My melodic lemon

[Bill Sethares -- I don't mean to cop your pun, I came up with it
quite independently on the way to work this morning. Honest. ;-)
Steve]

The recent discussion re melodic limits of preception have caused me
to look a bit more in depth at an experience I had a month or so ago.
At the time, I simply accepted it as the "fruit of my labor" in
working with micro-tunings starting to pay off, but I'm wondering if
theres more. As provocative as it may seem, my question here isn't
merely rhetorical, and I'd like to have some opinions from the field.

I had gone to see a guitarist that I admired, and hadn't seen for a
good many years (Ellen McIlwaine), and was rather suprised when she
introduced a piece dedicated to Usted Ali Akbar Khan. During this
piece, a particular interval continually sounded wrong to me, and I
concluded that it might have had something to do with the fact that
I had spent that entire afternoon listening to Arabian and Moroccan
music.

So far as I could tell, she was hitting a 12TET major third, but it
sounded far too "bright" for the piece. A minor wouldn't have done
right either -- it would have been flat. This wasn't a subtle
"something's not quite right", either. It stuck out like a sore
thumb throughout the piece.

To get to the meat of the matter, I looked in what references I have
last night, to try and find an explanation. What I came up with
as likely intervals were:

1) 408 cents
2) 384 cents
3) 355 cents

I think I can discount #1 right off -- even if I could have noticed
the 8 cent difference, it would have been even "brighter". So that
leaves #2 & #3. I seriously doubt that I was hearing a comma, as I
have to work at it to hear it in some of the JI recordings I have
where it is being demonstrated. #3 then seems likely. I'm not too
familiar with this music yet, but there does seem to sometimes be a
"neutral" sounding third, neither major nor minor, that crops up in
some of the melodies.

I cross-checked with 19, 22 and 24 tet as well. Neither 19 nor 22
offer an interval that has that sort of sound, and the closest
approximations involve differences on the order of 20 or 30 cents, and
they display majorness or minorness, and while I don't have anything
set up to give 24, it does have a 350 cent "quartertone" derived
neutral third.

So, was I clearly hearing an out of tune rendition of a neutral third,
and hence a melodic difference of 45 cents, and that under "real"
conditions? Inquiring minds want to know...

Steve


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From: Gregg Gibson
Subject: 19-tone Equal Octave Stretch
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