lurkification

Message written at 30 Nov 1996 12:43:17 -0500

I have been catching up on mail of late, and have been reading the
delurking messages from Tuning.

It is with great reluctance that I write this. My formal musical
education is extremely small. I taught myself the rudiments of music
theory from an old text book, and read Piston's book on orchestration
many many times. I did pass O-level music as a spare time subject
when I was 16, but I did not do this very well.

My background is mathematics, with particular interest in logic. My
first degree was Mathematics, but then I changed to computing which is
so much easier. My PhD, 25 years ago, was in algebraic software and
its application to gravity waves and cosmology. Since then I have
been an academic at 3 UK universities and at Salt Lake City. I
continue to work in computer algebra and have retired from astronomy
on the death of my guru a couple of years back. I have branched out
into parallel computing, and compilation, as well as tank warfare
simulation.

So what has this to do with Tuning? Not much. What I did not say in
that short biography is that I have been writing music at least since
aged 7 or 8, and as a teenager I struggled to write a piano concerto.
At university, in the face of professional musicians (my college had
an internationally known choir) I stopped trying, although I still
wanted to. I continued being interested in music; increasingly
medaeval and post 1950-classical, and am a frequent attender at modern
music concerts. With the faster computers (I began on valve computers
(tubes to North Americans) in the 1950s) I found Csound and ported it
to the PC, originally so I could return to composing. I never learnt
to play a keyboard and so had no way of hearing my notated music.

After a net-discussion with a guy called Ted Fitch (no relation) I
took part of his advice to break myself of writing terrible pseudo
Victorian tunes, and moved to non 12ET. I have actually finished one
work in this style, before I discovered all this errudition on kust
and alternative tuning systems. I continue to lurk here as I am
lamentably ignorant about so much, and many messages I simply fail to
understand. I have not even grasped the underlying mathematics of
many posts. So I suspect that I am not much use to the attempt to
pool knpwledge.

What I suppose I do know about is the use of Csound to realise
sounds. The system has no problems with pitches, and is clearly
easier to tune than MIDI synths. In a few minutes I intend to add new
features to make it even easier -- at least for equal tempaments. I
do not know how to specify just systems

So, back to lurk mode.....

==John ffitch (or John Fitch)

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Date: Sat, 30 Nov 1996 13:16:01 -0800
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