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Syntonic Comma vs. P5

🔗mr88cet@texas.net (Gary Morrison)

4/28/1997 6:24:23 PM
>If only the 81:80 is a syntonic comma, then only the 3:2 is a (perfect)
>fifth. We don't restrict the latter that way; there's no reason I can see
>to restrict the former either.

Well... Perhaps, but I think that that's not a very meaningful
comparison, for two reasons:
1. A syntonic comma is a description of a pitch discrepancy between two
different formulations of what are conceptually (12-tone framework) the
same pitch, whereas a perfect fifth is a basic consonance. Those are two
very different concepts, with very different purposes behind them.
2. 22TET's analogy to a syntonic comma is more than two and a half times the
size of an 81:80, whereas the most extreme intervals likely to be charac-
terized as perfect fifth are unlikely to deviate from 3:2 by more than
20c, a difference of barely over 1%.



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