The word can also mean just simply "why", for example Matthew 14:31 "Wherefore didst thou doubt?". See dictionary.com, and as some have pointed out in Juliet's Shakespearean lament. This however is certainly a pretty archaic usage. The simple-ratio intervals upon which JI is based are what the human auditory system recognizes as consonance, if it ever has the opportunity to hear them in a musical context. 1 The significance of whole-number ratios has been recognized by musicians around the world for at least 2,500 years. Just intonation (hereinafter “JI”) is any system of tuning in which all of the intervals can be represented by ratios of whole numbers, with a strongly implied preference for the smallest numbers compatible with a given musical purpose. Unfortunately, this definition, while accurate, doesn't convey much to those who aren't already familiar with the art and science of tuning. The aesthetic experience of just intervals and chords, however, is unmistakable. The Strict Style, in addition to being the “vastly predominant world method,” is the method used in many works by composers including Lou Harrison himself, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Michael Harrison, and many others. This approach is more or less necessary if one intends to compose for a fixed-pitch instrument, such as a retuned piano or harpsichord or a refretted guitar, or an ensemble such as the Harrison/Colvig American gamelan. (Composing in the free style is a subject for advanced students, and is beyond the scope of this article.) If you have some experience with composition, you already have some idea of what sorts of scales, modes, and harmonic progression interest you and what their expressive properties are. Try mapping different versions of these figures onto a JI lattice like that in Figure 5. (Learn to construct such lattices for yourself; they’re a vital tool for understanding JI.) You will discover that there are many different versions of familiar resources such as pentatonic or diatonic scales. In 12TET, there is only one whole tone and one semitone, which can be arranged in a limited number of ways to construct five- or seven-tone scales. (There are only eleven unique intervals smaller than an octave in 12TET, though they may, in some cases, be called by different names.) In contrast, JI offers a much larger variety of such intervals (see Table 3), which can be used in constructing scales that are at once familiar and novel. Different versions of familiar scales will have different expressive properties and tonal centricities. Once one has chosen a mode or gamut, what then? Take time to familiarize yourself with all of the tones and the intervals that connect them. By this I mean familiar both aurally and computationally. Which intervals feel stable and which are in need of resolution? What melodic or harmonic figures lead to or away from the stable intervals?

Now Sauron prepared war against the Eldar and the Men of Westernesse, and the fires of the Mountain were wakened again. Wherefore seeing the smoke of Orodruin from afar, and perceiving that Sauron had returned, the Númenóreans named that mountain anew Amon Amarth, which is Mount Doom. There it is used like the conjunction and so; using therefore in that position would have caused a comma-splice error. To have used therefore, a semicolon not a comma would have been required. He’s asking out of what earlier reason he was born, not to what future purpose. He’s just asking why; you can’t start a question with therefore. I sat down at the table, closed my eyes, and took my first deep breath in what seemed like a year or so. The old woman looked at me and didn’t ask any questions, wherefore I gave her no answers. I really wished you were here, Kiera, because I felt the need to confess and to have some help sorting out what had just happened.Q From Joseph Flanigan: I was wondering about the origin of whys and wherefores and the correct spelling. The aspect of relationships between simultaneously sounded complex tones that has attracted the most attention among theorists is the coincidence of certain harmonics when pairs of complex tones are tuned in simple-ratio intervals, or conversely, the presence of beats resulting from the non-coincidence of these same partials when pairs of complex tones deviate from these simple intervals. For uses of therefore that will not tolerate being replaced with wherefore, consider the sense of therefore that is usually spelled therefor without a final -e: On the next day they bore her towards Ephel Brandir; but when they came to Dimrost, the Rainy Stair, where the tumbling stream of Celebros fell towards Teiglin, a great shuddering came upon her, wherefore afterwards that place was called Nen Girith, the Shuddering Water. Frodo gazed at the ring with awe; for suddenly it seemed to him that he understood. ‘Yes,’ she said, divining his thought, ‘it is not permitted to speak of it, and Elrond could not do so. But it cannot be hidden from the Ring-bearer, and one who has seen the Eye. Verily it is in the land of Lórien upon the finger of Galadriel that one of the Three remains. This is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, and I am its keeper. He suspects, but he does not know — not yet. Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlurien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.’

The complete expression is at least as old as Shakespeare, who used it in the Comedy of Errors in 1590: “Was there ever any man thus beaten out of season, When in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason?” Note the singular, once a common form: though it’s often misquoted, that’s the way the gallant Captain Corcoran and others sang it in HMS Pinafore: “Never mind the why and wherefore”.So far, we have been talking about the properties of musical intervals in isolation. This is much like talking about the properties of paint squeezed from a tube onto a palette. Musical intervals or painter’s colors are not without aesthetic affect when encountered in isolation like this, but it requires the work of a skilled painter or composer to use these materials in a way that reveals their true significance. There is no simple answer to the question “how do I go about composing in JI?” once you have acquired the basic resources needed to begin. There is no manual or course that will tell you how to do it. It is a question that individual composers must answer for themselves, depending on their musical taste and aesthetic preferences, and on how the music is ultimately to be performed. Lou Harrison, in his Music Primer, made a useful distinction: Originally published in 1985, SIPRI's study suggests some answers to these questions. The book examines the situation in a number of countries of key importance for non-proliferation: the two nuclear-weapon states which have declined to join the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (China and France); a group of nuclear ‘threshold’ states also remaining outside the Treaty (Argentina, Brazil, India, Israel, Pakistan, South Africa and Spain); and a group of states, both developed and developing, which for various reasons have joined the Treaty (Canada, Egypt, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan). The phrase is an interesting instance of the way English speakers can turn one part of speech into another without breaking stride. Conventional grammar would say that why is an adverb, but here it lurks in the guise of a noun, meaning “reason or explanation”. Likewise wherefore.