Electronic interference with tunings

Graham Breed writes:

> On my Wave Blaster, major triads actually sound better
> in 31tet than JI. This may be because of sample looping (could
> someone explain this, please?), phase shifting vibrato or a bug in
> my program.

It's hard to say without hearing it myself, but my best guess is that the
problem is distortion being made more audible by the greater purity of the JI
chord waveform. The purer (more nearly periodic) a waveform is, the higher
quality the reproduction gear must be to handle it without audible artifacts.
This is especially true in the digital audio realm, where the problem may be
related to poor software programming or low-quality Digital-to-Analog
converters (most likely clock jitter, a complicated and expensive subject).
Nevertheless, the problem could be occuring in one of the amplifiers,
speakers, poor connections between them or any combination thereof. Any
non-linearity in the system will cause overtones, some of which may be
non-harmonic. The more purely harmonic the source audio is, the more the
non-harmonic overtones will stand out.

In addition, JI chords tend to be higher amplitude (by both peak and RMS
measurements) than others because the peaks of the individual note waveforms
line up periodically and sum together. Digital or analog distortion could be
caused this way, or both. If you can lower the volume of the individual
notes early enough in the process, particularly within the program itself,
you may be able to solve the problem.

Sample looping as the problem would be a long shot if all major chords sound
better with one tuning than another. I'll send you a personal note on that
since it leaves the realm of the tuning list a little too much.

David J. Finnamore
Just tune it!

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