Richter-Herf Institut - WWW

Fresh from the press: the homepage of the Richter Herf-Institut fu"r
musikalische Grundlagenforschung in Salzburg.

http://www.moz.ac.at/~herf/index.html

Manuel Op de Coul coul@ezh.nl

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Ladies and Gentlemen-
I have had a request to supply more info on barbershop music.
The full correct name of the organization is "The Society for the
Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America "
and the compilations of each years winning quartets is available on the
ProArte label. I own two of these, "Coney Island Baby" from 1990 and "Old
Mill Stream" from 1991. Some of these groups sing "justly" and without
much vibrato.
John Starrett

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

Topic No. 8

Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 01:53:14 +0100
From: blee@dircon.co.uk (Brian Lee)
To: tuning
Subject: Ratios to cents
Message-ID: <199607140053.AA25094@felix.dircon.co.uk>

To convert ratios to cents I use this little program in GWBasic. It's so
simple it should be translatable into other dialects of Basic without
difficulty.

10 Print "Input the numerator and denominator of the ratio"
20 Print "and this program will give the cent value"
30 Print
40 Print "numerator": Input A
50 Print "denominator": Input B
60 Let R = A/B
70 Let C = 1200 * LOG(R)/LOG(2)
80 Print "cent value of ratio" A"/"B "is" C

What it does is divide the logarithm of the ratio by the logarithm of
2(because it's an octave) then multiplies by 1200 for the number of cents to
the octave.

If you want to use Yamaha tuning units instead of cents just replace the
1200 by 1024.

Brian Lee

Paul H. Erlich wrote:
>I see Barbershop more as an extended diatonic style where the small amounts
>of "bending" required to get from Pythagorean to 7-limit JI harmonies are
too
>small to constitute a perceptually distinct pitch set (it's Gregg's melodic
>limen idea again, but we're talking differences no larger than a septimal
>comma, or 27 cents, here, which carefully performed can pass unnoticed in
>melody).

I think that most people recognize that barbershop harmonies sound better
than piano harmonies. If you can hear the difference, doesn't that make it
a "perceptually distinct pitch set"? Maybe I'm just splitting hairs...

-b0b-

// http://wco.com/~quasar


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>I'm not very familiar with the barbershop style. Do they generally use
>the dominant 7th as V7 of the key, as opposed to jazz harmony which uses
>it as a sound color that can occur almost anywhere, functionally?

The Barbershop style is jazz. It uses both otonal and utonal (tho mostly
otonal) 4-5-6-7 chords functionally. These chords, along with chords like
the 12-14-18-21, form the basic consonances of this music. They are built
on every beat of the music, just like major and minor triads are built on
every beat of a Bach chorale.

The V7 chord is usually tuned with the harmonic seventh, as opposed to the
16/9 or 9/5 sevenths. But the music modulates widely (it is composed in
12TET, with all the effects of that tuning assumed) and lots of things
happen throughout the 5 and 7 limits.

By far the best example I have found of this music is Nitelife's Basin
Street Blues album, available at...

http://www.harmonize.com/nightlife/record02.htm


>The point is, given this interpretation the distance to the 4:5:6:7 is
>36/35, which is the septimal comma plus the syntonic comma or nearly 49
>cents, a significantly larger interval to swallow as a comma--though
>still not as big as the 648/625 I mentioned in a previous message.

Because the ear is orders of magnitude more sensitive to tuning
harmonically than it is to tuning melodically, huge commas can effectively
be swallowed by a capella quartets.

*Note. By "sensitive to tuning", above, I mean the preference for one
interval over another. How accurate can you tune a *given interval*
melodically vs. harmonically. I do not mean pitch discrimination -- can
you tell the difference between these two tones? -- which seems to be
roughly the same in either case.

Carl