Benade's field of attraction experiment: a fairly thorough review

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> I don't know if I'd use a term like "fraudulent." I wish we could all
> lower the level of angst around here.
>
> I can't find these Benade papers. I saw a link to his book, but not
> the papers. I'm not going to buy the book. If these tests really are
> just to see what dyad people retune to in laboratory conditions, then
> I don't care at all about them, really.

I said I wouldn't buy it, and I won't. But I found the chapter on
Google Books for free. Here it is (click View Sample and go to page
274):
http://books.google.com/books/about/Fundamentals_of_musical_acoustics.html?id=cCW5Ng0UfYYC&utm_source=gb-gplus-share

So it's probably worth clarifying Carl's description

> It's observed that when people are given a tunable tone
> generator, set randomly, and are instructed to "tune" it,
> they tend to turn the knob until they hit a simple ratio.
> It's assumed that, on average, where they started is in
> the field of attraction of the thing they stop at.

So the first thing to note about the experiment in this book is that
it's not really an experiment at all; there's no data or charts or
controls or anything. It's just an anecdote about the way Benade's
observed his students to behave in a highly informal group setting
with artificial, harsh, electronic timbres. In fact, "anecdote" itself
isn't really the right term - these informal experiments were done as
a group with both musicians and nonmusicians and Benade himself in the
room, as a pedagogical demonstration deliberately to teach his
students about beatlessness by instructing them to find beatless
intervals. That being said, what Carl wrote is more or less the
experiment described in the book. However, this description might be
interpreted the wrong way for those who haven't read it.

In Benade's story, students were given a random interval and then
directed, specifically, to find the nearest point of beatlessness
narrowly constrained between fields of larger beating. This
beatlessness is what Benade calls a "special relationship" between two
tones and is specifically what Benade tells his students to look for.
Benade picks a student out of a group, directs the student to find the
nearest beatless ratio, and the student does in front of the class, at
which point the class "invariably agrees" that the point picked is a
local minimum of beating.

It should be noted that it isn't like the subject was just given free
reign to tune the oscillator to whatever he or she wanted, and then to
stop upon finding the sound they thought was "most in tune." Under
those directions, I see no idea why someone given an initial interval
of 600 cents wouldn't glide all the way over to 702 cents. So it's not
really clear anything's being measured here other than the degree to
which humans can find intervals they'd label as beatless.

Benade then lists a set of intervals "everyone always agrees on as
being beatless." This set ends up being the set of all 7-odd-limit
dyads smaller than an octave and doesn't include any ratios more
complex than that. However, it's obvious that care must be taken in
assuming that this is the set of all dyads that humans can actually
hear as "beatless," considering that Benade was right there in the
room, that nonmusicians were mixed in with musicians, and that this
whole thing is a demonstration to teach students that harmonic ratios
don't beat.

Benade then goes onto say that many of the simplest JI ratios were
readily categorized by the musicians into classes like "major third,"
"minor third," and so on (for some reason, he doesn't list that they
think that 7/5 is a tritone). He then says that when he does these
demonstrations, all of the musicians are always convinced that 5/4
actually is the 12-EDO major third, and don't realize it's flatter
than usual. He then plays them the 400 cent 12-EDO third, and they all
hate it and can't believe that's the major third they're used to.
Benade claims they then tend to ask "why does anyone think that 400
cents is an acceptable tuning?" Benade answers this question by noting
that a real musical performance is not the same thing as a controlled
laboratory setting: the timbres are much less prone to "display the
simple relationships" (read: are much less harsh), that there's often
inharmonicity in piano strings, that when dyads are arpeggiated they
display no evidence of the "simple relationship" at all, and that
dyads which don't seem to "display a simple relationship" often
suddenly do when placed in a triadic setting. There are a few other
things I wish he also said, but that's somewhat decent for now.

There are a bunch of minutia but this is long enough as is. Hope you
found this useful. I see Igs has now one upped me by reading the whole
experiment and demanding I still reply to his post though, so oh well.

-Mike

Just to add a little more to what I said when I "one-upped" Mike: Benade's work demonstrates that people can hear beating and eliminate it, in a group setting with the instructor present. It's weak science at best, totally biased at worst. But it's not even a little bit important to the point I was attempting (and apparently failing) to make.

Temperament is based on representation. It's possible to interpret that representation as being purely abstract, having nothing to do with music, acoustics, psychoacoustics, or physical reality at all. You can set up any sort of equivalence relationship between two numbers and see what that does, mathematically, to relationships based on those numbers.

