Reply to mclaren

I get the feeling I'm never going to be your favorite person. ;->
Please forgive me if I don't accept each and every "challenge" for
"proof" that you demand: trying to satisfy you, or change your mind on
anything you believe or don't believe, is very clearly a futile
exercise. And, I don't really _care_ if you believe things that I think
are silly: it doesn't prevent me from doing the work I value in music.
My place is musical history does not depend upon your approval, nor does
yours depend upon mine.

I have pledged not to bandy about nasty words on this list, and I intend
to keep that pledge. Would you please do the same? If you want to
butt heads, let's do it on tuning-challenges (where, indeed, a post from
me already awaits you, if you're interested).

Thanks, and good luck with your music!

JdL

[mclaren wrote:]
>Of course John deLaubenfels' program of retuning 12-equal
>compositions to 5-limit JI by redistributing the warped
>out of tune melodic pitches in various elaborate ways had
>been tried in the 19th century.
> The entire program had been tried, and it failed:
>
> "Today the elaborate and ingenious attempts of Perronet
>Thompson, Bosanquet and others to devise new keyboards, with
>many more pipes to the octave, are historical curiosities, mere
>museum specimens. And one reason why they failed was that theorists
>left the properties of the human ear out of account." [Lloyd, L.S.,
>"Just Intonation Misconceived," Music and Letters, Vol. 23, No. 1,
>1943, pg. 133]

Mclaren, do you have _any_ idea what I do??? Have you ever listened
to just _one_ of my tunings? The tango, for example, which is in
this group's file section, under the JdL directory.

I don't think that what I do has been tried before, for the reason that
computers to do the tradeoff calculations didn't exist for a long time,
and when they became affordable, it took a few years for someone to
bumble along and do it.

It has nothing to do with keyboards. Each pitch class has a
continuously modifiable tuning (within the limits of resolution in MIDI
and the playback module), which the program calculates on the fly.

As to your assertion that I am beginning to "wiggle and squirm" because
I'm asking for actual MIDI sequences (of which there are thousands,
available for free, across a wide spectrum of genres, on prs.net and
other locations), all I can think is that you are afraid for a test to
take place. It is absolutely not necessary to demand that _new_
sequences be created just to satisfy a reasonable pick of pieces.

I gave you a chance to pick the pieces; now I'm giving that choice to
others.

JdL