Contorsion?

I've just finished reading everything in the archives, to my
knowledge, which exists about contorsion. I've always disagreed with
the notion that contorted temperaments are the pariahs of regular
temperament theory because I've felt that the objections to them have
come from the following two points of view

1) People just aren't interested in them, period, because nobody
thinks that constructions like <24 38 56| or <14 22 32| are musically
useful
2) People don't want to call them "temperaments" because the overall
paradigm originally derives in large part from Fokker, so that the
concept of musical notes existing in a scale that don't map to
elements in some Fokker block is somehow considered musically invalid
or a throwback to a more hedonistic, anti-harmonic, serialist era

This seem silly to me, because what if I want to just play in 24-EDO
and only play 5-limit chords? What if I actually like the sound of
quarter-tones purely as melodic intervals - why should I have to
pretend that they're 45/44 or something? But then I also came across
this view

3) People think they probably are musically useful objects, but have a
view that "temperaments" are more abstract entities which must be
non-contorted because this gives them nice dual properties with the JI
lattice and makes the math really beautiful and elegant, and then
"tuning systems" like 14-EDO can "implement" things like <7 11 16|

This is something I can agree with more. Is this where people have
coming from on this issue? My impression of reading the arguments in
the archives is that it wasn't clear to me what the actual reasoning
is for one side or the other.

-Mike

On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 9:23 AM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is something I can agree with more. Is this where people have
> coming from on this issue? My impression of reading the arguments in
> the archives is that it wasn't clear to me what the actual reasoning
> is for one side or the other.

Can anyone answer this question?

-Mike

On 12/25/2011 9:23 AM, Mike Battaglia wrote:

> 3) People think they probably are musically useful objects, but have a
> view that "temperaments" are more abstract entities which must be
> non-contorted because this gives them nice dual properties with the JI
> lattice and makes the math really beautiful and elegant, and then
> "tuning systems" like 14-EDO can "implement" things like<7 11 16|
>
> This is something I can agree with more. Is this where people have
> coming from on this issue? My impression of reading the arguments in
> the archives is that it wasn't clear to me what the actual reasoning
> is for one side or the other.

I think this is closer to my view about them. They're musically useful, but consist of two or more independent chains of the same temperament.

On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Herman Miller <hmiller@prismnet.com> wrote:
>
> On 12/25/2011 9:23 AM, Mike Battaglia wrote:
>
> > This is something I can agree with more. Is this where people have
> > coming from on this issue? My impression of reading the arguments in
> > the archives is that it wasn't clear to me what the actual reasoning
> > is for one side or the other.
>
> I think this is closer to my view about them. They're musically useful,
> but consist of two or more independent chains of the same temperament.

Yeah, so I don't have much problem with this view. I don't think
there's a problem with this. As long as we're doing things in a
self-consistent way, and it's not coming from some arbitrary
hypothesis about the all-encompassing importance of ratios in music
cognition, I'm happy.

So what will we call something like 5-limit 14p? Perhaps a "tuning
system" which utilizes the 7p "temperament?"

Whatever it's called, the val <14 22 32| still describes how the
primes map onto a chain of generators, but admits a melodic dimension
to look at as well.

-Mike