Response to Dave Hill

Many thanks for your detailed reply Dave.

>The reference given by Patrick Ozzard-Low on Frequency ratios of
>spectral components of musical sounds is of interest to me and I
>plan to copy the article and read it at first opportunity (next trip
>to UC San Diego library).

As I say, I don't have the background to have a serious view on the
methodology therein, but I expect it could be stimulating.

> If the results of my work would be of significant value to a
> researcher or researchers in the field, I would like to make my
>programs &c. available to them.

I guess this would indeed be of much interest (if not directly to me,
at least to prospective co-researchers) in the long term. But maybe
you should get in touch with Judy Brown - she's got a couple of Web
pages which look like your current research:

> I'm currently working on another research project
>(preparing listener intonation response -

and hers have quite a bit in common.

However, I assume from your post that the research you mentioned in
_not_ published. Did I understand correctly?

One of the reasons I was asking about publication was because it
seemed to me your results were quite specific and detailed in ways
that are not obvious to read in Brown's article. And that makes it
much easier to understand for someone like me!

cheers,

Patrick O-L

On Wed, 20 May 1998, Andrew L. Kaye wrote:
[snip]
> "The Circle of Life." At the climactic cadence of the song, when the
> singer reaches into his higher register to sing "IN THE circle......the
> circle of lai----ifffee", the singer's tuning on the notes sung to "IN
> THE" always seem problematic to me. We are in a major key, and the
> notes are: In (6) the (6) cir-(5) cle (3-2-1-_6-_5), the (_5) cir (4)
> cle (3) of (2) lai (2)-aiffe (1). The "6" note in the scale appears at
> this point as the third in a subdominant chord. It seems to me to be
> somewhere between 6 and flat-6. Has this caught the attention of any
> parents-tuning specialist out there? What note is actually being sung,
> and what relationship does it have to the underlying notes?

Okay, here's what's in the published songbook from Hal Leonard: your
analysis of the melody is correct, but the underlying chord is (from the
bass up) B double-flat, D flat, E flat, G flat. (Confusingly, the chord
symbol given is Gbm6/A.) The voice/melody, however, is singing a high B
(single) flat. I imagine the tuning problem you're hearing is either
(a) the conflict between the vocal Bb and the instrumental Bbb in other
octaves (sort of a "Gershwin chord", though I've never seen one where
one of the notes involved in the cross-relation was the bass), or (b)
sheer vocal fatigue on the part of the singer, who has been belting full
tilt for most of a longish song, and who now has to hit a !@#$*&^% HIGH
B-FLAT four bars from the end.

--pH http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote
O
/\ "Churchill? Can he run a hundred balls?"
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