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Hoots : Is there such a thing as a diminished unison? I'm working through Mark Sarnecki's Rudiments of music theory book, and I'm digesting the bit about augmented and diminished intervals. I'm confused as to how a diminished unison - freshhoot.com

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Is there such a thing as a diminished unison?
I'm working through Mark Sarnecki's Rudiments of music theory book, and I'm digesting the bit about augmented and diminished intervals.

I'm confused as to how a diminished unison can exist. By definition it would be one semi-tone smaller than a perfect unison, which cannot exist.

Am I missing some key idea somewhere? Thanks so much!

Edit: I don't believe the question is a duplicate, although it appears that way based only on the question headings. I posit that when the question bodies are taken into account, the questions are distinct.


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The unison is an exception to this due to how the unison works.

A perfect unison has a distance of 0 semitones from the original note while and augmented would have a distance of 1 semitones. Since the interval is perfect at a distance of zero one less would be -1 semitones, but since most theorists only consider intervals as a positive number a diminished interval would be impossible.


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