JI Puns

Hello Aline

> And, Marion's comment that he thought people gravitated to eq
>temps because they were "easier"...easier in what way? I
>certainly admit that pure tuning understanding is a vast and
>endless subject...I am working toward that goal daily, and it's
>a long haul. However,do we mean, by easier, intellectual
>understanding, or the performance of great music?

Can you have good music without intellectual understanding? I
was thinking intellectual understanding when I wrote that.

>...yes, I am bored to tears with 12 eq, but you "just" champions
>better get on the ball, then, and do some serious playing and
>composing,

I have composed about 20 hours of JI music using a sequencer I
wrote, and made JI arrangements of about 20 hours more of the
work of other composers. Unfortunately, when I wrote the JI
sequencer, I limited it to 12 tones. Now I am working on a DSP
based project that would extend the possible tones to about 40,
but it will likely be a while till I get it done, since I now
have a full-time day job.

Paul E Says:

>Another way of saying this is that Just Intonation has no
>"puns", or notes taken in two different senses, and typical JI
>theory does not admit punning. However, in creating intervals in
>JI, you will eventually come across some very complicated ratios
>that are so close to simple ones that they will function as
>consonances rather than dissonances. So the typical JI
>small-integersnsonance / large-integersssonance approach
>falls flat on its face.

Actually I have played with JI scales that have notes that are
close enough that you probably couldn't hear the difference if
the notes were sounded in isolation. But if I sound one note,
and then introduce other notes from some consonant triad, and
then sound the second, close note and then introduce notes from a
triad consonant with the second note, I get an effect that is
very like a musical pun. I use that quite often in my
compositions, which is why I am puzzled by all the complaints I
hear about 'commas'. Of course you can't do this reliably if you
are uncertain about the tuning accuracy of system on which you
are performing, which is why I insist on exact JI techniques.

Is it fair to select JI scales that don't allow for ambiguity by
discounting scales that contain these 'commas', and then knock JI
because it can't support musical puns?

>Ultimately I have to agree that a continuous-pitch paradigm is
>most desirable. However, individual musical ideas within such a
>paradigm are likely to employ simple sets of fixed pitches,

This is probably so, under the tuning limitations of current
hardware, but I don't think it will always be so. When we get
hardware with better tuning accuracy, we can go to scales with
more pitches.

The limited tuning accuracy of the Yamaha FM synthesis chips was
one of the major factors in my decision to limit my first
sequencer to 12 tones.

>The technical difficulty of mastering a single new tuning, even
>a new ET, in the current educational environment, is plenty to
>expect of a composer whose main goal is to express
>himself/herself in a new way.

I have composed in dozens of JI scales. I couldn't have done
this without the analysis tools I developed for FasTrak. I would
feel quite the prisoner if I were to be restricted to one scale.

Marion

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