Thai tunings

The figures that Graham cites from Manuel's table are probably taken fromHelmholtz-Ellis, which are monochord measurements of single instruments
that had somehow made the long searoute to Europe. I would thus take these
figures with more than a grain of salt, and would by no means accept these
figures as a definitive representation of Thai practice. In my most recent contacts with mainland southeastasian musical instruments
(Thai, Cambodian and Laotian), I have heard very accurate 7-tet tunings. In
fact, I spoke last Winter with a Laotian Khaen maker and player (now living
in France) who said that he used a digital tuner and that he had both sent
cassettes with his instruments and tuners back to Laos where other makershad duplicated his tunings or adopted the use of the digital tuners.

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Charles Lucy wrote:
>Lydia Ayers queried the use of the scale x/y/z notation.
>I agree with her implied criticism of the ambiguity of this system.
>
>I have used it for many years, yet to mean something totally
>different, and much more precise than the vague current Alves usage.
>
>I tackled Bill on this recently, off-list, and he provided a
>(to my mind) lame justification for his continued use of the
>pattern, which was originally devised in about 1989 by John Gibbon,
>Jonathan Glasier and myself in Los Angeles and widely distributed
>in pamphlet form.

Just to set the record straight, Charles Lucy originally wrote me the
forwarded email to respond to a post in the context of defining pitches in
some modes as subsets of tuning systems. I wrote him back that I had no
intention of setting up a competing "Alves system" as he has implied.

I merely wanted a brief way, in that post alone, to specify number of
pitches in the tuning system/number of pitches in the mode/commonly used
auxilary pitches. Three numbers separated by slashes seemed an
understandable way to do it. I included obvious qualifications and had no
intention to try to express the actual tuning of these modes.

I also told Charles Lucy that I found the Lucy/Gibbon/Glasier system
interesting (if largely unrelated to the point of my post), but that I
doubt that all tuning systems or modes could or should be defined in terms
of MOS scales. I promised to try to avoid confusion in the future.

If this explanation is "lame," so be it, but, goodness, can't a person
express himself with numbers and slashes sometimes?

Bill


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