Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup makemicromusic A textbook for tuning theory (was: wallowing and questions)

Hi all,

Gene asked:
> What in the world could people use as a textbook for tuning theory?

Rick McGowan answered:
> ... and of course, none of these books we've mentioned is easily
> available at all. Doty is out of print and I can't even find it used.
> Partch is out of print. Blackwood is in facsimile reprint at
outrageous
> price, etc, etc.
>
> What's a student to do? And a prof couldn't reasonably expect students
> to be able to obtain any of these as textbooks for a course.

Paul Erlich replied:
> There should be a small number of required readings from these books,
> so that the students can use the one copy of each the school library is
> likely to have. There's so much other material to cover anyway that
> anything more than a few select passages/concepts from each of these
> books would begin to crowd out some equally important stuff.

Seems to me that a couple of you guys could
well edit a book of selected readings for
students of Musical Tuning Theory (note
the caps! - I'm thinking "academic" here.)

Paul, if you were to teach such a course,
it's clear your syllabus would "require" some
readings. What's the chance of you doing so?

A base level course would cover the
fundamentals, and there are surely too many
choices there rather than too few. Helmholtz
is of course historically important, and both
he and his English translator Alexander Ellis
have relevant and valuable insights to offer
today. (Read the Appendix on teaching the
art of sol-fa singing, for example.) However,
his style is rather too heavy and old-fashioned
for modern audiences.

For the base level course, I'd rather a book
that delved, at least a little, into the psychology
of perception, rather than absorbing itself with
much historical minutiae. The history is, of
course, relevant, but only broad outlines are
necessary to set the stage for a) explaining
general practice of the "common-practice era"
and b) introducing a few alternatives that
students might use today. So some readings
from Sethares make sense in this context.

More to the mathematical side of this, there's
also another book that I downloaded a PDF of
a while back: Dave Benson's "Mathematics and
Music" -
http://www.maths.abdn.ac.uk/~bensondj/html/maths-music.html

Altho this book will shortly be published by
CUP, Benson promises to maintain and update
the PDF version as well. I found Benson's
approach both modern and balanced. (I can't
say the same for his old home page at the
University of Georgia, which totally cracked
me up.)

This course should also, IMO, include a brief
look at the development of musical notation,
culminating in the reading and application of
a primer on Sagittal. Notation is a necessary
tool for exposition and analysis - as well as
being very handy for performers. As for the
Sagittal primer - well, that's up to the authors
of Sagittal to organise; I've recently had
some discussions offlist with both Dave
Keenan and George Secor on this topic, and
we've sketched an outline of such a primer.
That primer should be a simple thing, of perhaps
a dozen linked web-pages, and need not
represent an expense for students to acquire.
But it does first need to be written! Consider
this a challenge for anyone who feels bored:
Hi, Jacob, you still tuned in? :-) For motivation,
consider how many more people would hear your
music, if only they knew it was out there to
start looking for.

Subsequent courses could explore the history,
psychoacoustics, alternative notations, the
full tuning theories used throughout history by
the classical traditions of the West, Arabs,
Persians, Turks, Indians, Greeks, Byzantines,
Babylonians and Sumerians, ancient China (look
at the Zeng bells of 443 BC, whose tuning
Martin Braun has explored), the depths of
Partch's and Wilson's discoveries in diamonds
and lattices, some of the many discoveries made
by members of this list, including Gene, Paul and
George (do we have a Richard?), ...

Regards,
Yahya

🔗Jacob <jbarton@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Yahya Abdal-Aziz" <yahya@m...>
wrote:
>
> This course should also, IMO, include a brief
> look at the development of musical notation,
> culminating in the reading and application of
> a primer on Sagittal. Notation is a necessary
> tool for exposition and analysis - as well as
> being very handy for performers. As for the
> Sagittal primer - well, that's up to the authors
> of Sagittal to organise; I've recently had
> some discussions offlist with both Dave
> Keenan and George Secor on this topic, and
> we've sketched an outline of such a primer.
> That primer should be a simple thing, of perhaps
> a dozen linked web-pages, and need not
> represent an expense for students to acquire.
> But it does first need to be written! Consider
> this a challenge for anyone who feels bored:
> Hi, Jacob, you still tuned in? :-)

Well there's something I haven't thought much about in a while. A
corpus of sagittal scores must be accumulated, and so on.

