TUNING digest 535

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>X-Comment: Alternative Tuning Distribution List
>
> TUNING Digest 535
>
>Topics covered in this issue include:
>
> 1) 88CET #22: Wandering Tonics and #Parts
> by Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com>
> 2) Unsubscribing
> by mayyar@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Mohan Ayyar)
> 3) Approximations, Mongolian music
> by Joshua Brandon Holden
> 4)
> by "John H. Chalmers"
> 5) Re: Dean Drummond's address
> by "Adam B. Silverman"
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Topic No. 1
>
>Date: 20 Oct 95 00:59:13 EDT
>From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com>
>To: Tuning List
>Subject: 88CET #22: Wandering Tonics and #Parts
>Message-ID: <951020045912_71670.2576_HHB31-2@CompuServe.COM>
>
> "Relativistic voice-leading" has an important consequence: wandering
tonics.
>Here is a traditional-harmony chord progression in 88CET:
>
> B B
> A A A#
>(2nd-line treble) G
> D D
> C#
> B B
> A
> F
> E
> D D
>(2nd-space Bass) C C
>
>Func. Harmony: I IV64 ii V7/V V43 I6
>
>
> The equivalent progression in 12-tone notation is:
>
> G G
> F F F#
>(1st-line treble) E
> C C
> B
> A A
> G
> F
> E
> D D
>(2nd-space Bass) C C
>
> ("IV64" is an attempt at an ASCII-text rendition of a roman-numeral IV with
>the usual harmony-text 6-over-4 figured-bass notation for the chord inversion.
>"64" denotes a second-inversion chord, "6" a first inversion, and "43" a third
>inversion seventh chord.)
>
> Because 88CET has no octave, each inversion of what you convince your
>audience is a tonic triad, places the tonic at a different pitch. So the tonic
>wanders over the course of this progression from (in the 88CET notation) the
>second-space bass-clef C of the opening I chord, to the pitch-class of the D
>(somewhat less than an octave above the C) of the final chord. That even
though
>our ears "calculate" the tonics to be the same based upon how the parts move.
>
> Wandering tonics have a very surprising effect if accomplished over a short
>progression - short enough that the audience can remember the new and old
tonic.
>The harmony says that you've gone full-circle back to where you started,
but you
>mysteriously ended up somewhere else. If the progression is too long,
>especially if it has a lot of temporary tonicization, the audience will
probably
>not notice the effect at all.
>
> Traditional harmony in 88CET poses another difficulty: lack of octave
>doubling makes it very difficult to sustain more than three-part traditional
>harmony. The possibilities for smooth voice-movement when voices can't move
>through octave-doubles of other chord tones, dwindles rapidly. Even in
>three-part harmony, you end up having to use lots of chords with fifths below
>their roots, or ninth chords (fifths above their fifths). Secondary dominants
>become more common than usual solely so to take advantage of the additional
>chord tone!
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Topic No. 2
>
>Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 18:10:38 +1000
>From: mayyar@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Mohan Ayyar)
>To: tuning
>Subject: Unsubscribing
>Message-ID: <199510200810.SAA18546@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
>
>Can someone please advise how to unsubscribe (temporarily)
>from the tuning list.
>
>
>_____________________________________________________
>Mohan Ayyar
>Sydney, Australia
>mayyar@extro.ucc.su.oz.au
>WWW URL http://www.usyd.edu.au/~mayyar/music.html
>Ph: 61-2-8315295
>Fax: 61-2-6715676 (by prior arrangement)
>Mobile: 0414 500 277
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Topic No. 3
>
>Date: Fri, 20 Oct 95 10:36:47 -0400
>From: Joshua Brandon Holden
>To: tuning
>Subject: Approximations, Mongolian music
>Message-ID: <199510201437.HAA07381@eartha.mills.edu>
>
>"John H. Chalmers" writes:
> > See also Neubauer , Otto (?, Neuberger, etc.) The Exact Sciences in
> > Antiquity. Sorry I don't have a better reference to this book.
>
>That would be Otto Neugebauer, who I believe founded the Brown department
>of the History of Mathematics.
