Wilson's CPS

I need to correct a misapprehension that I am the co-discoverer
of Wilson's CPS. This is not the case; Erv did it all by himself.
I think the confusion stems from a joint paper we published in the
ICMC proceedings back in 1981 (at NTSU) on our computer projects at
UCSD in the late 60's, though the paper makes it clear that they
were Erv's alone.
Erv's discovery of the CPS came about as he pondered the best
set of pitch bases for a large table of ratios I was compiling. As we
were becoming limited by the great length of the table, Erv observed we
could obtain extra "complexity" (more composite intervals and longer
chains of 5ths, 3rds, etc.) by transposing the whole list to various
pitches related by well-chosen ratios. This turned out to be a very
efficient procedure as we had to print out the results on wide computer
paper anyway and it cost us essentially nothing to add the extra columns
when we printed the list off a tape.

I didn't mean to imply that the XH12 paper was the only place where
Erv Wilson's theories have been published, but it is the most complete
and easily accessible source. Other issues of XH have articles by Erv
or his student Kraig Grady and Paul mentioned his article on the 14-tone
stellated 1.3.5.7 hexany. (BTW, Paul, Erv said he likes your setting of
the Hildegarde of Bingen text very much.) The Tables of Contents of all
issues of XH are available at John Pusey's WEB site whose URL is
http://www.tiac.net/users/xen/xh.html

--John

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