On the textbook side of things, I've long wanted the existence of one
of those "Dummies" books...but it turns out that "Complete Idiot's
Guides" (www.idiotsguides.com) is the one to approach with a proposal.
But something like that would have to be perfect.

🔗Paul Erlich <paul@...>

Teaching a course? I guess if people wanted to come to my house, I'd
take the time to teach them. I'm not interested in being a
professional academic right now.

> A base level course would cover the
> fundamentals, and there are surely too many
> choices there rather than too few. Helmholtz
> is of course historically important, and both
> he and his English translator Alexander Ellis
> have relevant and valuable insights to offer
> today. (Read the Appendix on teaching the
> art of sol-fa singing, for example.) However,
> his style is rather too heavy and old-fashioned
> for modern audiences.
>
> For the base level course, I'd rather a book
> that delved, at least a little, into the psychology
> of perception, rather than absorbing itself with
> much historical minutiae.

Oh yes -- how could I forget! The latest edition of Roederer's _The
Physics and Psychophysics of Music_ is a great intro here.

> The history is, of
> course, relevant, but only broad outlines are
> necessary to set the stage for a) explaining
> general practice of the "common-practice era"
> and b) introducing a few alternatives that
> students might use today. So some readings
> from Sethares make sense in this context.

From Sethares? This (a) seems to be the area where Sethares is
weakest. Were you thinking of something else?

> More to the mathematical side of this, there's
> also another book that I downloaded a PDF of
> a while back: Dave Benson's "Mathematics and
> Music" -
> http://www.maths.abdn.ac.uk/~bensondj/html/maths-music.html
>
> Altho this book will shortly be published by
> CUP,

Are you serious?! Good think I caught his plagiarisms first . . .

> culminating in the reading and application of
> a primer on Sagittal.

Oh dear.

🔗Rick McGowan <rick@...>

🔗Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...>

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006, Paul Erlich wrote:
>
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Rick McGowan
> <rick@u...> wrote:
> >
> > Paul said, regarding:
> http://www.maths.abdn.ac.uk/~bensondj/html/maths-music.html
> >
> > > Are you serious?! Good think I caught his plagiarisms first . . .
> >
> > Hmmm. This sounds potentially more than a bit juicy. Do tell... ;-)
> >
> > Rick
>
> He was using a number of ASCII lattice diagrams that appeared to be
> lifted right off my work on the web, and he attributed ideas to Fokker
> that were to be found only in my "Gentle Introduction" but not in
> Fokker's writings. But he only gave me credit for these things after I
> called him on them . . . his excuse was that he hadn't wanted to
> reference web material, but he relented . . . some other suggestions I
> sent him were not implemented last time I checked . . .

Paul,

I had no idea! Credit where credit is due, I say.
Your work is your work, naturally, and if he uses
your ideas in publication he should identify their
source. Your actual diagrams are a copyrighted
work, and there's no doubt you could show prior
publication.

As to him implementing any suggestions, I guess
that's entirely his call, but I can see you'd be
chary of spending any more effort in that
direction.

The reason I mentioned the book is because it
covers much of the material needed to understand
tuning issues, including the physiology of our gross
acoustic apparatus (not necessarily a sysnonym
for "hearing", as I'm sure some of the work by
Martin Braun and others makes clear.) In this
respect I found it a long overdue update on
Helmholtz & Ellis, both in style and in content.
It's quite possible there are other works available
that cover the same ground; but it does happen to
be the first and only one I've yet found.

Regards,
Yahya

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
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🔗Paul Erlich <paul@...>

🔗Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@...>

🔗monz <monz@...>

We (at Tonalsoft) see Tonescape as being
*very* useful to students: not only for composing
microtonal music, but also for learning about the
mathematics and history of tunings. Once the entire
Encyclopedia is included on the Help menu, available
offline to anyone who has the software, that could
function as a kind of "textbook" on tuning.

