Subliminal Spin

Hello again, Gary,

>Gosh, I personally would be amazed if anybody looks down on Just
>Intonation for that sort of reason. I've never heard anybody
>make such a claim anyway.

I don't see it as the sort of thing that actually makes it to the
conscious level. It's a subliminal hit, built into the language
we use, which may mean that it has all the more influence because
it is a vector most of us are not taking into account in our
calculations.

>But perhaps that's not terribly important in the long run.

Perhaps not, but it may also be that the language will change to
place a positive subliminal spin on whatever tunings supplant the
12et regime which would surely be coming to an end.

I personally think that recognizing the connotations of the
language we use is the only way to achieve an objective
viewpoint. We may decide that the "spin" the language we use
puts on things is right an proper, but if we don't even know we
are doing it, then we are not truly objective.

Also, I've been thinking that there's another way to look at the
whole ET vs JI thing.

Most of the time the discussions of ET I read concern such topics
as selection of the [fifth|fourth|second|etc.] that is closest to
the JI interval. Or perhaps is the comma 81/80 or 123/120, or
some such.

It seems that much discussion of ET is framed in JI terminology,
so that the study of ET scales could just be viewed as a study of
a limited subset of JI scales--those that approximate ET spacing.

Marion

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I made some more in-depth comments on punning earlier on the list, but I
cannot let PAULEs comments go uncorrected.

While temperaments can create ''stable'' puns by way of a kind of
portmanteau construction (e.g. the interval 4 in 12tet can be read as a pun
on 5/4 and 81/64), just intonations create puns by changing rational
interpretations in time. For example, a given tone can be approached as the
5/4 third of one chord and departed as the subharmonic septimal seventh of
another. This kind of pivot-tone modulation functions in both tempered and
just environments to similar effect, but under different constraints. The
just environment may require altering the tonal reference points (e.g.
slipping commas), while each temperament favors particular sets of puns.





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On Tue, 6 May 1997, Daniel Wolf wrote:
> While temperaments can create ''stable'' puns by way of a kind of
> portmanteau construction (e.g. the interval 4 in 12tet can be read as a pun
> on 5/4 and 81/64), just intonations create puns by changing rational
> interpretations in time. For example, a given tone can be approached as the
> 5/4 third of one chord and departed as the subharmonic septimal seventh of
> another.

I don't see this as particularly punny at all. A tone might be the 8/7
of a 5/4 chord and the 5/4 of an 8/7 chord, but it's still 10/7 of the
tonic either way. If these are puns, then one is punning every time one
changes chords. But this essentially drains the meaning from the term.

I would only consider something a pun (in more traditional terminology,
an enharmonic substitution) if a tone were reinterpreted to a different
part of the lattice, e.g. suddenly treating 15/8 as 48/25.

--pH http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote <*>
O
/\ "Well, so far, every time I break he runs out.
-\-\-- o But he's gotta slip up sometime . . . "


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Message text written by INTERNET:tuning@ella.mills.edu
>A tone might be the 8/7
of a 5/4 chord and the 5/4 of an 8/7 chord, but it's still 10/7 of the
tonic either way. If these are puns, then one is punning every time one
changes chords. But this essentially drains the meaning from the term.

I would only consider something a pun (in more traditional terminology,
an enharmonic substitution) if a tone were reinterpreted to a different
part of the lattice, e.g. suddenly treating 15/8 as 48/25.<

Although the tone in my example may be heard as 10/7 of some pitch, it is
not neccessarily heard as 10/7 above a tonic. A tonic is established from
within a collection of pitches, and a pun is a function not of a single
intervallic relationship but of a set of relationships. If I establish a
tone as the 5/4 above a tonic and then suddenly present it as the 8/7 of a
tone _not_ present in the initial collection, I am, in effect, moving our
center of reference to a different part of the lattice. (If you still
disagree, then please define how far apart on a given lattice two tones
would have to be to qualify...).

