LucyTuning

> I am not clear on what you mean by "Lucy Tuning." Is this some special
> tuning concept or is it just your word for a flexible JI that hovers
> around 440?

Lucy tuning is a meantone temperament devised and promoted by Charles
Lucy. Lucy periodically appears on the tuning list, by the way. After
Lucy devised his tuning, he discovered that a fellow named Harrison had
previously devised it. (I think Harrison was British from somewhere around
the turn of the century, but I'm not sure of that.)

As with any meantone temperament, LucyTuning built upon a circle of
fifths. The size of the fifth is such that the major third works out to
1/pi of an octave (352 cents), in the same sense that 12TET is based upon a
fifth such that the major third is 1/3 of an octave. That puts the P5 at
about 695.5 cents, which means that it's somewhat similar with 88TET (not
to be confused with 88CET). A stack of 88 LucyTuned fifths fails to close
the circle by only about 3 cents.

It turns out that LucyTuning is a very close approximation to Erv
Wilson's "metameantone", which is a meantone tuning whose approximation to
a 4:5:6 triad (specifically in that voicing only) has equal beat
frequencies in its major and minor third intervals.

Your guess that LucyTuning might be a form of JI is amusingly ironic
(not that I'm criticizing you, of course, since you had no information on
it). It's ironic in that Lucy has been critical of the
small-whole-number-ratio basis for tuning. He claims in his book that
small whole-number ratio pitch relationships are meaningful only because
they approximate LucyTuned pitch relationships. Lucy promotes his tuning
as a new basis for evaluating tuning as a whole.

Not surprisingly, some JI enthusiasts have reacted very negatively to
Lucy's book and his ideas in general. They have complained not only from
the perspective of meantone being the ultimate basis of tuning, but also
based upon how he promotes his ideas. In particular, Lucy apparently sells
his book for somewhere around $300, and provides some sort of consulting
service. I don't know for sure, but I get the impression that he more or
less copyrights the tuning, suggesting that you can't use it without his
permission, or something like that anyway.

A couple years ago or so, I posted the results of a semiscientific
experiment I did comparing LucyTuning to several other tunings. I
concluded that it struck me as a decent tuning, but I failed to detect
anything fundamental about it that would make it a revolutionary basis for
tuning principles. I also concluded that JI was clearly a far more
auditorially intuitive basis for tuning. LucyTuning struck me personally
as only one of a wide variety of possible alternative tunings. It was
interesting, but I doubt if it'll make it to the top of my list of tunings
to explore within my lifetime. But I'd encourage others to make up their
own minds.

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Hello Charles,

We met in Los Angeles a number of years ago and I showed you
the graphics for a tuning-generation program I was designing
on the Amiga computer.

> As I see/hear it "harmonics" beat.

By definition, "harmonics" don't beat.

The more inclusive term "partials" is now used to describe
the sine wave components of timbre, whether those partials
are harmonic (relating in whole numbers) or inharmonic.

> To hear and appreciate this beating, it is crucial that
> instruments should be tuned as precisely as possible.

You seem to be confusing the beating within a single
note due to inharmonicity of partials with the beating
between two or more notes in various intervalic
relationships. To hear appreciate the former, no tuning
is needed.

> Unfortunately tuned samplers and synthesisers, which are
> currently available, fail to provide the accuracy
> necessary to hear these subtle, yet significant, beat
> frequencies.

If an acoustic instrument can produce a beating timbre,
a sampler can--simply sample the instrument.

Matt Nathan

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