Boomsliter and Creel

mclaren wrote...

> You can see some of the problems with Boomsliter &
>Creel's procedure right off.
> For one thing, they are essentially talking about
>modeling human hearing as difference tones. But that
>scheme was tried by Felix Krueger in 1906 and was
>conclusively debunked by Carl Stumpf in 1908.

Where in that quote, Brian, are you getting difference
tones?

> SUMMARY OF THE FAILURES OF DIFFERENCE TONE THEORIES
/.../

Difference tones can be used musically, but I agree they are
not likely to be the root of any major aspect of western
music as we know it.

> Given the overwhelming eveidence against any musical
>important of difference tones for human hearing, it's
>clear that Boomsliter & Creel's theory rests on a
>foundation which has already been demmolished.

Brian, Boomsliter and Creel's ideas have nothing to do with
difference tones. They may have speculated at some point
that difference tones could provide a mechanism for
projecting new roots at just intervals, but nothing in their
main thesis depends on, or has anything to say about
difference tones.

Most, if not all of the theories on difference tones I've
heard of are probably incorrect, I'll grant you.

> The second big problem with Boomsliter & Creel's
>theory of extended reference is that it boils down to
>unsupported personal preference.

Absolutely correct. Boomsliter and Creel didn't even have
a theory. They had a hypothesis.

> Well, you can see the whole plaethora of problems
>with Boomsliter & Creel's test procedure.

Yep.

> First, since B&C present while the listener used the
> search organ, they could have influenced hi/r without
> meaning to.

Yep.

> Second, the listener being tested always knew which
> pitches on the search organ he was playing, so there was
> a vast opportunity for bias, depending on the test
> subject's innate theoretical bias.

Yep, though unlikely that the subjects could have figured
out in real time which sequences amounted to a chain of
small ratios and which didn't.

> Third, the test subjects were ONLY given a choice
> of pitches already chosen on the search organ by
> Boomsliter & Creel, which intolerably and unacceptably
> biases the entire experiment.

This strikes me as the first serious problem.

> Fifth, lots of experiments show that performers
> tend to compress musical intervals smaller than a
> minor third and expand musical intervals larger than a
> minor third. This is probably what the test subjects were
> doing, and they merely chose the nearest available JI
> pitches even though JI has nothing to do with what was
> going on.

Well, I don't know about that. But you imply, and I agree,
that B&C never show their extended reference interpretations
are unique... that such an interp. can't be created for any
sequence of choices at the organ, or that a given sequence
can't have more than one interp. This is the biggest hole
in Boomsliter and Creel, in my opinion.

> Sixth, B&C did not provide an adequate set of
> alternatives for listeners. They should have provided
> 12 equal AND extended reference pitches AND a whole
> set of non-just non-equal-tempered pitches. But B&C
> couldn't do that because their search organ was
> very limited in the total number of alternate pitches
> it could allow for each musical notes. To put it bluntly,
> the search organ was a piss poor idea from the outset
> because you can only have so many keys on any keyboard-
> based musical instrument.

Well, I think a suitably-constructed keyboard, with a
suitably-large equal temperament and the right experiment,
it could work.

In another approach, subjects could be recorded singing the
melodies, and the recordings could then be subjected to
pitch-tracking (a technology that didn't exist when the
original study was done).

Lastly, a tool like melodyne could be used to create several
versions of a melody, and blind comparative listening tests
could be done.

> There is not one shred of evidence for the false claim
> that singers or string players "naturally play in just
> intonation,"

You never said what type of JI you meant -- melodic or
harmonic -- and you cussed me out when I asked. At the
time, we were discussing adaptive tuning, which deals with
harmonic intonation. Now we're discussing B&C, who deal
with melodic intonation. Which, or both, is it?

> and there much evidence against the musical old wive's
> tale that solo performers "naturally play in JI." --

There must be, since you've already called it a "false"
claim.

> Lastly, we may note that Boomsliter & Creel's approach
> is a typical Western mathematical reductionist approach
> to music. First, the issue to be studied is stripped of
> its complexity by removing it from the real world (instead
> of playing free pitches, the performer is forced to choose
> from among the predigested pitches available on the search
> organ). Then the issue to be studied is boiled down
> further to a mathematical skeleton (i.e., B&C's extended
> reference scheme). The final stage occurs when the
> researcher declares the original rich complexity of
> the real intonation in real music in the real world
> irrelevant, and substitutes the dessicated mathematical
> skeleton for the rich living original as the "real"
> version.

Yeah, you definitely have a point. But you're wrong to
assume "people like me" are up to the same thing, without
taking the time to consider what we're saying. Music theory
has moved beyond it's embarrassing roots, right here on the
internet.

-Carl