5- (and higher) limit monophony in real life

Pythagorean monophony and equidistant scale steps are by no means as
ubiquitous as PAULE claims. Some European and Euro-American
counter-examples:

Irish folk music - especially unaccompanied Sean Nos singing - consistantly
demonstrates that leaps of major thirds are sung smaller than ditones and
that once a third has been established by the singer, an unequal infill
(i.e. 9:8, 10:9) is virtually inevitable. (The entire Schenker project rest
on an analogous insight - and Schenker's analyses of vii and ii chords
deserves another posting). Alpine unaccompanied singing shares a tendency
towards higher limit intervals, including 7:6 minor third - possibly
imported from yodeling and alphorn playing. Scandinavian folk music shares
the five limit preference, with frequent comma shifts - while avoiding
comma sinking. American shape-note singers - with a more conservative
harmonic vocabulary than Barbershoppers - use a rich vowel sound to get
asist in maintaining the pitch in unison passages also do 5 limit thirds.

Outside of Europe:

A recent concert of Laotian music (Khaen and vocal) at Hessischer Rundfunk
gave ample demonstration that vocalists ''corrected'' the 7tet scale to a
scale with unequal steps. While slendro has some structural affinities for
5tet - and with pythaagorean pentatonics - it is decidedly unequal when
realised by vocalists, rebab and suling players. (A three-limit
realisation of pelog is impossible, I reckon.) The ''harmonic'' traditions
of the Asian steppe include a huge body of solo songs with consistant
intervals clearly outside of a three limit framework. Chinese monophony
will often include comma shifts - both syntonic and septimal. Central
African choral music....

Need I go on any further?

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Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 15:22:27 -0800
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On Tue, 25 Feb 1997 15:32:14 -0800 Lydia Ayers said:
>The justly-tuned aluminum tubes of my Woodstock Gamelan will vibrate
>sympathetically whenever a pitch is soundeded at the same frequency as
>one or more of them. This works not only when pitches are played on the
>flute or sung, but even when I cough! Coughing gets quite a few of the
>tubes to sound, and sometimes even when the cough is in a different room!
>There is no sounding board on the "gamelan," so this phenomenon is
>definitely transmitted through the air directly to the tubes.
>
The house I lived in in Massachusetts 3 years ago had an old set of
tubular chimes as a front door bell. Whenever I sneezed (which is a MAJOR
acoustic event, and rather dangerous in fault-ridden California.....) the
chimes would sympathetically resonate with incredible vigor. So, I echo
Lydia's observation of air-transmitted energy to the tubes.
-- Brian Belet

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Lydia Ayers wrote:
>
> This is a second attempt to post to the list in response to posts in
> January about sympathetic vibrations (I'm trying to catch up with a
> lot of old tuning posts):
>
> >> I believe that sympathetic strings do indeed work by transferring
> >> the energy through the air. As a simple experiment, sing into a string
> >> on a guitar, and you can easily set the string to vibrating
> >> (sympathetically) with your voice.
>
> > In that particular case I'm almost certain that what gets the guitar
> >string to vibrate is the sound waves from your voice vibrating the
> >soundboard, which vibrates the strings. FAR less, I believe you'll find is
> >a result of the air directly exciting the strings themselves.
>
> The justly-tuned aluminum tubes of my Woodstock Gamelan will vibrate
> sympathetically whenever a pitch is soundeded at the same frequency as
> one or more of them. This works not only when pitches are played on the
> flute or sung, but even when I cough! Coughing gets quite a few of the
> tubes to sound, and sometimes even when the cough is in a different room!
> There is no sounding board on the "gamelan," so this phenomenon is
> definitely transmitted through the air directly to the tubes.
>
> An interesting feature of sympathetic vibrations in strings or tubes is
> that they lack the characteristic attack, and often have timbres closer
> to sine waves than the timbres produced by "normal" playing techniques,
> such as struck, plucked or bowed.
>
> Lydia Ayers

Just to tell you, this message and the tonality message
made it on the list. I received them here in Los Angeles.

Matt Nathan

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On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, Lydia Ayers wrote:
> The justly-tuned aluminum tubes of my Woodstock Gamelan will vibrate
> sympathetically whenever a pitch is soundeded at the same frequency as
> one or more of them. This works not only when pitches are played on the
> flute or sung, but even when I cough! Coughing gets quite a few of the
> tubes to sound, and sometimes even when the cough is in a different room!
> There is no sounding board on the "gamelan," so this phenomenon is
> definitely transmitted through the air directly to the tubes.

Yes, but tubes present orders of magnitude more surface area to be acted
upon by sound pressure than strings do.

--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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Paul Hahn wrote:

>Yes, but tubes present orders of magnitude more surface area to be acted
>upon by sound pressure than strings do.

