Copyright

BENCH DEGREE
Music

Published by Bench Degree.

This book is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). The full terms are at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. In plain language, and this is the whole of it:

You may copy this book. All of it, in any medium, for any purpose, including commercially. You may print it, host it, quote it at any length, translate it, excerpt it for a class, rebuild it as a website, read it aloud, feed it to a machine, or sell copies of it. You do not need to ask, and there is no circumstance in which the answer would have been no.

Two conditions, and they exist to keep the material free rather than to protect anybody’s interests. Say where it came from, so a reader can find the original and check it. And if you publish something built on it, release that under these same terms, so the next person inherits exactly what you did.

Why a licence rather than a disclaimer. Nothing in this book is a discovery. The music is centuries old, the experiments are older than anyone reading this, and the ratios belong to whoever first heard them. What is new is the arrangement: which experiment sits next to which explanation, and in what order. That arrangement is the only thing here that copyright touches, and it is being handed over on purpose. Copyright is used here to guarantee your freedom to use this rather than to restrict it, which is the idea the free software movement gave the rest of us, and it is worth saying that debt out loud.

The experiments were never covered in the first place. An apparatus, a procedure and a measurement cannot be copyrighted by anyone, so build, modify, photograph and publish any of them without reference to this page at all.

First edition, 2026. First printing.

This book is published free, in full, on the web at the same time it goes to print. The complete text, every figure and every listening example are at benchdegree.com. If you paid for this copy you paid for paper, ink and postage, and the price is set as close to those costs as the printer allows.

How this book was made

This series discloses its production honestly, using the five credits published at bookcredits.org. They are given here in full for this volume.

Credit	Who, and what they did
C for Concept	Joe Kuefler. The series, this volume’s argument, and the rule that every claim traces to a primary document.
D for Direction	Joe Kuefler. Scope, order, what stays and what goes, every experiment chosen, and the decision to publish free.
M for Models	Claude (Anthropic), principally Claude Opus. Research synthesis across primary sources, drafting of prose, the code that draws the figures, and the code that synthesizes the listening examples. Most of the sentences in this book were written with a language model.
E for Editing	Joe Kuefler, with the model. Every number checked, every experiment assessed for whether it can actually be done, and the music theory corrected where the draft was wrong.
A for Art direction	Joe Kuefler. Cover system, typography, and the rule that a cover portrait is a real document or openly a drawing. Figures are drawn to specification, never image-generated.

What that means in practice, stated plainly. A language model did the reading and most of the writing. A person decided what the book is for, chose the experiments, checked the arithmetic, and is responsible for every error left in it. No claim in this book is sourced to a model, a video or a summary. Where a chapter rests on a patent, a paper, a standard or an original text, that document was read.

Nothing in this book is an image-generated illustration. Every diagram, keyboard and staff of music is drawn from a specification by a program, and every note on those staves was checked against the text. Every listening example is synthesized by a program from the notes and numbers on the page; nothing is a recording, and no sound in it was generated by a model. All the music reproduced is in the public domain or was written for this book. The cover portrait is Elias Gottlob Haussmann’s painting of Johann Sebastian Bach, 1748, which is in the public domain by age. It is rendered here as an engraving by a program that sets the thickness of each line from the tone of a photograph of the painting; nothing in it was invented.

Printed in the United States of America.

The measurements in this book are given in both metric and imperial throughout, because the two audiences who need them do not overlap.

Bench Degree

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