My aunt liked this quote so much, she copied it by hand from a book on the group The Four Freshman. I like it so much, I typed it up here:

“Bob Flanigan and Don and Ross Barbour are cousins. Our mothers were sisters.
At family reunions they would all stand and sing. The way they sang made a different sound from playing those notes on a keyboard. I never understood why they were so different until I read an article in The Outline of Knowledge Encyclopedia entitled “Sound Physics.”
It seems that in about 1700, the musical scale was quite complicated. An octave had 20 or more notes in it. Between F and G, for instance, there was F sharp, G double flat and G flat.That was called “the perfect diatonic scale.”
Johann Sebastian Bach came along and changed all this. He formed what is known as “the tempered scale” by choosing 12 of the 20-plus notes, and having his piano tuned that way. It was a lot simpler, but the beautiful quarter tones were left out. People’s ears could still hear them and harmony singers knew how to use them to make what they called overtones, but they were just not on a keyboard anymore.
Bob, Don and I were hearing those overtones or harmonics as kids and we became addicted to them. In our early Four Freshman days, we rehearsed without instruments. If my note was a major seventh, I could sing it on top of the note--sing it sharp, you might say, so it and the tonic note became a little less than a half-step apart. That’s what makes it buzz in your ear.
It may be that we were the first modern vocal group the world noticed who put the emphasis on harmony and overtones. Other groups are bound to succeed in doing it because there is something in people’s ears that needs harmony. That thing can make your hair stand up when a chord rings. It can make you shout right out loud!
That article about “Sound Physics” goes on to say that Handel, the great composer, “could not stand to hear music played in the tempered scale.” He had an organ built that would play all the notes in the perfect diatonic scale. Boy! That would be a bear to play!”
(by Ross Barbour)

After I typed this, my aunt played a Four Freshman CD in the car during an 8-hour trip home. I have to say--I didn’t get it. My hair did not stand and shout. But I’m still intrigued by the notes we don’t hear so much any more, the unnamed notes. That just because the notes aren’t on the sheet music or don’t fit our convention, our framework for music, doesn’t mean that we don’t hear them. It doesn’t mean they do not exist.

I want to know the unacknowledged.