Max Meyer

Two comments made here about Max Meyer should be addressed:

There is indeed a tonality diamond on p. 22 of "The Musician's Arithmetic."
It gives cents values for all 16 seven-limit intervals, transposed to within
one octave. Of course, four of these intervals are 0 cents. So Partch most
likely did get the idea from Meyer, but he rotated it 90 degrees
counterclockwise.

Someone said in effect that Meyer's system of using numbers rather that
ratios limited him to a small subset of just scales. This is not the case.
Meyer explicitly ignores powers of 2, and multiplies all ratios by whatever
factor is necessary to leave only powers of two in the denominator. This is
no different from Brian McLaren's representation of Wilson CPS scales, where
Brian leaves only powers of 2 (which Meyer would ignore) in the
denominators. Any just scale can be represented in this way. Meyer may have
deceived himself in many matters, but his mathematics was sound.


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