A wax statue of a person, though always redolent of the funeral parlour, is also "a semitone away from life", with eerily translucent skin and the sense that, once a viewer's back is turned, it may yet breathe and live.
In southwestern parts of the Central African Republic there is three-part harmonic singing with vocal parts shifting chromatically between two roots one semitone apart.
With the slide drawn in (first position), the notes of the harmonic series of the B♭ below the bass staff are available: B♭1 B♭ f b♭ d′ f′ a♭′ (approximately)–b♭′ c″ d″, etc. Shifting the slide a few inches to the second position allows the harmonic series of A, a semitone lower, to be sounded.
The cante jondo developed a distinctive melodic style, the foremost characteristics of which are a narrow range, a predilection for the reiteration of one note in the manner of a recitative (intoned speech), a dramatic use of ornate melodic embellishment, an Oriental preoccupation with microtones (intervals smaller than a semitone), and a subtle, intricate rhythm that defies notation.
This B♯, however, instead of being exactly in tune with C, is slightly higher, by 0.24 of a semitone.
The difference is the comma of Didymus, or syntonic comma, and equals 0.22 of a semitone.
One tuning with intervals expressed in cents (140, 143, 275, 127, 116, 204, 222) may roughly be represented by the following notes in a descending scale: C↑, A ♯, G ♯, G↓, F↑, D ♯↓, C ♯↑, and C. (Arrows up are tones slightly higher than Western tempered tuning [in which a semitone is equivalent to 100 cents] and vice versa for arrows down).
In the division of the octave established by the tuning system used on the piano, equal temperament, the smallest interval (e.g., between B and C, F and F♯, A♭ and A) is the semitone, an interval also measured as 100 cents.
In this last case, the octave would consist of 96 equal divisions, and the modern semitone would equal eight of them in sequence; e.g., between B and C would lie eight equal 16th-tone intervals.
All have the fourth valve and often a fifth valve tuned to a wide semitone for facilitating good intonation in certain fingerings.
In the course of the 5th century they calculated the intervals for the usual diatonic scale, the tone being represented by 9 8 (fifth minus fourth); i.e., 3/2 ÷ 4/3, and the semitone by 256:243 (fourth minus two tones); i.e., 4/3 ÷ (9/8 × 9/8).