It's also possible to interpret that representation as having musical import, and as such being anchored in physical and/or cognitive reality. In this interpretation, tempered representations of JI are supposed to, well, represent JI. For something to represent something else, it's generally given that there must be resemblance between the two. There isn't a hard-and-fast limit on this, but if we allowed anything to represent arbitrarily anything else, the act of representation would become meaningless. Accepting that there are limitations on what can represent what, is all that protects us from nihilism.

So, in temperament, we presume JI to be "that which is represented". We assume that we have some idea of what JI "is", although this appears not to be an assumption Mike is comfortable making. Regardless of what verifiable or measurable properties a Just interval has or doesn't have, we should at least be able to agree that the interval spectrum is not 100% covered by Just intervals (if it were, "Just" would be a meaningless term). We can probably agree that it's not even 50% covered by Just intervals. So we can say that if a Just interval is going to be represented by something other than itself, it's got to be represented by a non-Just interval, and likewise any interval that represents a Just interval cannot be a Just interval itself.

Now, the idea of one Just interval representing another Just interval *all else being equal* should be an absurdity. Why? Well, we have to ask "what is being represented, exactly, when one interval represents another?" Certainly, in order for an interval to *be representable*, it must have some distinguishing features about it that can be recognized under distortion or in absence of its totality of features. There must be some quality to it that is "essential", such that anything that shares that quality can be recognized as similar to the "original". This is elementary stuff. Anyway, to the extent that a JI interval is capable of being represented, it must have some essential unique quality to it--if that quality is either non-essential or non-unique, then it will be impossible to recognize a representation of that interval *as being* a representation of *that* interval.

In order to talk about temperament at all, then, we have to assume *axiomatically* that all Just intervals each have some distinguishing feature(s) that enable them to be represented by tempered intervals. Either that, or we have to admit that temperament is a purely abstract operation not concerned with physical reality. We may not know what these distinguishing features *are*, per se--I couldn't tell you what qualities distinguish a Just 7/6 from a Just 11/4 or a Just 8/5, for instance--but they are nevertheless clearly distinct. Training, categorical perception, musical context, etc.--these things are important in determining *which* intervals might be considered Just (and thus suitable material for tempering). But the basic premise that Just intervals are "special" and therefore representable is the keystone to temperament theory. If we reject that, we have to either reject temperament or relegate it to the realm of pure mathematical abstraction.

Your move, Mike.

