Ensemble (Musik in Stadt und Land)

In the early 18th century, violinist Giuseppe Tartini came across a phenomenon unknown at the time: if he played two notes on his instrument at the same time, he heard – buried in between – the frequency of a third note.

Today we know that the human mind compulsorily forms a third from two sounding tones: it adds their difference to the two: so-called combination tones. What at first seems like mathematical nonsense or at best a colloquial truism is in fact a phenomenological fact: One and one is more than two.