of tune the further they get from the center.

It's true that ET is a compromise in some ways, but it actually opens up the possibility for radical modulations into more distant keys without having to adjust intonation on the fly. In that sense, just intonation is also a compromise.

[black_knight]

I disagree. I really liked that this post focused on the subject matter, rather than the history. History can be interesting in itself, but I find that when trying to actually learn something it is just a layer of distraction. Maybe “casual“ reader would find it interesting to read about the history. But more technically inclined readers might then just bounce off the piece because they would have to weigh through history in order to get to the part which they actually found interesting.

[phlakaton]

Better reading IMO: Temperament by Stuart Isacoff. It is a small-ish music history book that covers the whole subject pretty thoroughly, with various tuning options that have been tried through the centuries, while treating the tradeoffs between them in a fair manner.

[olau]

If you have not read it, you might find the last part of the blog post most interesting. It covers shortcomings of just intonation.