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> >
> > I don't know if I'd use a term like "fraudulent." I wish we could all
> > lower the level of angst around here.
> >
> > I can't find these Benade papers. I saw a link to his book, but not
> > the papers. I'm not going to buy the book. If these tests really are
> > just to see what dyad people retune to in laboratory conditions, then
> > I don't care at all about them, really.
>
> I said I wouldn't buy it, and I won't. But I found the chapter on
> Google Books for free. Here it is (click View Sample and go to page
> 274):
> http://books.google.com/books/about/Fundamentals_of_musical_acoustics.html?id=cCW5Ng0UfYYC&utm_source=gb-gplus-share
>
> So it's probably worth clarifying Carl's description
>
> > It's observed that when people are given a tunable tone
> > generator, set randomly, and are instructed to "tune" it,
> > they tend to turn the knob until they hit a simple ratio.
> > It's assumed that, on average, where they started is in
> > the field of attraction of the thing they stop at.
>
> So the first thing to note about the experiment in this book is that
> it's not really an experiment at all; there's no data or charts or
> controls or anything. It's just an anecdote about the way Benade's
> observed his students to behave in a highly informal group setting
> with artificial, harsh, electronic timbres. In fact, "anecdote" itself
> isn't really the right term - these informal experiments were done as
> a group with both musicians and nonmusicians and Benade himself in the
> room, as a pedagogical demonstration deliberately to teach his
> students about beatlessness by instructing them to find beatless
> intervals. That being said, what Carl wrote is more or less the
> experiment described in the book. However, this description might be
> interpreted the wrong way for those who haven't read it.
>
> In Benade's story, students were given a random interval and then
> directed, specifically, to find the nearest point of beatlessness
> narrowly constrained between fields of larger beating. This
> beatlessness is what Benade calls a "special relationship" between two
> tones and is specifically what Benade tells his students to look for.
> Benade picks a student out of a group, directs the student to find the
> nearest beatless ratio, and the student does in front of the class, at
> which point the class "invariably agrees" that the point picked is a
> local minimum of beating.
>
> It should be noted that it isn't like the subject was just given free
> reign to tune the oscillator to whatever he or she wanted, and then to
> stop upon finding the sound they thought was "most in tune." Under
> those directions, I see no idea why someone given an initial interval
> of 600 cents wouldn't glide all the way over to 702 cents. So it's not
> really clear anything's being measured here other than the degree to
> which humans can find intervals they'd label as beatless.
>
> Benade then lists a set of intervals "everyone always agrees on as
> being beatless." This set ends up being the set of all 7-odd-limit
> dyads smaller than an octave and doesn't include any ratios more
> complex than that. However, it's obvious that care must be taken in
> assuming that this is the set of all dyads that humans can actually
> hear as "beatless," considering that Benade was right there in the
> room, that nonmusicians were mixed in with musicians, and that this
> whole thing is a demonstration to teach students that harmonic ratios
> don't beat.
>
> Benade then goes onto say that many of the simplest JI ratios were
> readily categorized by the musicians into classes like "major third,"
> "minor third," and so on (for some reason, he doesn't list that they
> think that 7/5 is a tritone). He then says that when he does these
> demonstrations, all of the musicians are always convinced that 5/4
> actually is the 12-EDO major third, and don't realize it's flatter
> than usual. He then plays them the 400 cent 12-EDO third, and they all
> hate it and can't believe that's the major third they're used to.
> Benade claims they then tend to ask "why does anyone think that 400
> cents is an acceptable tuning?" Benade answers this question by noting
> that a real musical performance is not the same thing as a controlled
> laboratory setting: the timbres are much less prone to "display the
> simple relationships" (read: are much less harsh), that there's often
> inharmonicity in piano strings, that when dyads are arpeggiated they
> display no evidence of the "simple relationship" at all, and that
> dyads which don't seem to "display a simple relationship" often
> suddenly do when placed in a triadic setting. There are a few other
> things I wish he also said, but that's somewhat decent for now.
>
> There are a bunch of minutia but this is long enough as is. Hope you
> found this useful. I see Igs has now one upped me by reading the whole
> experiment and demanding I still reply to his post though, so oh well.
>
> -Mike
>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> So the first thing to note about the experiment in this book is that
> it's not really an experiment at all; there's no data or charts or
> controls or anything. It's just an anecdote about the way Benade's
> observed his students to behave in a highly informal group setting
> with artificial, harsh, electronic timbres.

What you say is true, though I agree with Igs that his claim doesn't necessarily need to depend on this observation.

Consider this temperament, for instance:
http://x31eq.com/cgi-bin/rt.cgi?ets=1bcc_1p&limit=5

Where 3/2 is 983 cents, and 5/4 is -217 cents.

The first observation I would like to make is that it is ridiculous to play this temperament the way it is intended. Who would honestly play 983 cents as a perfect fifth? And even more puzzling is why you would use an interval smaller than 1/1 to represent a major third.

If I were to use these to generators to make a scale, I would honestly scrap the mapping and use 983 cents as some sort of 7/4 or 16/9, because that is what it *sounds like.* I think this is the part you don't quite understand Mike. There becomes a point when one interval no longer sounds like the one we call it, and that is exactly what Igs is describing.

And of course, I know the next question you are going to ask is "At what point do we stop calling X another version of Y?" Well, I've already answered that question, if you look at my first response to Igs post. There is no such definitive answer, though we know that a threshold must exist in each individual, reductio ad absurdum (see my above example).

What I don't quite understand is why you are responding to Igs observations as if they have no relevance. Weren't you just recently saying that you wish people would take the time to understand your own theories, instead of immediately attacking them? I think what Igs is saying definitely has some ground to it, because it is based on observation instead of the psychoacoustics you very much hate.

Ryan

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Ryan Avella" <domeofatonement@...> wrote:
> If I were to use these to generators to make a scale, I would honestly scrap the mapping and use 983 cents as some sort of 7/4 or 16/9, because that is what it *sounds like.* I think this is the part you don't quite understand Mike. There becomes a point when one interval no longer sounds like the one we call it, and that is exactly what Igs is describing.
>

Thank you, Ryan! This is exactly what I'm talking about.