I cannot identify intonational puns with ''enharmonic substitutions''
alone. Above and beyond my discomfort with the term ''enharmonic'' when
used in this context (I prefer to save ''enharmonic'' for the classical
tetrachord with the narrowest pycnon), ''enharmonic substitutions'' arise
in temperaments where series of intervals coincide and a single pitch can
be notated in more than one way. Intonational puns (and no one has yet
challenged my priority for the term) can cover a broader range of
phenomena, including the deliberate use of close but wrong pitches, and
pivot tones. Earlier on the list I distinguished portmonteau puns which are
heard simultaneously in more than one sense and those that are heard
differently over time.

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[In view of David's message, I am sending this again. If you get two
copies of this, apologies. --pH]

On Tue, 6 May 1997, Daniel Wolf wrote:
> Although the tone in my example may be heard as 10/7 of some pitch, it is
> not neccessarily heard as 10/7 above a tonic. A tonic is established from
> within a collection of pitches, and a pun is a function not of a single
> intervallic relationship but of a set of relationships. If I establish a
> tone as the 5/4 above a tonic and then suddenly present it as the 8/7 of a
> tone _not_ present in the initial collection, I am, in effect, moving our
> center of reference to a different part of the lattice. (If you still
> disagree, then please define how far apart on a given lattice two tones
> would have to be to qualify...).

This misses the point. The above description would fit modulation or
even a simple chord change. I don't think anyone is served by using
such an overbroad definition. I don't consider the progression I-IV a
pun on the tonic note, even though it is being construed as 1/1 of one
set of pitches and 3/2 of another. I would consider I-IV-ii-V-I a pun
on the supertonic, because it has to be construed as 10/9 at one point
and 9/8 at another (relative to the starting and ending point--and no, I
don't want to get into comma drifts right now).

BTW, I chose the term "enharmonic substitution" not becaues it precisely
fits the meaning we're trying to discuss, but rather because it is
analogous to it, i.e. in each case two differently notated pitches are
being represented by one physical pitch.

--pH http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote <*>
O
/\ "Well, so far, every time I break he runs out.
-\-\-- o But he's gotta slip up sometime . . . "

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Paul Hahn wrote:

''This misses the point. The above description would fit modulation or
even a simple chord change. I don't think anyone is served by using
such an overbroad definition.''

My definition is not overbroad, it is quite strict:

A tonic is established from
> within a collection of pitches, and a pun is a function not of a single
> intervallic relationship but of a set of relationships.

In the most familiar tonal repertoires, the fixed collection establishes
tonic/dominant relationships clearly so that common tones between such
chords will not be heard as puns. A pun will be heard when the ear requires
some reorientation, that is when the membership in the collection has been
altered in some way.

Think of it this way: the collection consists of those (usually) closely
related pitches accessable during a given time span in some music. A
temporal pun occurs when a single pitch from an initial collection is now
heard in terms of new collection. Expressed in of just intonation, _any_
such pun will envolve collections upon the same lattice, and puns can be
composed at _any_ distance on the lattice.

It is true that when the collection is ignored the function I describe is
identical for common tones in a tonic-dominant pair and for a more exotic
interval pair, the function alone is insufficient to make a pun. A pun must
be supported by some musical form of ''syntax'' that supports both
interpretations, or it will not be heard as a pun. For that reason, it has
to be framed in terms of distinct operative collections of pitches. I
assume that I needn't note that the effectiveness of an intonational pun
depends upon the identity of this function with that founds in familiar
modulations or chord changes; the difference is not strictly one of degree
- i.e. distance on the lattice - but of context.

This might be positively contrasted with a pitch-saturated music like
Princetonian serialism, where 12 tone aggregates are the basic collections.
In such a music, the lack of content distinctiveness among collections
leads to a situation where all the puns fall flat. (Although intervallic
diversity may create very different lines - or lynes, as they would have it
- in the end all of them map onto the same set of pitches).

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