Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup mills-tuning-list More misc. replies

Dan: I agree about Aristoxenos not proposing ET and being the first
cognitive scientist. BTW, Winnington-Ingram has a good discussion of his
tunings in "Aristoxenos and the Intervals of Greek Music." Class.
Quart. 26: 195-208 (1932).

As for Armenian's being originally Phrygians, recent reclassifications
of the various branches of the Indo-European language family have placed
Armenian with Greek (formerly it was unclassifiable, partly because so
much of the basic vocabulary had been replaced by Iranian, etc.).
The language of the Old Phrygian inscriptions has been considered cognate
to Greek also.

Greek is now also grouped with Indo-Iranian, despite being a "kentum"
rather than "satem" language. (Other newer groupings are Celtic with
Tokharian and no longer with Italic, and Balto-Slavic with Germanic
rather than Indo-Iranian.) But, I digress.

I saw a book not too long ago on Turkish Modes (Maqam, by Karl Signell),
but I can't recall whether the scales were quantized to 24-tet or
Pythagorean. I've seentwo different descriptions of Iranian music,
one in terms of commas, limmas and whole tones, the other in 1/4-tones.
Unfortunately, "1/4 tone" is also used generically by some authors
for any sort of interval less than a tempered semitone.

--John

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🔗Lionel Dotson <ldotson@...>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

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Matt Nathan wrote:

> performers tune in to each other as an ensemble is just great. They performed the piece in obvious just
> intonation with no vibrato and with the same envelope articulation. Man what a sound. You should hear the
> resonance. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Matt: Jever take'n try to tune 8 bars of *barbershop* harmony in MIDI?

Attached,find 2(two) midi files. One(annie.mid) is pitchbend tuned,the
other(annieun.mid) is untuned.
The erudite members of this forum are invited to critique the *tuned*
midi file, and offer alternate tunings if they like.

Ed Dotson
ldotson@sprynet.com

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🔗Matt Nathan <mattn@...>

Lionel Dotson wrote:

> Matt: Jever take'n try to tune 8 bars of *barbershop* harmony in MIDI?

I love the barborshop quartet sound, but I haven't actually sung it, nor sequenced
it myself.

About midi and microtones, pitch-bend tweaking is too much trouble. I admire the
stamina of people who can do it that way. I prefer to tune the instrument (Yamaha
DX7-II in my case) rather than the sequence file (pitch bend events). That way, I
get all the polyphony on the same midi channel, and I can play it manually as well.
I can also build scales by ear, without preplanning, one new note at a time, tuning
it against the notes I've already tuned. That kind of trial-and-error process using
pitch-bend tweaking on multiple midi channels would be horrendous.

> Attached,find 2(two) midi files. One(annie.mid) is pitchbend tuned,the
> other(annieun.mid) is untuned.

Great, thanks! Could you send them again and attach them as files rather than as
coded text please? (If you're using Netscape Navigator for Win95, click "As is"
rather than "Convert to Plain Text" in the Attachments window.) I'm ignorant of
how to handle the text versions.

> The erudite members of this forum are invited to critique the *tuned*
> midi file, and offer alternate tunings if they like.

There must be many good ways to interpret a just tuning setting for a piece where
the notation is originally in 12tet. I may have some ideas once I listen, but
probably not criticisms.

Matt Nathan

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🔗Matt Nathan <mattn@...>

> > > [Lionel Dotson]
> > > Attached,find 2(two) midi files. One(annie.mid) is pitchbend tuned,the
> > > other(annieun.mid) is untuned.
> > [Matt Nathan]
> > Great, thanks! Could you send them again and attach them as files rather than as
> > coded text please?
>
> Hey Matt,here they come directly to you. The tuning list converts them
> to text,so if you have netscape they should arrive in midi format.

Cool. Thank you very much. I can get these to play now. I like it, especially the tuned 7ths.
There are some things I hear that I want to get in and see if I can try something else with,
but I'm now not sure how to edit the midi file. I'm using my new PC compatible and don't have
any midi editing software for it. All my midi stuff is on the Amiga, which is still packed
away in a box from moving. I notice some of the voicings have slow beats in them, which is
probably due to the poor resolution of pitch bend on the Soundblaster card I have. I'm not
sure what the specifications are on this thing but I can hear that it's not perfect.

> I have an AVM Summit tone generator with a
> purported accuracy of 1/2 cent...but the vibrato(tremor) in the
> steadiest instruments(trumpet and reed organ) causes beats in doubled
> notes which are annoying.

I haven't heard of that--would like to hear it and learn more about all the possible
instruments or tools out there which are available.

> Does the DX-7 have steady(unmodulated)tones?

Sure. You can program your own voices starting with a pure sine wave and expanding from there
using frequency modulation of sine wave by sine waves, stacked. When I'm tuning the DX7-II, I
use a patch I made which is completely steady and has a brightness parameter that I can
adjust manually using the modulation wheel (the modulation wheel doesn't have to produce actual
modulation, or wobbling, it's a generic controller). I turn up the brightness to
hear the upper partials, which makes it easier to tune pitches relative to one another by
listening to the beats. The higher partials beat faster with small tuning deviations than the
lower ones, so provide a better cue for fine tuning.

Before I had the DX7-II or the Amiga, I wrote a bunch of software for the Commodore 64 for
my own use. It has a SID (Sound Interface Device I think) chip which can play 3 notes at
the same time, each tunable to an exact partial in an humongous harmonic partial series
(overtone, not undertone like the frequency-divider type chips) from partial 1 to partial
65535. The frequency of the 1st partial was very low, like around .5 Hz or something.
This thing could produce completely steady tones and play them in perfectly
synced just intervals which would never beat in a million years.

One of the software things I wrote was an ear training program. I wanted to be sure I
was one who could, as you wrote, DO it and not just talk about it. It quizzed me with
simple just ratios and as I got better increased the complexity of the intervals. It
also had a routine that would quiz me on random intervals (technically, they were just
ratios because that's all the SID chip could play, but the resolution was fine enough
that they can be considered approximations of any interval) for which it expected a
value in cents to be answered. It would keep track of my errors in guessing and show
me my average performance. On good days, I could identify random intervals with an
average of 5 cents error.

Matt Nathan

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More misc. replies

🔗John Chalmers <non12@...>

🔗Lionel Dotson <ldotson@...>

🔗Matt Nathan <mattn@...>

🔗Matt Nathan <mattn@...>

🔗Matt Nathan <mattn@...>

🔗sejic@nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu (World Harmony Project Inc.)