English

Alternative forms

• (music) eptameride

Noun

heptameride ‎(plural heptamerides)

1. A thing having seven parts or divisions.
   • 1914, The Saturday Evening Post, vol. 186, iss. 4, page 45.

     The Greeks had Seven Wise Men and Seven Sleepers, and the Pythagoreans saw magic in all the heptamerides.

2. (chemistry, dated) A seven-unit oligomer.
   • 1930, British Chemical Abstracts: Part A, Pure Chemistry, page 317, ISSN 0365-9259.

     The residue remaining after the separation of the heptameride is colourless and very viscous; there appears little prospect of isolating higher polymerides [...]

   • 1938, Albert Ernest Dunstan, Benjamin Talbott Brooks (eds), The Science of Petroleum, vol. 4, page 2830, OCLC 313182716.

     Fractionation of the liquid polymers gave compounds up to the heptameride.

   • 1939, British Chemical Abstracts: Part A, Pure Chemistry, page 602, ISSN 0365-9259.

     From available v.d. data the existence of polymerides is shown and the relative amounts of various associated forms up to the heptameride have been calc.

3. (music, obsolete) An interval of pitch equal to 1/7 of a meride, or 1/301 of an octave.
   • 1984, Joseph Sauveur (trans. Rudolf Rasch), Collected Writings on Musical Acoustics: (Paris 1700-1713), page 28, ISBN 9070907089.

     Sauveur divided the heptameride into two demi-heptamerides. One demi-heptameride is 1/602 of an octave, with frequency ratio 1:2^1/602 = 1.001 154 or 1.993 cents, very nearly 1/12 of a ditonic comma.

   • 2007, Translator's notes in: Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, page 437, ISBN 1602066396.

     As 301 = 7 × 43, he called each degree a heptameride, which he made = .03987 of an (equal) Semitone.

   • 2008, Patrizio Barbieri, Enharmonic: Instruments and Music 1470-1900, page 378, ISBN 8895203143.

     Sauveur stresses that the difference between the pure 5th (176 heptamerides) and the tempered 5th (175) is equal to 1: so the temperaments of all the other intervals will also be multiples of 1:

Synonyms

• (chemistry) heptamer
• (music) savart

Related terms

• meride
• decameride