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Do-re intonation

🔗Magnus Jonsson <magnus@...>

10/11/2006 9:29:32 PM

Today in my choir the director had us sing simultaneous Do and Re in pairs. It was very interesting to hear how the singers' intonations differred. My ears could distinguish between two camps - most people sang something flat of 8:9 (I wasn't sure if it was 9:10 or some meantone) while the other camp preferred 8:9. The choir director kept letting different people sing Do and Re together until he got an 8:9 which he seemed to be satisfied with. That was on the fourth pair of singers. I tried to figure out what this means mathematically and it seems that very roughly we could estimate that 1/4 of singer pairs sing pythagorean do-re while the other 3/4 sing meantone do-re. If anyone wants to see the math I did let me know... (basically I assumed a geometric distribution and equated the expected value with the observed value.)

/ Magnus

🔗c.m.bryan <chrismbryan@...>

10/12/2006 1:42:56 AM

Wow! That could be a really interesting line of research...

cbryan

On 12/10/06, Magnus Jonsson <magnus@...> wrote:
>
> Today in my choir the director had us sing simultaneous Do and Re in
> pairs. It was very interesting to hear how the singers' intonations
> differred. My ears could distinguish between two camps - most people sang
> something flat of 8:9 (I wasn't sure if it was 9:10 or some meantone)
> while the other camp preferred 8:9. The choir director kept letting
> different people sing Do and Re together until he got an 8:9 which he
> seemed to be satisfied with. That was on the fourth pair of singers. I
> tried to figure out what this means mathematically and it seems that very
> roughly we could estimate that 1/4 of singer pairs sing pythagorean do-re
> while the other 3/4 sing meantone do-re. If anyone wants to see the math I
> did let me know... (basically I assumed a geometric distribution and
> equated the expected value with the observed value.)
>
> / Magnus
> -- 'Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power.
... Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak
rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer