Plato etc.

I'm just a fascinated bystander on this list, so I have no idea what the
"official" take is on McClain. For me discovering THE MYTH OF INVARIANCE was
a big thrill. I'd been playing around with keyboard configurations for just
tuning, sketching out triangular patterns on a plane - then to open up
McClain and see the very same patterns, associated with Plato, the Vedic
Rishis, etc. Grand fun. Of course now I seem them pratically every day on
this list, and lots more. Amazing!

A bit off the tuning front, but still... David Fideler's JESUS CHRIST, SUN OF
GOD has lots of numerology. One main focus as I recall is on rational
approximants to the square root of three. The book explores the influence of
Platonism on Christianity in the first few centuries after Christ.

There's a delightful debate we often circle around - is "harmony" some
absolute property, a basic structure of the universe? Or perhaps it's some
built-in property of human beings, like having five fingers. Perhaps
sea-slugs find octaves discordant? Or perhaps harmony is just some socially
trained language. Even if many cultures appreciate similar forms of harmony,
perhaps this is just due to millenia of inter-cultural musical exchange.

Tuning relates music to math. My background is physics, I work as an
engineer. Please excuse my crudity. But for the reductionist materialist
crowd I hang around with during the week, mathematics is something like the
foundation of truth. While music is more like an ornamental cornice. That's
one of the reasons I love the whole tuning affair. The mathematical structure
of music seems paradoxical from a materialistic engineering
perspective. I.e. it seems to highlight a defect or limitation of that
perspective.

Of course these days math has gotten pretty flipped out. I think it was
Kronecker back 100 years ago and more who thought the integers were God's
handiwork and all the rest human invention. Fits in well with the
Pythagoreans. The square root of two is just too wierd to comprehend.

Jim



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From: PErlich@Acadian-Asset.com
Subject: RE: theories
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>The math involved in tuning theory is quite simple, really. Some
>of us like to make it kind of complicated just to stretch our
>intellectual muscles. But you don't need anything beyond a basic
>understanding of logarithms to grasp any of the really good ideas in
>tuning.

Bingo! Very true, Paul!



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From: kukula@synopsys.com
Subject: Natural Harmony
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