>
> AUTHOR Neugebauer, O. (Otto), 1899-
> TITLE The exact sciences in antiquity.
> EDITION 2d ed.
> PUBLISHED New York, Harper & Brothers [1962]
> DESCRIPT'N vii,240 p. illus., facsims. 21 cm.
> SERIES Harper Torchbooks, TB 552.
> NOTE Includes bibliographical references and index.
> LC SUBJECT Mathematics, Ancient.
> Astronomy, Ancient.
> LCCN 57012342.
> RLIN/OCLC RIBG0626061-B.
>
>Enjoy!
>
> ---josh
>
>Joshua Brandon Holden Brown Math Department holden@math.brown.edu
> "It's never too late to have a happy childhood!" ---Cutter John
>YAZ/socrates
>
>------------------------------
>
>Topic No. 4
>
>Date: Fri, 20 Oct 95 7:55:52 PDT
>From: "John H. Chalmers"
>To: tuning
>Message-ID: <9510200755.aa14515@cyber.cyber.net>
>
>From: mclaren
>Subject: Tuning & psychoacoustics - post 25 of 25
>---
>As an empirical science, psychoacoustics is largely concerned with
>measuring the reactions of the ear/brain system to specific acoustic
>stimuli. However, human hearing is a hierarchical process made up of many
>layers of abstraction.
>Small acoustic stimuli shade imperceptibly into larger ones, leading
>inexorably to such large-scale percepts as "key center," "cadence," and
> "discordance" and "concordance." As Eberhard Zwicker points
>out, "It is clear that psychoacoustics plays an important role in musical
>acoustics. There are many basic aspects of musical sounds that are
>correlated with the sensations already discussed in psycoacoustics.
>Examples may be different pitch qualities of pure tones and complex sounds,
>perception of duration, loudness and partially-masked loudness, sharpness
>as a an aspect of timbre, perception of sound impulses as events within the
>temporal patterns leading to rhythm, roughness, and the equivalence of
>sensational intervals. For this reason it can be stated that most of this
>book's contents are also of interest in musical acoustics. At this point we
>can concentrate on two aspects that have not been discussed so far: musical
>consonance and the Gestalt principle." [Zwicker, E. and H. Fastl,
>Psychoacoustics: Facts and Models, 1990, pg. 312]
>Zwicker characterizes the hierarchical perception of musical tones by
>drawing a distinction between sensory consonance (perceived roughness,
>sharpness, and noisiness of the tone) and harmony, (perceived tonal
>affinity, tolerability, and root relationship of tones or sequences of tones
>to a scale).
>So doing, he posits that both modes of perception are hierarchically involved
> in the sensation of musical consonance.
>Both experience and experiment tell us that the process of listening to
>music involves levels of neural organization above the purely physical
>acoustic operation of the inner ear. While the point of maximal stimulation
>on the basilar membrane indicates a simple mechanical Fourier analysis of
>sounds entering the ear, the firing pattern of neural fibers in the auditory
>nerve encodes pitch and spectral information in the nerve system in a
>complex way.
>The path between primary auditory nerve and cerebral cortex is not a simple
>one. Many feedback loops control the processing of auditory information,
>and there are many opportunities for higher brain centers to alter the raw
>input travelling up the auditory nerve--and vice versa.
>The anatomy of the pathway between the auditiory nerve and the cerebral
>cortex is complex: the cells of the primary neurons (that is, those in the
>auditory nerve) are located within the modiolus of the cochlea; these
>primary nurons terminate in the cochlear nucleus, a mass of gray matter
>located in the dorsal and lateral portion of the medulla oblongata. Here the
>physical nerve connection breaks. From this point there is a synpatic
>connection (mediated by neurotransmitters) to the neurons of the inferior
>colliculus. After another synpatic gap in the neural pathway, the third-
>order neurons converge on the medial geniculate body, the final relay station
> on the auditory path to the cerebral cortex. It's worth nothing that the
>medial geniculate body not only collates fibers from the audtiory nerve, but
>also from other sensory systems and from the cerebral cortex as well. Thus
>the geniculate body serves not as a passive relay station so much as an
>active filtering and integrating locus.