> And of course, I know the next question you are going to ask is "At what point do we stop calling X another version of Y?" Well, I've already answered that question, if you look at my first response to Igs post. There is no such definitive answer, though we know that a threshold must exist in each individual, reductio ad absurdum (see my above example).
>

Right. I agree. More importantly, while temperaments in the abstract are clearly-defined, in music it's entirely possible for multiple temperaments to "come in and out of existence" in the ear, according to how the music is being played, somewhat regardless of how we arrived at the tuning or defined it in the abstract. I could, for example, take a super-flat meantone major scale of 0-180-360-510-690-870-1050-1200, play a bunch of 0-360-690 and 0-330-690 triads, and be playing in meantone...and then turn around, drop into the relative minor, and start playing a bunch of 0-690-840 triads and all of a sudden this isn't meantone, but some bizarre 2.3.13 1053/1024 temperament. But maybe a naive listener would come along and hear those triads as not consonant or implying any sort of consonance at all, and to him or her, this is just a random dissonance of meantone, no 13-limit implication at all. Temperaments thus only truly exist in the ear of the beholder.

For another example, let's say that every time I hear something like a dominant 7th chord in 12-TET, I think it sounds like an out-of-tune 4:5:6:7. 12-TET's a dominant temperament, no problem. But let's say I write a piece in Flattone[12] using lots of dominant 7th chords. Flattone doesn't map 7/4 to a minor 7th, it maps it to a diminished 7th (C-Bbb rather than C-Bb). But--for giggles, let's say I want to do an adaptive JI version of this dominant-heavy Flattone piece. Well, 4:5:6:7 is still the most concordant thing I can tune those chords to, and I decided that this sounds "right", better than tuning them to 1/1-5/4-3/2-9/5. Wouldja believe that I actually wrote the piece in Dominant[12], despite tuning it initially as Flattone[12]?

So, I'm going to go ahead and say that for anyone who cannot hear anything "special" happening at ratios of 11 or 13, the 11- or 13-limit *does not exist*. If there's nothing special being heard, it's not JI, and if it's not JI, it makes no sense to temper it or describe a temperament as representing it.

-Igs

Igs, I'm combining your first post with this one, thus forming what
will surely be the longest reply to any post ever made to this list.

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 12:06 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> Now, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute. I'm not talking about nebulous concepts like "major 3rd" here. I'm talking about the ability of tempered intervals to represent rational ones. Are you suggesting that things like "temporal context, tonal center, modality, the futility of training, timbre, harmonic context, scalar context" etc. might have the power to make a 6/5 sound like a 4/3?

No, of course not. But to throw out a trivial example, 16/13 by itself
sounds to me "like 5/4" in a somewhat meaningful way. However, 16/13
is also just the octave inversion of 13/8. And, in a musical setting
in which there are 13-limit otonal chords and you're arpeggiating
things, if one of the things being arpeggiated is 16/13, and the
"root" is heard as 1:...:13:16 for this particular point in time, then
I think it's likely that it will "sound like 16/13" in a way which is
also meaningful, at least to me.

And I want to reiterate that I hate to talk about what things "sound
like" other things, because you're talking to a person who's been
playing in 12-EDO since he was 2 years old, and for whom everything
"sounds like" things that have nothing to do with JI. I have no idea
if my "sounds like" has anything to do with your "sounds like" at all.

> Let me ask you: when we say a tempered interval represents a Just one, what do you think we mean?

Who's we? I can tell you what I mean, but I can't tell you what anyone
else means.

> > Your post here now seems to be making a larger statement about the
> > applicability of these experiments to music cognition, which is
> > precisely the thing that nobody wanted to do before. So now, if you're
> > making further assumptions now, particularly things that have to do
> > with psychoacoustics, it would be helpful if you could state
> > explicitly what they are.
>
> I don't think I'm making any more assumptions than anyone else who believes that "temperament" is a meaningful concept. Temperament is entirely based on the idea that you can take JI, mistune it by some amount, and still achieve a similar effect with the resulting intervals. When we create temperament mappings, we are making an explicit list of which Just intervals our tempered intervals should be "heard as"--or, "adaptively intoned as" (same difference).

Igs, in the very beginning of this discussion, I tried to get people
to define, very clearly, what all of this "fields of attraction" crap
meant, what "hearing an interval as another interval means," and what
the hell we're talking about. Please remember that my interest in
getting a clear definition like this was piqued when and only when
Carl said that fields of attraction "can't be conditioned by normal
means," so it would seem to be important for me to understand exactly
what something like that means. This also comes after a big discussion
on scales and categorical perception, at which point Carl also told me
he had always believed the same things I did, so I was completely open
to having misinterpreted the point and wanted to see in what sense he
(and you) thought these fields of attraction exist and in what sense
they can't be conditioned.

