Myths and Facts

MYTH: The Alternative Tuning List is a cozy community
full of nice folks who discuss microtonal music
with insight and wisdom.

FACT: The Alternative Wanking List is a cesspool of
pseudoscientific superstition lorded over
by a handful of members of the pseudoscience fringe
who have gotten moderator powers. These moderators
harangue a captive audience about musically meaningless
numerology and shout down anyone who tries to
discuss actual microtonal music. The preferred
methods of intimidation used by the moderators
of the ATL include insults, character assassination,
and relentless non-stop hysterical name-calling.
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MYTH: "[The Alternative Tuning List] is the most sophisticated
forum for discussing microtonality" -- Paul Erlich

FACT: The crudity of the discussion on the Alternative Lying
List is startling. Shockingly primitive, the level
of discussion on the Alternative Lying List howers
somewhere around the year 1570. Essentially everything
on the Alternative Lying List boils down to medieval
number mysticism of the kind purveyed by Zarlino in
the 16th century. When asked for proof, people like
Dante Rosati fall back on a blind mindless assertion
of faith ("I don't care what citations you throw in,
I hear...") and vacuous name-calling (anyone who
asks for proof of claims on the ATL is "mentally
deranged" and "a baboon"). When asked for proof
that their claims are anything other than medieval
number mysticism, ATL members like Gene Smith first
scream hysterical insults ("you imbecile," "you
baboon") and then, after repeated requests for
evidence to support their numerology, they fall
silent.
This was the behavior of the medieval monks
who argued about the number of angels that
could dance on the head of a pin. It is not
not the behavior of serious scholars or
scientists. It is not the behavior of serious
researchers. It is not the behavior of serious
musicians and composers.
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MYTH: The Alternative Tuning List is slightly overbalanced
toward music theory, but this is understandable since
music theory is so important in microtonal music.

FACT: There is no theory to be found on the Alternative
Lying List. The superstitions bandied about on
the ATL are not theories because they are not
testable. They have no connection with observed
reality. Just as the homeless person who attacked
Dan Rather while yelling "What's the frequency,
Kenneth?" was not offering any kind of theory,
the members of the lunatic fringe who spout gibberish
on the ATL do not offer any kind of theory.
A theory has some relationship to observed reality.
A theory can be tested.
A delusion has no discernible relationship to
observed reality, and cannot be tested.
The pseudo-mathematical claims made on the
Alternative Lying List are not theories, they
are delusions.
The pseudomathematical claims made on the ATL
are the musical equivalent of the shouts of the
homeless guy who attacked Dan Rather while yelling,
"What's the frequency, Kenneth?"
These delusions -- variously involving lattices in
ratio space, Abelian groups of integers, Rube
Goldberg schemes for doing musically meaningless
calculactions on the pitches of JI scales -- are
not theories. They have nothing to do with theory.
They are either untestable, or these fantasies make
claims which have uniformly been contradicted by
the psychoacoustic literature. The claims made by
the moderators on the ATL are not theories at all,
they're delusions, fantasies, pipe dreams as irrelevant
to microtonal music as the bra sizes of the female
population of Ecuador.
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MYTH: The Alternative Tuning List accomodates a wide
variety of viewpoints on microtonality.

FACT: The handful of people who tyrannize the Alternative
Wanking List as moderators have systematically chased
away virtually every significant practicing microtonal
composer and musician, and cowed the rest into silence
with a combination of insults and pseudoscientific
jargon.
The only viewpoint permitted on the Alternative Lying
List is the discredited medieval superstition that
must is somehow "based" on small integer ratios.
Asked for proof of this superstition, the ATL
members respond (as Dante Rosati did) first with
crazed lies and frantic name-calling, and next
with a blind statement of mindless superstitious
belief ("I don't care about the evidence, I believe
it" or words to that effect).
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MYTH: The Alternative Tuning list is an important aid to
microtonality.

FACT: "The Alternative Lying List is the single greatest
obstacle to making microtonality music, or any kind
of music." -- Kraig Grady
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MYTH: The members of the Alternative Tuning List _are_ the
microtonal community.

FACT: The Alternative Lying List has nothing to do with
the real microtonal community.
The real microtonal community views the ATL with
well-deserved contempt and derision.
The real microtonal community consists of composers
and performers who have either abandoned the
Alternative Lying List in disgust, or observe
while remaining silent in public but remarking in
private on the unbelievable triviality and
meaninglessness of the discussion, or they take
one look at the gibberish bandied about on the
Alternative Lying List and walk away laughing.
The members of the pseudoscience fringe who tyrannize
the Alternative Lying List have nothing to do with
the genuine microtonal community, which consists of
composers and performers who actually produce
microtonal music.
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MYTH: People like mclaren and Bill Wesley and Jonathan Glasier
and Gary Morrison are evil. These people, who ask for
proof that the Alternative Tuning List is anything but
a cesspool of medieval number superstition supported by
name-calling and crazed lies, are twisted hate-filled
villains worse than Osama bin Laden. These monstrous
Hannibal Lecters of microtonality like mclaren only
want to destroy this magnificent creation called the
ATL that so many hard-working people have built up.

