Lurker as Learner

Hello everyone,
Although I have posted here once or twice, I have never introduced
myself. I don't consider myself a lurker so much as a learner.

I first knew something was up when, as a teenager tuning my guitar, I
discovered that if I tuned the open strings' adjacent 5ths and 4th to my
liking that the high an low open E strings would beat like mad. Something
wasn't adding up. The search for why led me to learn a little music
theory, a little acoustic theory and the basis of 12-TET. I wasn't aware
that anyone was attempting anything different until I stumbled across
Partch's 'Genesis of a Music' at the Vancouver Public Library. It was an
awakening. During the Seventies I built a few analog synth kits and tuned
some of the oscillators so that I could hear 7/4 et al. I decided 'normal'
music was 'out of tune' and that JI was the only way to go. After
designing some circuitry to convert analog synths to JI, I concluded that
it would be too difficult and expensive for me with my limited resources to
pursue with the technology of the time. I simply gave up for awhile.

Ten years later I wrote a program in Basic on my Amiga PC to input and
playback JI with the ratios based on 3, 5, 7, 9, 15, 21, 25, 35, 49. Using
these as both numerators and denominators in a tonal array, Partch style, I
was able to play four part harmony using 256 point user defined waveforms
(both limits of Amiga Basic.) Again, due to the limits of my tools, and the
feeling that I was working in isolation, I lost interest.

Several more years passed. In 1994 in a book called 'The Musicians
Guide to MIDI' by Christian Braut, I found out about the MIDI Tuning
Standard and the Just Intonation Network. Reading 'The Just Intonation
Primer' by David Doty revealed that tunable synths had been around for a
several years already! When, in 1995, I started exploring the internet,
one of the first things I checked out was the newly minted Just Intonation
Network web page. That page mentioned this forum, so here I am.

Since coming here I have learned as much as I did in all those lonely
years before. I have learned that JI isn't necessarily 'the only way to
go' and that there is a growing community of innovators pushing the
boundaries of tuning into areas I never dreamed of.
I believe that, with ever-improving technology of music making and
world wide communication, that the theories and techniques discussed here
will increasingly move out of the province of academics and isolated
visionaries and into the mainstream.

Thanks, and I hope I haven't taken too much of your time.
---Fred.

--------------------------------------------------------
Fred Kohler, #7-240 Burnside Rd E, Victoria, BC, Canada
phone:(250)388-7918 email:Fred_Kohler@bc.sympatico.ca
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