TUNING digest 984

It's that Starrett creep again-

Neil Haverstick wrote
" Forgive me if I didn't get it quite right, but I believe Starrett said
that the Harmonic series was more of a mental construct than a physical
reality, because nothing in Nature vibrates precisely at the frequencies of
the Harmonic series. If this be the case, then what's all the fuss about
"just intonation" in the first place?"

I suppose I may have been insufficiently clear in my writing.
My point is (and perhaps I misunderstood Neil's original statement) that
I don't see how one can say that the harmonic series is the "pure" basis
for music as opposed to, for instance, the priciple of small number
ratios. Certainly people can hear the harmonic partials of a complex tone
and infer melody and harmony from that, but they can also hear simple tones
in "simple" pitch relationships and infer melody and harmony from this.
If we really have some kind of "built in" mechanism for understanding
and appreciating constructions of sound, it seems more likely to me that this
mechanism is broadly based, and encompasses a wide variety of different pitch
realtionships. I love the sound of harmonic series music-I sing "ragas"
in my shop to the hum and whine of the machine tools. But I also love the
sound of 5/3 and 8/5, and they do not exist as ratios in the harmonic
series relative to the fundamental except as a limit of a subsequence
of the series (divided into the octave as usual).
We have a natural bent to play music, speak language and do
mathematics. There are deep beautiful structures in all of these
activities, and human beings are complex and flexible creatures. We
understand and create from many different points of view. This suggests
to me that our appreciation of music is not so simple as to be based on
the principle of the harmonic series alone.

John Starrett

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On Wed, 12 Feb 1997, BUYO-BUYO-IGOR wrote:
> And now I making researches to find out what the "Philly Cream Cheese" is and
> who really is the composer of the music. At first, I thought that "Philly" was
>
> the name of the company.......is this correct? I tried Yahoo, Excite & Hotbot
> but the best result was the URL of the restaurants.

"Philly" is short for Philadelphia brand cream cheese, which is made by
Kraft, I believe. Does that help?

--pH (manynote@library.wustl.edu or http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote)
O
/\ "Do you like to gamble, Eddie?
-\-\-- o Gamble money on pool games?"

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