Subharmonic chords

Paul wrote:

'' It should be pointed out that no less an authority than James Tenney
dismissed subharmonic interpretations as a musical fiction, despite their
compact appearance in his lattices.''

My conversations with Jim and La Monte Young in Krems, and with Jim later
in Frankfurt last year suggested that both were very much more flexible on
this issue than your remark indicates. ''Musical fiction'' is an extremely
curious phrase to use. ''Music-theoretic fiction'' is more plausible, but I
have no idea what terms of reference are construed as fiction and fact by
this statement. The fact remains that /4:/5:/6 is a description of a set of
frequency relationships that is extremely useful, while the equivalent
harmonic description (in lowest terms: 10:12:15) is misleading when applied
to any real musical contexts of which I am aware.

Do you really hear a just minor triad as being built a Major third above an
absent fundamental?

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You wrote:

'' Even Daniel and Little Wolf
preferred 10 12 15 17 to /12 /10 /8 /7, despite the smaller numbers in the
latter.*** Only in changing the comparison to 17 20 24 30 vs. /7 /6 /5 /4
does the subharmonic version win out. ''

Check my posting. This is NOT what I said. My overall preference is for /7
/6 /5 /4, but in the next inversion, I prefer 10 12 15 17 to /6 /5 /4 2/7.

You wrote:

''The real test, Daniel, is to start with a just minor triad in sine waves,

and then, without looking at the numbers, and starting far away from the
target pitch, try to tune a fourth sine wave to the /7 or 17 purely by ear.

If you can do the former with anywhere near the accuracy with which you can

do the latter, I'll eat my hat.''

As the folks here say: Guten appetit!

I tested all of this with my Rayna and a HP sine wave generator. I may be a
biased test subject, however, in that I have really ear trained though
ratios of 17. But this kind of bias is always a problem for me: what do you
really intend by ''prefer''?



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