QC Meantone and Subtle Differences

A tuning lister opined, directly to me, that my assessment that quarter-comma
meantone is not subtly different from 12TET, but very significantly different.
I'd like to clarify my statement and forward on what, in my warped sense of
humor, I found to be an amusing illustration of what I meant by subtly
different. Actually, I'm slightly rephrasing it here.

I absolutely agree with you that QC meantone is very clearly audible as
distinct from 12TET. I found that it was more clearly recognizable than 12TET
as a byproduct of my assessment of whether LucyTuning had clearly audible
meaning to it.

But my point earlier was that there's different, and then there's DIFFERENT.


Let's suppose that at 9AM tomorrow morning, a Baltimore radio station were to
play, say a short set of Bach Sinfonia, in quarter-comma meantone. I suspect
that something on the order of a quarter of the listening audience (many of whom
are fighting traffic on the way to work) would hear it and notice that something
is curiously unusual about it.

Now let's suppose that, at that exact same time a Richmond radio station were
to play that same set of Sinfonia with all major thirds tuned down to 16:13, all
minor thirds at 7:6, minor sevenths tuned down to 7:4, and tritones tuned to
10:7. I suspect that most of the Baltimore listeners won't hear the unusual
nature of the meantone performance over the gut-wrenching screams echoing from
50 miles away in Richmond!


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