These are the things I tried to people to take a stance on:
1) Does a field of attraction have to do with a subjective judgment
for when an interval resembles another? (What you seem to be saying
now) I was told "no."
2) Does a field of attraction have to do with purely psychoacoustic
features, more like what Cam is calling a "field of interaction,"
which a composer is free to care about or not care about in his music?
This would be one of the few things I do agree can't really be
conditioned too much by normal means, but I was also told "no," in a
way I thought was unnecessarily harsh, in fact.
3) Does a field of attraction have to do with predicting what people
will like? I was told "no."

Obviously all of that makes it totally impossible for me to figure out
what the hell it means, until you saved the day with the idea that we
didn't have to make any of the above assumptions: neither subjective
resemblance, nor psychoacoustics, nor pleasure is needed for the
concept, because we can assume a purely operational definition about
how someone would retune an interval in the same manner as the Benade
experiments. OK, so I went with that.

Now it seems that you've changed this definition to what's #1 above.
That's totally fine, I'll use whatever definition you want. But
frankly, after hearing all this shit about me "making too many
assumptions" and "putting words in people's mouths" and
"misrepresenting ones position" or whatever, it shouldn't be much of a
surprise that I made -zero- assumptions beyond what you said. And now,
you're using this concept to talk about the usefulness of
=temperaments= and claiming that dicot as a totally abstract
mathematical object isn't real because 350 under laboratory conditions
for a listener with a low value of s won't retune it to 5/4...?! What
about in larger chords? What about adaptive dicot? What if I have a
higher s than you? These are a million assumptions which I
deliberately DIDN'T make, but now you're telling me it's simple and
obvious.

I'm not trying to give you shit man, but I really don't understand
what you think the big picture is. I probably have a different view of
the big picture than you do. If it makes you feel better, I don't
think 120391 cents is a good 3/2. I don't know how much else that
means.

> Mavila's an inaccurate temperament, but it doesn't map intervals across fields of attraction.

OK, Armodue equates 7/6 and 6/5, for instance.

> > This would also imply that dominant temperament isn't real, because
> > the tempered minor third represents multiple consonances: 6/5 or 7/6.
> > I don't agree with that either.
>
> In some temperaments, there are musical circumstances where one interval can sound like two separate consonances--in a dominant-tempered 4:5:6:7 chord, for instance, or a semaphore-tempered 6:7:8:9. If you wanted to tune dominant temperament adaptively, you'd tune 1/1-5/4-3/2-9/5 chords to 4:5:6:7, every time, no ambiguity. That's how the temperament works. I might even guess that most people confronted with 1/1-5/4-3/2-9/5 would say that 4:5:6:7 sounds like a smoother version of the same chord, suggesting that even if they're not *playing* in dominant temperament, they're still *hearing* in it.

I agree only for some cases when something sounds like an altered
version of something else. What about the times when someone hears a
7/6 and a 6/5 as two different versions of the same thing, or 8/7 and
9/8? What are they "hearing in" there?

> > I don't know what you mean by "sounds like" a 6/5 here. To my f'd up
> > evil AP ears, minor thirds in Bug sound like minor thirds, and 4:5:6's
> > in something like 9-EDO still sort of "sound like" 4:5:6.
>
> If someone played you a minor triad in Bug temperament, and asked you to tweak it so it sounds in tune, would you tune it to 10:12:15, or 6:7:9?

That depends. Have I been born and raised on 9-EDO my whole life?

> The Bug minor 3rd is flat of a 6/5 by a huge amount, and flat of a 7/6 by much less. I would say that unequivocally suggests that a minor triad in Bug should be adaptively intoned as a 6:7:9. But if that's the case, then this isn't Bug temperament, it's 2.3.7 semiphore. But then, if those wonky Bug major triads still sound like 4:5:6, and the minors sound like 6:7:9, well holy crap 36/35 just added itself to our comma list. So we started from the abstraction of tempering out 27/25, but that perceptually "implies" 49/48 and 36/35, meaning that Bug does not exist as an independent entity and "just is" Beep...or rather, that Bug exists only as an abstraction and can't be realized in music.

What if you play around with adaptive Bug?