>>From the geniculate body, the fourth-order auditory neurons connect with
>the cerebral conrtex by way of a thin sheet of radiating nerve fibers. These
>radiations include corticofugal fibers running from the cortex back to the
>medial geniculate body.
>Thus the auditory neural pathway contains a complex feedback loop,
>controlled by several sets of higher brain loci, running between the auditory
>nerve and the cerebral cortex.
>Most of the fourth-order neurons enter a small region ofthe posterial half
>of the horizontal wall of the Sylvian fissure, which acts as a focal zone for
>the entire auditory cortex. The complexity of the auditory region of the
>Sylvian fissure is daunting: each cochlear fiber makes connections with
>thousands of other neurons grouped in at least thirteen regions, and
>populated by many different types of neurons. To make the process even
>more complex, not all of these neurons respond identically. Some produce
>strong signals when presented with tones in a
>particular frequency range but do not respond to tones in other frequency
>ranges. A small fraction of neurons emit strong signals when two different
>frequencies are sounded together, but these same neurons produce little or
>no response when either frequency sounds alone. Some neurons are most
>strongly stimulated by sounds at specific amplitudes: sounds outside this
>narrow amplitude window cause no resopnse from suchneurons. For yet other
> auditory nerve fibers, the higher the sound's amplitude, the stronger the
>response, until a satuation point is reached. Some neurons respond best toe
>amplitude-moedulated tones, others to frequency-modulated tones. Some
>neurons respond with paritcular vehemence to sounds coming from a
>particular region of space, and some neurons respond best to sounds that
>are moving in space.
>Because these cortical loci consist of neural pathways, they are formed by
>learned response and can be changed. Thus, the impact of culture and
>experience on musical perception is at least as great as the physical
>sensory correlates of musical tone--if not greater.
>"I once attended...a concert in Bangkok that was totally mystifying. I could
>see that the audience was utterly enraptured, swooning at moments of
>apparently overwhelming emotional beauty that made no impression on me
>whatsoever; not only that, I couldn't distinguish them from any other
>moments in the piece." [Eno, Brian, "Resonant Complexity," Whole Earth
>Review, May 1995, pg. 42]
>This points to a important caveat. While the results adduced so far provide
>evidence for this or that musical tuning system ont he basis of sensory
>consonance, psychoacoustics cannot describe or validate the higher levels
>of musical organization implicit in a tuning system.
>Thus the internal structure of a tuning is different from the sensory
>consonance produced by intervals within that tuning. For example: Risset's,
>Pierce's and Sethares' timbral mapping procedure, following the
>implications of research by Plomp and Levelt and Kameoka and Kuriyagawa,
>allow a composer to control the level of *sensory consonance * in a given
>tuning, but mapping the component partials of a sound into a given
>maximally consonant set for a specific scale does *not * change the
>inherent tonality of the scale, its Rothenberg propriety, the Barlow
>harmonicity or the Wilson efficiency of the scale.
>In short, by changing timbre, note duration, and compositional style one can
>change the surface affect of music produced in a given tuning: but the
>deeper structural elements of the tuning remain invariant.
>Ivor Darreg described one of the deeper structural invariants in a given
>tuning as its "mood:" "In my opinion, the striking and characteristic moods
>of many tuning-systems will become the most powerful and compelling
>reason for exploring beyond 12-tone equal temperament. It is necessary to
>have more than one non-twelve-tone system before these moods can be
>heard and their significance appreciated." [Darreg, Ivor, "Xenharmonic
>Bulletin No. 5, 1975, pg. 1]
>David Rothenberg proposed that the Rothenberg propriety of a scale
>explains some aspects of the scale's deep structure; Clouth and Douthett
>duplicated some of this work in their article "On Well-Formed Scales."
>John Chalmers has speculated that Rothenberg propriety explains the sense
>of tension in such tunings as Ptolemy's intense diatonic.
