Stria, Phi

As Bill pointed out, the pitch material of Chowning's STRIA is based
on phi-- the ninth root of phi, as I recall. However, Chowning says he
was unaware of O'Connell's "phi-tonality" work at the time he composed it. I don't know whether he made use of the theoretical properties of
phi-tonality or whether they are perceptible in the piece. I haven't heard
it for a very long time and I have seen no analysis that suggests that ]
they were. I'd be very interested in finding out, needless to say.

As I recall, Gerald Strang used some timbres based on powers of e
back in the 60's and they required an enormous amount of computing time
on the old IBM mainframes running Music4 (or Arthur Robert's all Fortran
version). The computation to playing time was something like 180 to 1,
I think. Technology has obviously improved.....

--John

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