Re: The "bias" of a tuning

[mclaren wrote:]
>And Helmholtz's claim that just intonation sounds better than 12-equal
>for common practice period Western music is systmeatically disproven
>by a wide variety of listening experiments. The experiments show that
>listeners either hear no difference, or hear classics of Western
>music retuned into 5-limit JI as sounding badly out of tune.

That's not the feedback I usually get! Though only about half or so
like my 7-limit treatments, the response to 5-limit is overwhelmingly
positive. Perhaps 1/4 say it's hard for them to tell a difference.

It is highly likely that past experiments offered badly retuned music,
with commas poorly distributed (if at all). No wonder people hated it!

JdL

> From: John A. deLaubenfels <jdl@...>
> To: <crazy_music@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 8:00 AM
> Subject: [crazy_music] Re: The "bias" of a tuning
>
>
> [mclaren wrote:]
> > And Helmholtz's claim that just intonation sounds better than 12-equal
> > for common practice period Western music is systmeatically disproven
> > by a wide variety of listening experiments. The experiments show that
> > listeners either hear no difference, or hear classics of Western
> > music retuned into 5-limit JI as sounding badly out of tune.
>
> That's not the feedback I usually get! Though only about half or so
> like my 7-limit treatments, the response to 5-limit is overwhelmingly
> positive. Perhaps 1/4 say it's hard for them to tell a difference.
>
> It is highly likely that past experiments offered badly retuned music,
> with commas poorly distributed (if at all). No wonder people hated it!

John, you really have to keep your adaptive-tuning bias in mind here.

Of course Brian is talking about no distribution at all. When he
says 5-limit JI, he means 5-limit JI, and not an adaptive tuning
based on 5-limit JI which distributes the commas. His whole point
is that rendering Eurocentric "common-practice" music in 5-limit JI
doesn't work because those composers wrote that music with the
intention that the commas would be distributed in some form of
temperament. Unless the piece happened to avoid bumping up against
any commas (as does Pachelbel's Canon, which is why Herman Miller's
JI versions of that work so well), a straight JI version would have
commatic shifts all over the place, which would make the melodic
lines sound weird and out-of-tune.

The feedback you get on how good 5-limit *adaptive*-JI sounds
for this repertoire doesn't hold for 5-limit *straight*-JI.
(of course you know that... I'm just clarifying what's been
written here in case others don't follow.)

-monz
http://www.monz.org
"All roads lead to n^0"

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--- In crazy_music@y..., "monz" <joemonz@y...> wrote:
> John, you really have to keep your adaptive-tuning bias in mind
here.
>
> Of course Brian is talking about no distribution at all. When he
> says 5-limit JI, he means 5-limit JI, and not an adaptive tuning
> based on 5-limit JI which distributes the commas. His whole point
> is that rendering Eurocentric "common-practice" music in 5-limit JI
> doesn't work because those composers wrote that music with the
> intention that the commas would be distributed in some form of
> temperament.

Maybe, maybe not. Some of them may have written without this
intention, but knowing full well that was what they were going to get.
By way of comparison, Mozart may have written for the forte piano, but
that doesn't mean that was the sound he wanted. The piano forte is in
many ways superior, and he may well have preferred it, had it been
available.

> From: <jdstarrett@...>
> To: <crazy_music@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 7:11 PM
> Subject: [crazy_music] Re: The "bias" of a tuning
>

> --- In crazy_music@y..., "monz" <joemonz@y...> wrote:
> > John, you really have to keep your adaptive-tuning bias in
> > mind here.
> >
> > Of course Brian is talking about no distribution at all. When he
> > says 5-limit JI, he means 5-limit JI, and not an adaptive tuning
> > based on 5-limit JI which distributes the commas. His whole point
> > is that rendering Eurocentric "common-practice" music in 5-limit JI
> > doesn't work because those composers wrote that music with the
> > intention that the commas would be distributed in some form of
> > temperament.
>
> Maybe, maybe not. Some of them may have written without this
> intention, but knowing full well that was what they were going to get.
> By way of comparison, Mozart may have written for the forte piano, but
> that doesn't mean that was the sound he wanted. The piano forte is in
> many ways superior, and he may well have preferred it, had it been
> available.

You're right, John... all very good points.

It would be really interesting if graduate students started analyzing
important historical harmony treatises and picked thru them to determine
what tunings would have been most likely, based on the descriptions of
the musical examples and any other clues the author might give about
intonation. To a large extent, this was what I was trying to do with
my own book.

I've argued in the past with Paul Erlich that while meantone was
certainly the accepted tuning paradigm for most of the European
"common-practice" period, many theorists -- and I'd bet composers
too -- had JI or Pythagorean at least partly in mind.

-monz
http://www.monz.org
"All roads lead to n^0"

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