TUNING digest 998

Hey Y'all-
I visited Ray Tomes' web site at

http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/users/rtomes/rt-home.htm

and boy what a find! Lots of interesting tuning ideas, and a good looking
bunch of pages. Of course I linked to it from my page
(www-math.cudenver.edu/~jstarret) under his name as a microtonalist, and
to his "Automatic Just Intonation" under Notes on Microtonality. If you
are on the web, I suggest you visit him right away.

One of you kindly contributed a Microtonal MIDI Moment as a text file,
but a directory got nuked and I lost your name and the file. Could you
retransmit?

John Starrett

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To Lydia Ayers:

Of course the sound is _initially_ airborn. However, the issue is how
exactly does it reach the strings. Try the following: (1) turn a small
table upsidedown and stretch a dulcimer wire between two legs as tightly as
possible. Now tune a string on your dulcimer to match the pitch of the wire
between the table legs. Now try singing the matching tone. Since the
dulcimer string is resonated and the other not, do not pay attention to the
heard amplitudes, but rather to the visual amplitude of the strings. The
unresonated string's movement will be minimal. (2) try singing directly
into the _back_ of your violin. The string should oscillate sympathetically
- via the soundpost and soundboard.

Incidentally, although surface area is critical (as these experiments
illustrate; in long string installations - like Alvin Lucier's _Music on a
long, thin wire_ the scale is so enlarged that sympathetic vibrations can
affect the magnet-driven string in catostrophic ways), the density of the
material can also be very important. The tubular chimes described in this
series actually exhibit two modes of operation: sympathetically, and as
resonators open at both ends. If the tubes were thicker, or made of a
denser metal, lead, for example, the sympathetic effect would have been
negligible except when activated by sounds with extreme amplitudes, while
the resonator effect would be unaffected (actually, for lower tones, the
resonator is improved by having stiff walls).

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