TUNING digest 887 Reply to Jon Szanto

For the record: although I am a **real** _Californio_ (my grandfather*s
grandfather had a farm (!) in San Francisco in 1848), I was never the
'**California boy** that J. Szanto suggests. I can*t surf. I never inhaled.
And I never heard of the Hindustani Jazz Sextet. (Though I sometimes heard
Harihar Rao*s Indian Music program on KPFK).

I do know Emil Richards* book, however. _Emil Richards* World of
Percussion** is interesting for a couple of Erv Wilson instruments, and
Richards had Harry Partch tune up a few of the instruments in his
collection. Perhaps a good Partch scholar should add these to the list.
(Along these lines, Mills College also has a Partch instrument, the _double
canon_, or prototype of the Surrogate Kithara, whose picture is found in
the first edition of _Genesis of a Music_. The dance music that this was
used for at Mills should also be added to the Partch works list. Perhaps,
there should be a prize created for anyone ever finding either (a) the
abandoned Guitar I or (b) one of the abandoned reed organs or (c) one of
the fugues Partch composed while in Hawaii.)

Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt

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> I THINK I heard on the list a few weeks ago that the Kurzweil 2500
> couldn't be programmed into 19 TET unless each key was setup to playback a
> tuned sample.

I'm the one who posted that conclusion by my K2500-owner friend. That
conclusion has the potential to be true provided that you're trying to map
linearly across the keyboard, mismatching octave boundaries in the tuning with
octave boundaries in the white/black structure of the keyboard).

(An aside: Speaking for myself, I'm very impressed by people who are capable
of ignoring the 7+5 white/black structure of the traditional keyboard. Although
I have always found it very difficult to ignore, there can be no doubt that the
majority of people exploring 19 and many other microtonal ETs on keyboard map it
that way, and see nothing particularly problematic about it.)

I say "has the potential to be true" because somebody down in the bowels of
Kurzweil responded saying that that's not true. The K2x00 apparently has four
basic capabilities useful for unusual tunings, as I understand it anyway:
1. You can tune all C-C octaves identically to just about any conceivable
pitch. The limitation is that it must be on C-C (or A-A or whatever)
boundaries, and the pattern must repeat in octaves. Apparently you can
have quite a few of this sort of table loaded and can switch off between
them with a SysEx message. So you can certainly map 19 into two, three,
or more 12-toned subsets. One way that strikes me as reasonable for doing
this is a tuning table with naturals and sharps, one with naturals and
flats, and another with the more common nonnaturals (e.g., F# instead of
Gb, and Bb instead of A#) and also containing B#/Cb and E#/Fb notes. You
can also create 19 tables for each of the 19 possible key signatures.
2. You can tune the interval between adjacent keys to a consistent cent
distance identical between all adjacent key pairs. The limitation is that
you have only 2-cent resolution. So using this mechanism alone, 19 mapped
linearly across the keyboard (instead of in 12-toned subsets) turns out
way off by the time you reach the 19th key in the sequence.
3. The fellow at Kurzweil, who apparently prefers the 12-tone subset approach
or perhaps doesn't do much with microtonal ETs, says that you can refine
this 2-cent resolution using something I think he called a "function". I
don't know the details, nor do I personally know anybody who's
successfully implemented this suggestion (not to suggest for a moment that
I have any reason to think that this Kurzweil fellow is misleading us, of
course).
4. James McCartney, whose address I don't recall, uses a K2000 microtonally
by using what I suppose might be called a "memorizing controller". Ap-
parently the K2x00 has at least one controller which, when you set it to
some value, it remembers that value. You can then use it kind of like a
pitch-bend by applying it to pitch calculations, and it does NOT affect
notes currently playing.

Without a doubt, in my mind and many others', Ensoniq's pitch-table approach
is FAR more intuitive and easier to work with. But certainly in many ways the
K2x00 instruments are more powerful at a purely synthesizer-capability level
than the ASR. Apparently their effects processor isn't as capable as the ASR's
though.


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