FACT: This is the standard retort of ufologists and
dowsers and psychic surgeons.
The purveyor of pseudoscience claims to have "built
up" somethign wonderful and magnificent, and anyone
who asks for proof or offers contrary evidence is
"just trying to destroy, not create."
When faced with a question of fact, use common
sense and examine the evidence. What does the
evidence show?
Total up the number of CDs of non-12 music released
by the members of the Alternative Lying List, and
then compare with the total number of CDs released
by the total number of CDs released by the people
who have abandoned the ALternative Lying list. In
actual fact the people on Alternative Lying List
create virtually nothing, while well over 90%
of the microtonal music being composed and
performed is created by people who either remark
on the worthlessness of the ATL or who have
abandoned it entirely.

Anyone with the common sense God gave a gopher has
already fled the Alternative Lying list in disgust
at the pathological dishonesty, the name-calling, the
backbiting, the pseudoscience, the superstition,
the anti-intellectualism, and the sheer breathtaking
anti-American adoration of censorship and McCarthy-
style smear tactics. The deeply un-American anti-
democratic tactics of the Alternative Lying List are
used (as in the former Soviet Union) to support vacuous
superstitions and outright twaddle (in the case of the
Alternative Lying list, twaddle like harmonic entropy
and TOPS and calculations made using points and distances
in ratio space. In the case of the former Soviet Union,
Lyseknoist agriculture and Marxist economics.)
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MYTH: The Alternative Tuning List is a forum for high
intellectual discussion.

FACT: The sheer anti-intellectualism of the Alternative
Lying List is appalling. In the worst traditions
of Lysenkoism, unprovable or flatly false assertions
are slung around by arrogant do-nothing know-nothings
who use numerology and McCarthy-style innuendo and
outright lies to support their insupportable superstitions
about small integer ratios and harmonic entropy and
TOPS and vals and lattices in ratio space.

The parallels with Lysenkoism prove startlingly precise.
Just as the followers of Lysenko propounded crazy
superstitions ("we don't need to weed the fields,
the problem is that the wheat is evolving into weeds!")
and when asked for proof shouted down their critics and
ostracized them and used character assassination and
personal invective to carry the day for Lyuskenkosim....
In the exact same way as with Lyseknoism, the people
on the ATL who propound crazy superstitions like
harmonic entropy and TOPS and the claim that calculations
involving lattice diagrams in ratio space have any musical
meaning, respond to requests for proof in exactly the
same way the followers of Lysenko did in the Soviet Union.
The mathturbators on the Alternative Lying List shout
down their critics and ostracize them and use character
assassination and personal invective to carry the day for
musical pseudoscience.
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MYTH: The Alternative Tuning List is a community full
of well-intentioned serious musicians.

FACT: The Alternative Lying LIst is dominated by
anti-musicians, not by musicians.
All the well-intentioned serious musicians have
either fled or been verbally bludgeoned into silence.
Anti-musicians now tyrannize the Alternative Lying
List. These people are not just non-musicians;
their main activity seems to be to crush and stamp
out microtonal music (as Jonathan Szanto has so
energetically and persistently tried to do) and replace
it either with silence (apparently Jonathan "Just Gotta
Lie and Lie and Lie" Szanto's apparent preferred "Final
Solution") or with superstitions about magic numbers (Paul
"All Attacks, No Facts" Erlich's and Gene Ward Smith's
apparent preference). The jargon and numerology and
seeimngly endless haggling over mumbo-jumbo is not
just merely musically meaningless -- it is actually
anti-musical.
The ATL jargon and numerology expands like a gas under
pressure and displaces the actual music on the ATL.
The only apparent purpose of the jargon and numerology
is to feed the bloated egos of the ATL moderators (except
for Joseph Pehrson) and hammer actual musicians into
silence with a shitstorm of impenetrable numbers
and gibberish.
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MYTH: "I think everyone knows pretty well who are the
knowledgeable people on the list are." -- Joseph
Pehrson.

FACT: No one on the Alternative Wanking List has any
idea who the knowledgeable people are.
This is because the knowledgable people in
microtonality have all fled the ATL or been
verbally bludgeoned into silence and as
a result have no contact with the members of the
ATL.
Pseudoscience filled this vacuum.
A handful of pseudoscientists have succeeded in
duping the majority of well-intentioned but completely
scientitically uneducated musicians into believing
the big lie that the ATL's pseudoscientific mathematics
and terminology represents important but somehow
indefinable "discoveries" about microtonal music.
In actual fact, all the elaborate and incoherent math
and impenetrable terminology has no more scientific
content than dianetics, and has no more relationship
to actual microtonal music than the numbers on the
back of a Wheaties box.
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MYTH: The moderators of the Alternative Tuning List are
a brave competent group of profoundly insightful
people who both make microtonal music and produce
deeply important microtonal theory.

FACT: The moderators of the Alternative Tuning List exhibit
the typical characteristics of crackpots. They produce
virtually no music (except for Gene "Woolly-Headed
Numerology" Smith and Joseph Pehrson). Instead of
producing music, the moderators of the ATL waste
their lives in a giant circle-jerk of medieval number
mysticism with no verifiable connection to actual
microtonal music.
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