Meantone and Well-Temperaments

A couple of comments re Meantone and "Well-Temperament":

Because the chromatic and diatonic semitones are of different
sizes, different meantone keys should sound subtlely different
even if their principal triads are tuned the same when one plays
all 12 tones. This should be true to a greater or lesser extent
for all varieties of meantone short of 12-tet itself. Perhaps
these melodic differences were part of the alleged "affections."

The late Peter Yates, building on the work of Wesley Kuhnle,
described well-temperaments as irregular systems. According
to his rather vague descriptions, one started with 1/4-comma
meantone and adjusted the fifths until one could play in all
keys. Thus one would obtain a type of circulating temperament
with a variety of 5th and thirds.

J.M. Barbour took this idea to its rational conclusion with his
"Tuning by Regularly Varied Fifths," where one started by tuning
the fifth D-A to about 697 cents and increased the size as one
went around the circle in both directions with the widest fifth,
Ab-Eb having 703 cents. The thirds ranged from 392 cents to 408.
Barbour posited a linear increment of 0.16666.. cents, but one
could experiment with other increments, wider ranges, non-linear
steps, etc.

My recollection is that when this topic came up on the list a couple
of years ago, the consensus of people who had tried it was that
it is too subtle an effect to be worth the trouble of tuning it
accurately and that meantone or one of the less extreme historical
temperaments is adequate for performing Baroque music.

I might add that Augusto Novaro claimed the several of his mildly
stretched and shrunk 12-tone tempered octave tunings were were
perceptibly different and worth trying.

--John

Hello Tuning buddies,

Another quick question:

There is a hypercard tuning program available at the mills ftp site.
I can't seem to remember its name or find the appropriate ftp address.

Can anyone help me?

A more hypothetical question. I've gotten interested in tunings that
are more dissonant. This is because I've heard a kind of a tone cloud
during rock shows. This cloud is recognized by many people in the
audience and the musicians. However I doubt anyone knows exactly
what it is. I have guessed that it is the result of sloppy tuning and
loud thick harmonics. Its really a cool sound.

I am going to attempt to synthesise it using a retuned Kurtzweill.
My first attempts will use 11 tet and 13 tet, in combination with 12 tet.
Any thoughts.

I know it sounds amatuerish and insane...

but that is me...

Doren

> There is a hypercard tuning program available at the mills ftp site.
> I can't seem to remember its name or find the appropriate ftp address.

This may not mean much, but I seem to recall somebody saying that JICalc
is written in HyperCard.

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End of TUNING Digest 1582
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