Neutral third 31-tet . Infants experiment with singing, and a few studies of individual infants' singing found that neutral thirds regularly arise in their improvisations. In two separate case studies of the progression and development of these improvisations, neutral thirds were found to arise in infants' songs after major and minor seconds and thirds, but before intervals smaller than a semitone and also before intervals as large as a perfect fourth or larger. The neutral third has been used by a number of modern composers, including Charles Ives, James Tenney, and Gayle Young. The equal-tempered neutral third may be found in the
One-third hypothesis One-third hypothesis The one-third hypothesis (OTH) is a sociodynamic idea—advanced by Hugo O. Engelmann—that asserts that a group's prominence increases as it approaches one-third of the population and diminishes when it exceeds or falls below one-third of the population. As the one-third hypothesis was stated originally by Hugo O. Engelmann in a letter to the "American Sociologist" in 1967: "...we would expect that the most persistent subgroups in any group would be those which approximate one-third or, by similar reasoning, a multiple of [i.e., a power of] one-third of the total group. Being the most persistent, these groups also should