Non-twelve, Princeton style

From an interview with Paul Lansky:

http://silvertone.princeton.edu/~paul/perry.interview.html

"JP: It's interesting to hear you say this, because I always assumed from hearing all the work you've done with human speech that you really wanted in some way to free yourself of even-tempered tuning.
PL: I think that as much as I try to escape it, I've got an equal-tempered grid in my subconscious. I've denied it for years, and I still do, but I think that it's fundamentally where I end up, no matter how hard I try to escape -- and I do try to escape. I do believe that there's a lot a mythology about it, that there's not really any such thing as a true equal-tempered system, because the only machine that can ever really do it is the computer, and then when you do it on the computer, it's always really awful. I find myself constantly detuning things on the computer. A curious by-product of working with a digital system is the integer loop length problem. Comb filters, for example, are inherently out of tune because their memory is in an integer-length loop and their resonant frequencies are thus equal to the sampling rate divided by the size of the loop. The higher you go the worse it gets. You can fine tune them with all pass filters, but it never seems to work quite right."

Daniel Wolf
Komponist/Composer, Frankfurt/Morro Bay
djwolf@snafu.de
http://home.snafu.de/djwolf/