The most basic model of a tuning is an absolute tuning. An
absolute tuning maps a set of pitches to frequencies. This
definition may sound odd because colloquially, ``pitch'' can be used
interchangeably with ``frequency.'' As introduced in Section
1.6.3, in this work we use ``pitch'' in a restricted sense,
where a pitch is an element of a culture's music theory, whereas
frequency is a physical quantity. A pitch can be thought of as an
abstract representation of a frequency that can be made concrete only
through the application of a tuning. An example absolute tuning is
one that maps the set of pitches {C3, E3, G3} to {261 Hz, 329 Hz,
391 Hz}. Figure 3.1 is a block diagram of an
absolute tuning.
