Early Music, Temperaments, Miscellenia

Wow, an International Festival of Microtonal Music...never heard of it
before. Thanks, John, for bringing this to the List's attention. Anybody
else out there with some information?

Re: Mayumi's Harmonic 13 tuning - all the notes used by Mayumi were chosen
from Partch's 13-limit Appendix I in Genesis of a Music. I told her about
Paul's question and she's formulating a response.

Also - thanks to Mark Rankin for letting me in on some remaindered books
by Owen Jorgensen called _Tuning_ (just under 800 pages). Call
Mockingbird Books at 408-689-9113 for any additional copies they may have
(at slashed prices). It's basically a How-To-Tune compendium with much
new information about tuners behind the scenes over the last couple of
centuries.

Johnny Reinhard
Director
American Festival of Microtonal Music
318 East 70th Street, Suite 5FW
New York, New York 10021 USA
(212)517-3550/fax (212) 517-5495
reinhard@ios.com


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> > I really think it's fair to say that all of the common string and wind
> > instruments have partials at frequencies sufficiently close to
harmonics
> > that, for the vast majority of musical purposes, they can be considered
> > practically harmonic.
> Do you still have this information? How close is close?

I don't think I still have exact measurements of real-instrument
deviations from exact harmonics lying around. I don't think I ever printed
them out. And last I checked, my near-harmonic tone decomposition and
resynthesis program was in a rather chaotic state. It will need some
changes to be reversed and reimplemented before I could make those
measurements again.

But the comments I made in this regard, are based upon decomposing
(mostly) orchestral instrument sounds and then resynthesizing them, but
forcing them to have purely integer pitch relationships, and then comparing
the result to the original tones. Certainly two conclusions were true:
1. Negating the aharmonicity of an instrument didn't affect the
character of harmonies realized in those instrument sounds more than
realizing them in different timbres altogether, or in other
combinations
of timbres.
2. The main effect of negating aharmonicity was to make the timbres sound
"dead" and mechanical, somewhat like the old Hollywood notion of a
robot's voice.
I think I do still have a copy of the executable version of that program
that's capable of doing forced-harmonic resyntheses, by the way.

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