Misc. Comments

Kudos to Jonathan Walker for his very clear response to Scott's questions.
I have had a similar experience when I once gave a lecture on microtonal
music to a group of pathology residents and staff when I was on the
faculty of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Attendance at path.
department seminars was really abysmal, so the organizer, who was also
my boss (we were studying the immunogenetics of retrovirus-induced
cancer remission in chickens , a lateral step for me from the fungi I
usually worked with) decided on SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to stir up
interest. Well, it worked and I had a large audience, but about a 1/5 the
way through, just after playing excerpts of Carrillo's Preludio a Colon
and some samples of Harry Partch, the dept. chairman stood up asked what
all these numbers were. I then realized that most people know very
little music theory and even many musicians are unfamiliar with the type
of
theory we discuss on this list. So, since then I've made a point of
starting with the basics whenever I speak to an audience.

Re Complexity: I've tried both Erlich's and Hahn's complexity
algorithms (translated into BASIC) and have found them to agree for
level 1 complexity in all cases I've tried. Perhaps it would be helpful
if Pauls E and H would repost their definitions of consistency.

BTW, back in the 60's, Erv Wilson defined "efficiency" a tuning for
an interval as the fractional accuracy, i.e., the difference between
the best ET degree and the JI value divided by the step size. While using
the absolute value of the error is convenient, the sign of the efficiency
tells one if the approximation is sharp or flat of the JI value.

I might also mention that Manuel's "pipedum" routine, presumably based
on Fokker's concept of periodicity blocks in prime factor spaces (tonal
lattices) illustrates the type of "weird" behavior described in your
discussion. Various ET's are defined by the inter
which span 0
degrees of the temperament. For example, 5-tet is defined by the 16/15
and 81/80, 7-tet by 25/24 and 81/80, and 12-tet by 128/125 and 81/80,
though other sets of kommata will also yield these temperaments (at
least in the case of 12; I haven't looked at the other two tets).

Dan: I think your project is very interesting. Can you post some
references to studies of the relationship between brain electrical
activity and exposure to concordant and discordant musical intervals?

--John


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