threeness and more

Carl Lumma wrote,

>But if I'm breathing, I'm =

>not at a loss to hear the "3-ness" in the 81/64 or the "5-ness" in the
5/4.

Paul Erlich responded:

>I don't know what you're breathing. Consider the following intervals:

(etc.)

Erlich is right that you are not going to pick the 'threeness' out of .1
cents stops between a moving and a fixed sine wave. 'Threeness' is going =
to
have to be heard contextually, that is, an 81/64 will be heard as a 3/2
above a pitch understood, again contextually, to be 27/16 above a known
tonic.

I happen to find it easier to hear the 'nineness' in an 81/64. Against a
drone, I sing up a 9/8 major second and then singing either a 10/9 or 9/8=

above this tone is quite easy.

Following the long duration work of La Monte Young and my own installatio=
ns
with massive clusters of pitches related in frequency as pries, I am
increasingly convinced that perception of higher-prime relationships is
possible but that (a) the conditions of presentation must differ
qualitatively and quantitatively from conventional concert music
situations, and (b) the physiologically means of perception is either a
radical extension of the standard listening mechanism or an altogether
alternative mechanism, perhaps spatial.

One example. An installation that I made for the Kunsthalle Zug, in
Switzerland, used ratios involving prime numbers below 1024 in clusters o=
f
up to 20 tones. As insurance against a failure by my Rayna synthesizer, I=

made several DAT recordings at different sampling rates, all of which had=

increased beating when compared with the original. To get around this, I
retuned the original to the 'key' of the DAT sampling rate, and the
excessive beating disappeared. Although the sampling rate of the DAT was =
-
according to all standard theory - adequate to perception, all of the sta=
ff
members of the Kunsthalle could immediately discriminate between the
original Rayna version and the DAT sampling. Clearly, although we were no=
t
dealing with a traditional music-functional distinction - as found betwee=
n
ratios of 3 and 5 - the distinctions between these higher prime identitie=
s
were articulated in the installation. =





=

For you Mac users.

Check out www.metasynth.com (and then follow links to U&I Software for
someinteresting news about powerful tuning enhancements to this already vry
cool software package.

I'm in no way connected to either company, but this software is really
quite nice.




Sanford Forte
Interactive Development Systems
Palo Alto, CA

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End of TUNING Digest 1584
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