Steve's Thoughts on Commas and Pseudocommas

> This was all the more
> puzzling in light of Pauls explanation to me that I had created the
> _same amount of shift_ that I was trying to avoid when I used the
> borrowed tone in my experiments. One "works" but the other doesn't...

I'm inclined to agree with Paul's assessment that using the borrowed
ii-chord is more or less a way of avoiding the problem. And a clever one
too. It's avoiding the problem in the sense that, by substituting a chord
that is inherently more discordant, you made it plausible to use the
"wrong" scale degree 2 - wrong that is for submediant of the subdominant,
but right for the dominant of the dominant. Even more impressively, the
more discordant chord was enough of a surprise that moving the submediant
down from 16 to 15 became plausible as well. (Then again see my note below
about the tenor part.)




> Does the perceptability of such phenomon depend on
> a) whether the shift takes place in an inner or outer voice

Putting the movement from 16 to 15 in the tenor part (as it was in the
4-part voicing I suggested) does indeed seem to have made it less
noticeable. Generally speaking anything in the tenor part won't stand out
as much as soprano or bass. So I suppose that's not terribly surprising,
and a help tip for making a comma- or pseudocomma-shifted note less
shocking.



b) the function within the chord of the tone undergoing the pitch shift.

Perhaps so, in particular with regard to whether it's a tendency tone or
not. But I'm personally inclined to think that the overall discordance of
the chord, as with the minor vs. diminished ii, is a bigger factor. Or
perhaps more generally than discordance, but the surprisingness of the
chord. Adding a b7 to that chord might have made note shifts even harder
to pinpoint because the unusualness of that chord distracts listeners'
attention from the shifts.



> The other question concerns the last example, the wandering tonic. I
> thought this one sounded the smoothest of all, and all the chords
> sounded or felt "right". What bothers me is that while I could easily
> sense the shift in tonic if I were to hum it from the beginning of the
> progression in order to focus on it, I didn't seem to be all that
> bothered by it if I just listened to the chords as they were.

Wandering tonics of course are one of my big fascinations in this field
of unusual tunings, so I always enjoy hearing impressions of how they
affect people. Thanks for describing that impression.

The first time I heard a wandering tonic was, something like about 10
years ago, when I programmed it into Dave Hill's setup at FSU's Center for
Music Research. I had HEARD OF the idea before that, I think from John
Chalmers but I'm not sure, when Glen Prior experimented with them on one of
Erv Wilson's 53TET tubulogs.

In that case of 53TET, and the JI example at FSU, the comma shift was
more sneaky, presumably because the amount of shift was smaller (roughly 22
cents instead of well over twice that in 22TET). So the effect of "normal,
normal, normal, normal ... yeah yeah same ol' stuff, ... HUH?! How the
hell did we get here??!!" is a bit more mysterious than on 22TET. I'd like
to try that example in 34TET to hear it on an intermediate size of shift.
It should be available in 41TET as well.




> I recall reading somewhere, perhaps here on the list, about composing
> such that the downward drift is compensated for by upward drift. If
> anyone knows what I'm referring to and can provide a reference for me
> to track it down again, I'd appreciate it.

I know that a while back I mentioned that you can shift the pitch upward
similarly with a I-IV-V7-I progression by making scale-degree 4 of the
IV-chord match a 7:4 seventh of the V7 chord. In a purely JI scenario, the
tonic would wander up by 36:35, which is quite a bit more than the 81:80
downward wander of the comma-shift mentioned earlier.


Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl
with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 20 Jan 1997 14:15 +0100
Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA08657; Sun, 19 Jan 1997 16:19:51 +0100
Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA08676
Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI)
for id HAA15443; Sun, 19 Jan 1997 07:19:47 -0800
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 1997 07:19:47 -0800
Message-Id: <199701190506_MC1-F65-745E@compuserve.com>
Errors-To: madole@mills.edu
Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu
Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu