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Chinese Temperament again

🔗"John H. Chalmers" <non12@...>

10/15/1995 3:37:54 PM
Re Chinese music theory: Harry Partch (Genesis of a Music) quotes
J. Murray Barbour's unpublished dissertation, not the version published
as "Tuning and Temperament" and uses a somewhat different scheme to transliterate Chinese into English. He credits Ho Tcheng-Tien (circa
370-447 CE) with the first approximation to the 12-tet octave.
Partch says that Prince Chu Tsai-yu" gave the string lengths
for 12-tet in 1596 accurate to 9 places under the title Lu" Lu"
Ching I. Barbour is the source for the claim that such computations
would require numbers with up to 108 zeros (I think I said 105 in my
last post). Barbour also said that pipes tuned to Chu's method would
each contain 100 fewer grains of millet than the preceeding, an
anticipation of Ellis's "cents." However, this may be purely theoretical
as no end correction was mentioned.

--John

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