Darreg Disc Error: track 3 mislabelled

Gary M. wrote:
>But anyway, I just listened to the track Paul mentioned, and I think he's
>right! I suspect that it's 19TET though. The final chord pretty much
seems
>to
>rule out 17. But I think I'll have to ... "tenuously" I'll say ...
disagree
>with his assessment of the opening minor third. I definitely know what he
>means
>by it sounding a little "off", but I suspect that that's an aberation of
the
>carbon-arc-lamp brightness timbre of that particular Korg patch. I suspect

>that
>it's 19 because, unless I've gone deaf, I don't hear a shred of beating in
it.
>And with that much high-harmonic content I would expect it to sound like
>phase-shift city if it were off by any appreciable amount from just.

Not only does that minor third sound wide from just, but it also beats just
under 3 times per second. Gary, maybe you should listen to it on a different
stereo system, this beating is not hard to hear. The lower note of the minor
third is about a middle d#, and a little calculation shows that the beat
frequency for a 22-tet minor third in this register is 2.5 Hz. Considering
that this was a Korg, the disrepancy is forgivable -- when the minor third
moves down a semitone, the beat frequency falls to just over 2 Hz. Another
clue that the piece is in 22 is the melodic division of the major third into
two almost-but-not-quite-equal parts, which is impossible in 19.


Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl
with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 10 Jul 1996 23:05 +0100
Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI)
for id OAA04641; Wed, 10 Jul 1996 14:05:54 -0700
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 14:05:54 -0700
Message-Id:
Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu
Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu

Ooops. I meant to send this to the list, not just to Paul.

Actually, listening again to the opening chord, I hear something a little
different. The opening minor-third chord is about 3 seconds long before the
first melody note enters. There is some sort of square, on/off change (no
intermediary values) that occurs about once a second during that time. During
that first second-long period, I hear something that sounds to me like a classic
beat, but it vanishes after that first second-long period.

But anyway, check out Bill Sethares' analysis below.

By the way, it sounds different depending upon where and at what angle I
place my head within the room. That beat during the first second-long period
seems almost inaudible when I have my head between the two speakers, but is
clearly audible when I have my head turned 90 degrees so that both speakers are
toward my left ear.

For you folks doing sample looping, that's something I've found to be very
valuable: Don't declare a loop to be clean without moving and tilting your head
relative to the monitor speakers. Some flaws in some rooms can easily be
rendered inaudible when your head is at one angle or another.


--------------- Forwarded Message ---------------

From: Gary Morrison, 71670,2576
To: PAULE, INTERNET:ACADIAN/ACADIAN/PAULE%Acadian@mcimail.com
Date: 10 Jul 1996 , 7:16 PM

RE: Darreg Disc Error: track 3 mislabelled

> Not only does that minor third sound wide from just, but it also beats just
> under 3 times per second. Gary, maybe you should listen to it on a different
> stereo system, this beating is not hard to hear.

I definitely heard something changing at the low-mid frequency range, at
about the rate you mentioned, but it didn't sound like a beat to me. I say
"didn't" because of some results Bill Sethares came up with.

He did a mathematical analysis of a certain passage, and the frequencies
present drew two conclusions I found surprising:
1. Two pitch changes in a chromatic run were 48 cents and 52 cents. It seems
likely therefore that it's not in 17, 19, nor 22, but in quartertones.
2. The timbre, despite its brightness, consisted of only of two partials an
octave apart. I don't recall what he said were the relative weights.

As for the beat, I suppose that that change we both hear could be a beat
after all. The tone was bright enough that I expected it would have major wads
and wads of high-harmonic content, in which case the beats would sound like
typical phaser/flanger effect from a Tomita album. It would be a horrendous
comb-filter sweep - FAR less subtle than that fluctuation you pointed out.

But knowing that the tone is really just a couple of partials (and apparently
low ones), then yes, that probably is exactly what such a waveform's beat would
sound like.



