[iainctduncan]

You know those HN posts where someone who barely knows how to program decides to tell you why language X is terribly designed? This is that.

Anyone with a decent understanding of music and acoustics can tell it's silly from the title and abstract alone.

[dswilkerson]

Does Daniel Levitin, author of "This is your brain on music", count as someone with "a decent understanding of music and acoustics" ? He thinks that Helmholtz explained harmony (he told me personally). However, as the essay points out, (1) The American Acoustical Society collection has an experiment stretching frequencies from 2.0 to 2.1 that they conclude shows that Helmholtz was wrong, and (2) if Helmholtz was right, there would be not harmony at all, as the essay points out. So even someone like Levitin is wrong.