We do have plans to target universities as a big
potential market for Tonescape. If any of you out
there are on the faculty of a school and are
interested, contact me offlist at my Tonalsoft address:

monz(AT)tonalsoft.com

-monz
http://tonalsoft.com
Tonescape microtonal music software

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Yahya Abdal-Aziz" <yahya@m...>
wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> Gene asked:
> > What in the world could people use as a textbook for tuning theory?
>
> Rick McGowan answered:
> > ... and of course, none of these books we've mentioned is easily
> > available at all. Doty is out of print and I can't even find it used.
> > Partch is out of print. Blackwood is in facsimile reprint at
> outrageous
> > price, etc, etc.
> >
> > What's a student to do? And a prof couldn't reasonably expect students
> > to be able to obtain any of these as textbooks for a course.
>
> Paul Erlich replied:
> > There should be a small number of required readings from these books,
> > so that the students can use the one copy of each the school
library is
> > likely to have. There's so much other material to cover anyway that
> > anything more than a few select passages/concepts from each of these
> > books would begin to crowd out some equally important stuff.
>
>
> Seems to me that a couple of you guys could
> well edit a book of selected readings for
> students of Musical Tuning Theory (note
> the caps! - I'm thinking "academic" here.)
>
> Paul, if you were to teach such a course,
> it's clear your syllabus would "require" some
> readings. What's the chance of you doing so?
>
> A base level course would cover the
> fundamentals, and there are surely too many
> choices there rather than too few. Helmholtz
> is of course historically important, and both
> he and his English translator Alexander Ellis
> have relevant and valuable insights to offer
> today. (Read the Appendix on teaching the
> art of sol-fa singing, for example.) However,
> his style is rather too heavy and old-fashioned
> for modern audiences.
>
> For the base level course, I'd rather a book
> that delved, at least a little, into the psychology
> of perception, rather than absorbing itself with
> much historical minutiae. The history is, of
> course, relevant, but only broad outlines are
> necessary to set the stage for a) explaining
> general practice of the "common-practice era"
> and b) introducing a few alternatives that
> students might use today. So some readings
> from Sethares make sense in this context.
>
> More to the mathematical side of this, there's
> also another book that I downloaded a PDF of
> a while back: Dave Benson's "Mathematics and
> Music" -
> http://www.maths.abdn.ac.uk/~bensondj/html/maths-music.html
>
> Altho this book will shortly be published by
> CUP, Benson promises to maintain and update
> the PDF version as well. I found Benson's
> approach both modern and balanced. (I can't
> say the same for his old home page at the
> University of Georgia, which totally cracked
> me up.)
>
> This course should also, IMO, include a brief
> look at the development of musical notation,
> culminating in the reading and application of
> a primer on Sagittal. Notation is a necessary
> tool for exposition and analysis - as well as
> being very handy for performers. As for the
> Sagittal primer - well, that's up to the authors
> of Sagittal to organise; I've recently had
> some discussions offlist with both Dave
> Keenan and George Secor on this topic, and
> we've sketched an outline of such a primer.
> That primer should be a simple thing, of perhaps
> a dozen linked web-pages, and need not
> represent an expense for students to acquire.
> But it does first need to be written! Consider
> this a challenge for anyone who feels bored:
> Hi, Jacob, you still tuned in? :-) For motivation,
> consider how many more people would hear your
> music, if only they knew it was out there to
> start looking for.
>
> Subsequent courses could explore the history,
> psychoacoustics, alternative notations, the
> full tuning theories used throughout history by
> the classical traditions of the West, Arabs,
> Persians, Turks, Indians, Greeks, Byzantines,
> Babylonians and Sumerians, ancient China (look
> at the Zeng bells of 443 BC, whose tuning
> Martin Braun has explored), the depths of
> Partch's and Wilson's discoveries in diamonds
> and lattices, some of the many discoveries made
> by members of this list, including Gene, Paul and
> George (do we have a Richard?), ...
>
> Regards,
> Yahya
>