>In addition to the "mood" or overall "sound" of a given tuning, Darreg and
>McLaren (1991) pointed out that each tuning exhibits some degree of
>inherent bias toward melody or harmony. The Pythagorean intonation and
>13-tone equal temperament, for example, are both strongly biased toward
>melody, while 31-tone equal temperament and 13-limit just intonation are
>strongly biased toward harmony.
>Douglas Keislar made this same point in his 1992 doctoral thesis. In it,
>Keislar describes research which demonstrates that altering the surface
>characteristics of the music--timbre, tempo, spatialization--does not
>change the deeper structural characteristics of the tuning. Thus, while
>mapped overtones will make a comopsition in 13-tone equal temperament
>sound more acoustically smooth, it does not change the essentially atonal
>character of the 13-tone scale, nor does it materially affect the scale
>"mood." Similarly, changing the timbres of a composition in Ptolemy's
>intense diatonic tuning will alter the degree of sensory roughness or
>smoothness; adding reverberation will mask to greater or lesser degree
>some of the overall "sound" of the composition. But the sense of aesthetic
>tension created by scale intervals which are, in Rothenberg's usage,
>improper, will remain unchanged.
>Thus the implications for tuning suggested by psychoacoustic research
>must be viewed as separate from larger musical and perceptual questions.
>Because current psychoacoustic experiments focus on questions of sensory
>perception, there remains a dichotomy between what Easley Blackwood has
>called "concordance and discordance" and sensory consonance and
>dissonance. In fact sensory consonance is a misnomer: the effects are more
>accurately described as sensations of auditory roughness or smoothness.
>Depending on the tuning or the composition, intervals which are perceived
>as rough may prove concordant, while intervals which prdouce the auditory
>sensation of smoothness may strike the listener as discordant--that is, out
>of place musically. In Western music, the best example of this phenomenon
>is the perfect fourth, which sounds acoutically smoother than the major
>third but which by itself generally constitutes an unstable and musically
>discordant interval.
>In Balinese and Javanese music, the best example is the stretched 1215-
>cent octave, which sounds acoustically rough but which produces as sense
>of musical concordance when performed by a gamelan.
>The most striking example in my own experience was a 1990 concert by
>the Women's National Chorus of Bulgaria. One of the duets (a folk song
>from the Thracian plains) ended on a large major just second (9/8). The
>Western audience sat without moving forwhat seemed a long time: only
>when the singers bowed did the audience realize the duet was over, and
> applaud. In this case the contradiction between learned perceptions of
>concordance and cadence, and the sensory perception of roughness in the
>cadential intervals, prevented the audience from correctly perceiving the
>cadence.
>It is important not to confuse sensory roughness or smoothness, as
>measured by psychoacoustical experiments, with higher-level perceptions
>of musical consonance and dissonance. Many advocates of just intonation
>have baselessly conflated the two categories, while advocates of Fetis'
>model (viz., all auditory responses are predominately learned responses)
>excessively emphasize the abstract levels of hierarchical auditory
>perception while unjustifiably discounting the purely physical processes at
>work in the human ear/brain system--in particular the frequency-analysis
>operations of the basilar membrane and the periodicity-extraction
>mechanism of the neurons in the auditory nerve.
>Ultimately, what Zwicker calls Gestalt musical perception is mediated not
>only by the physics and acoustics of the inner ear, but also by primary,
>secondary, third-order and fourth-order neurons, a variety of different
>brain locations, and the operant conditioning imposed by experience, culture
>and musical tradition. The conclusions of this series of posts must be
>taken in that context, and understood in that larger framework.
>--mclaren
>
>------------------------------
>
>Topic No. 5
>
>Date: Fri, 20 Oct 1995 19:15:18 -0400 (EDT)
>From: "Adam B. Silverman"
>To: tuning
>Subject: Re: Dean Drummond's address
>Message-ID:
>
>I've tracked him down but lost his address. Quicker than writing to Mode
>records would be writing to SUNY Purchase, where I think he teaches a
>class, and leads a Partch ensemble on the original instruments.
>
>Adam B. Silverman
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>End of TUNING Digest 535
>************************
>
>


gnut@osn.de (Is there another gnut out there? Let me know)
..racing towards an early grave.


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