Yes, they do have more surface area, and they could even be seaid to
contain their own resonators, since they are hollow. But, even so,
it is the air that carries the vibrations which stimulatie the
sympathetic vibrations, not a sounding board connected to the
original stimulauus and not cables or anything. else. Sound waves can
travel through air, water, wire , etc. On a sitar, the vibrations
may travel from the plucked string to the sympathetic string through
the air and/or the soundboard; in either case the resonator of the
soundbaoard will serve as an amplifier to make the all the sounding
strings louder.

Now htathat I think about it, I remember quite a few years ago payinglaying
a solo flute piece with the soundboard of the pieano open. PLlaying
the flute near the piano strings with the dampers off caused the
same effect of certain strings vibrating sympathetically. Of course,
the soundboard of the piano was not connected directly to the flute!
So the aire m must have been a sufficient carrier of the sound waves
to stimulate the strings.

Best,

Lydia

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From: PAULE

The cross-sectional area of a string is almost negligible compared with that
of a tube or plate. Thus the string will receive almost no energy from
incident sound waves, while a broader object can absorb significant amounts
of energy.

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Lydia Ayers wrote:
>
> Paul Hahn wrote:
>
> >Yes, but tubes present orders of magnitude more surface area to be acted
> >upon by sound pressure than strings do.
>
> Yes, they do have more surface area, and they could even be seaid to
> contain their own resonators, since they are hollow. But, even so,
> it is the air that carries the vibrations which stimulatie the
> sympathetic vibrations, not a sounding board connected to the
> original stimulauus and not cables or anything. else.

I think what Paul Hahn means is that the greater surface
area allows the vibrations of the air to be transferred
into the body of the instrument more easily. I would add
that it it also allows the reverse, so the greater the
vibrating surface area, the louder the instrument is and
the more sensitive to external sounds it is, so we hear
tubular bells resonate to coughs because of their surface
area coming and going, but we don't hear lone strings
(without a soundbox) resonate because of their surface
area coming and going.

Of course there are other factors too. A painting
has a lot of surface area but is not either
very stiff or very tense (as a drum head would be)
and absorbs the air vibrations, changing them
into heat via internal friction in the canvas.


Since writing the above, I've read further in the thread.

I will add that a sound box (like the body of a violin)
is designed not to have particular resonances, or at
least to have its resonances spread out into wide bands.
That's why you don't hear the violin body responding to
and sustaining particular notes when you sing while
muting the strings.

The strings are designed to have strong resonance
peaks which is why certain notes are sustained when
you sing while the strings left free to vibrate.

A sound box is also designed to be in good contact
with the vibrating element (violin string) so that
vibration can be conducted from the element to the
sound box and then to the air for us to hear.

Now, I know of no way to allow sound conduction in
one direction and not the other. Sound must conduct
mechanically from the sound box to the string just
as easily as from the string to the sound box. Also
sound must conduct as easily from the air into the
sound box as it does from the sound box into the air.

The sound box and string together then make a single
vibrating system, which is in good contact with the
air. It has the dual advantages of musically usable
high-peak resonances (the centers of these resonances
are even adjustable by stopping the string to
different lengths!) and good body-to-air contact
provided by the large surface area of the sound box.

Since sound is conducted equally well in both directions
between string and body, and equally well in both
directions between air and body, it makes sense to me
that when you sing, the air vibrations are picked up
only slightly by the string's small contact with the
air and more greatly by the body which then conducts
the vibration to the strings, but that the strings,
though having poor direct contact with the air, will
determine which notes the system as a whole resonates
best to.

Going back to the hanging chimes, each tubular bell
is a single system which has both large surface
area and definitive peak resonances (unlike a violin body).

Now, what do we tune these to? :)

Matt Nathan

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On Wed, 26 Feb 1997, Lydia Ayers wrote:
> >Yes, but tubes present orders of magnitude more surface area to be acted
> >upon by sound pressure than strings do.
>
> Yes, they do have more surface area, and they could even be seaid to
> contain their own resonators, since they are hollow. But, even so,
> it is the air that carries the vibrations which stimulatie the
> sympathetic vibrations, not a sounding board connected to the
> original stimulus and not cables or anything else.

Nobody was questioning that air could transmit vibrations--that's what
sound is, after all. The original question was _can a string be set
into significant vibrating motion by air vibrations alone?_ Examples
involving tubes, or strings mechanically coupled to soundboards or
other strings, do not help resolve this question.

A simple experiment that _would_ resolve the question is this: sing at
an electric guitar at a pitch matching one of the strings. Note the
level of the output and compare vs. a gentle pluck. I'll bet it's
several orders of magnitude (bels) lower. Surely someone out there has
an electric guitar handy?

--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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