micro synths

In the recent discussion of wish lists and tuning implementations,
one practical point has been overlooked. It was not "Ensoniq" the
company that gave us their implementation -- it was Steven Curtin,
who was in charge of the tuning implementation while he worked there.
Likewise, E-mu's David Frost was more or less singlehandedly responsible
for the Proteus tuning implementation. Tuning is not and never will be
a priority for a manufacturer. The best we can hope for is a sympathetic
and knowledgable individual within a company who is willing to devote
his or her time and energy to make it happen. Talking to programmers
is far more likely to be productive than talking to executives or
marketing types.

>Margo Schulter has just put up a WEB site devoted to
>the tuning of early music. Her FAQ on Pythagorean tuning
>and harmony is superb. It also describes meantone and 12-tet
>from the point of view of medieval music.
>
>See http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/harmony/pyth.html.

This site is excellent and also describes many other important early
music tunings. Everyone should read it. I must now correct myself in TD
1367, where I wrote,

>the tuning of Grammateus, where the white keys are in meantone, and the
black keys divide the whole tones >exactly in half.

The white keys are actually in Pythagorean tuning. The resulting tuning
has 10 large and 2 small semitones, like the 12-out-of-22 tuning I
described.