------------------------------

Topic No. 4

Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 01:02:04 -0600
From: hyperpoodle@mail.sisna.com (Doren Garcia)
To: tuning
Subject: 11 tET mudtone bass guitar man
Message-ID:

Tuners,

For some reason I failed to receive issue 774. Would someone be kind enough
to send me a copy?

Is anyone entering and maintaining this list in a database?

>Beethoven and Haydn have played on this piano, which was tuned in 31 tET.
>>K"onnicke built it with instructions of the Domkapellmeister of Linz,
>Johann >Georg Roser who had ordered a similar instrument in Brussels ten
>years earlier >for Mozart. Roser had several meetings in Linz with Mozart,
>who allegedly >composed two little pieces for the instrument (according to
>the manuscript of >Roser's biography), and which were regrettably lost.

Mind-blowing! Thank you Manuel Op de Coul!

Doren O'Garcia
hyperpoodle@sisna.com
O'Garcia Astrophysics Lab and Garage



------------------------------

Topic No. 5

Date: 11 Jul 96 02:55:49 EDT
From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@CompuServe.COM>
To: Tuning List
Subject: 7HS Tuning Comments
Message-ID: <960711065548_71670.2576_HHB35-3@CompuServe.COM>

I suggested that a friend at work, Bill Meadows, who does a lot of multimedia
try out tuning in 7-tone-per-octave octave-repeating harmonic-series-based
tuning. The ratios within each octave for this tuning are 7:7, 8:7, 9:7, 10:7,
11:7, 12:7, 13:7, and 14:7, obvious 7:7 being the unison and 14:7 being the
octave.

This is a tuning I've played with before, and I thought that Bill would very
good at using it in the way that I concluded would be best, after I used it in a
way I concluded to be less than ideal.

Bill tuned it up on his Kurzweil K2500 last night and found it rather
intimidating. He likes to use the phrase "out of tune" because he knows that
that's inadequate to characterize a tuning except at a very high level.

Anyway, here are some suggestions I made to him that perhaps some of you
might want to consider playing with as well:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yesterday afternoon I wanted to expound further on how to use that 7-step
octave-repeating harmonic-series-based tuning. You said that you weren't sure
how to use it, noting semijokingly that it sounded "pretty out-of-tune".

My responses to that are:
1. Hey, no pain no gain!
2. Is that really any more disconcerting than the microtonal scale-step size
phenomenon you like to tantalyze your audience with? I'm refering to how
you described 19 to Dave E. and me ... oh, probably 9 months back:
Tantalyzingly delaying an expected melodic resolution by approaching it in
small microtonal steps. Is the out-of-tune nature of this tuning really
all that much more disconcerting? And whether it is or not, is that a
problem?
3. One thing you're really good at, and I'm not (yet) is music involving
long, sustained tones with faster stuff, often repeated figures, dancing
on top of the sustained chords. This tuning, I suspect, is well-suited to
that sort of thing:
a. You can build large chords will little chance of a clash in the minor-
second/major seventh sense of the word, because the pitch relationships
are very simple.
b. There exists a semi-standard mixing engineer/artist's analogy of the
sounds they mix to a three-dimensional space: left/right stereo gives
you the left-right dimension with high- vs. low-pitch suggests top-
bottom and quiet- vs. loud-volume suggests far and close. Combine
that with the fact that each tone of the octave has a distinct color to
it, and then play a musical, 3D version of ... Pollock was it? - the
fellow who first painted with squirt-guns).
4. What it's probably not good for is what I used it for on that tape I gave
you early on, with the last three movements of a Symphonietta in that
tuning. In that case I tried to build classical structures - traditional
instrumentation, forms, melodies - with nontraditional harmony. Well, I
concluded that what I did in that regard went reasonably well, but that
that style is not what this tuning is built for.
5. Since when have you been concerned with audiences thinking your music
weird?!