I do agree that limits are an undesirable feature though.

> This goes back to a conversation I had with Paul once. I wanted to argue that 690 cents is not a meantone generator, because four of them gets you to 16/13 (360 cents) while eleven of them gets you to 5/4 (390 cents), and I thought it was ludicrous to ignore the better mapping for 5/4. But Paul insisted, rightly so I think, that if I was playing major and minor triads in a 7-note MOS from the 690-cent generator, it would still be meantone because those 0-360-690 and 0-330-690 triads would still sound like they're representing 5-limit triads. He then suggested that if, on the other hand, I used a bunch of 8:12:13 chords to pump the 1053/1024 comma, I could legitimately claim it wasn't meantone. This blew my mind and I was kind of angry about it for a while and didn't want to believe it.

That's one way to interpret the regular mapping paradigm, sure.
Another common one is to not care at all about what VF something like
16/13 produces, or how much it beats, and to simply learn to remember
and label as many JI ratios as possible, and instead of giving them
names like "major third" to give them names like "16/13." To them,
16/13 might be an interval that they remember as being, oh, I dunno...
perhaps somewhere between a major and a neutral third, not the most
concordant in isolation, a bit flat perhaps, sounds a bit like 5/4,
==sounds awesome in 13-limit chords in a way that 5/4 does not==, and
they've just given the name for this whole package "16/13," with the
notion that it's not concordant dyadically but is very concordant in
larger chords just being a part of the package. Seems like there are a
lot of people who do that as well and couldn't give a damn about
psychoacoustics, because it doesn't matter if a dyad is really
concordant all by itself when we have nice things like polyphony.

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 3:25 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> Temperament is based on representation. It's possible to interpret that representation as being purely abstract, having nothing to do with music, acoustics, psychoacoustics, or physical reality at all. You can set up any sort of equivalence relationship between two numbers and see what that does, mathematically, to relationships based on those numbers.
>
> It's also possible to interpret that representation as having musical import, and as such being anchored in physical and/or cognitive reality. In this interpretation, tempered representations of JI are supposed to, well, represent JI. For something to represent something else, it's generally given that there must be resemblance between the two. There isn't a hard-and-fast limit on this, but if we allowed anything to represent arbitrarily anything else, the act of representation would become meaningless. Accepting that there are limitations on what can represent what, is all that protects us from nihilism.

I see temperaments as being melodic lattices which have certain
intervals that we're aiming to intone in a way that creates certain
psychoacoustic effects, and in which those intervals can combine in
certain ways to create chords that have certain other psychoacoustic
effects. That's it.

What I don't want to build into this is my subjective impression of
something like 5/4, and then judge temperaments by how bad that
impression gets messed up vs how much the overall resemblance stays
the same. This is because from the age of 2, my mind has been filled
with one type of 5/4 - a 400 cent, meantone and augmented-tempered,
12-EDO 5/4, which is a "major third," habitually is placed in a
diatonic scale, and which is accessible by the circle of fifths and a
munit consisting of two whole steps and which is pleasantly and
delightfully sharp. I continually discover new ways in which my
"impressions" are actually aggregates of simpler things, which always
unlocks new xenharmonic experiences as I associate those simpler
things in new ways. In short, if I go by my subjective impression of
"resemblance," I have no way of knowing which resemblances are
conditioned and which ones aren't.

Even more in short, 22-EDO augmented seconds in the context of
superpyth don't sound "like 5/4" to me, nor does the C#-E# in the
19-EDO C C# E# F tetrachord. But now that I'm more aware of my own
perception, I can separate the 5/4 part of it from the rest - a nice
buzzing effect and a phantom note in the bass, maybe a partial timbral
fusion too, etc - and leave the rest of that crap alone, like the warm
fuzzy feeling I'd expect if this 5/4 is also a major third. Now I have
what I feel is a more intelligent way of discussing when things sound
like 5/4 or don't, but it's never clear to me what others mean when
they say something "sounds like 5/4." And I also still have no way of
knowing what crap there is left too, if there are still associations I
have that I don't know about. And my perception changes any time I
spend a serious stretch of time in a novel tuning too, confounding
things even more. My entirely psychoacoustic interpretation of regular
temperaments is delightfully compatible with all of this.

Is that compatible with what you mean by seeing temperaments as
representations of JI? If so, then I'm happy.

> So, in temperament, we presume JI to be "that which is represented". We assume that we have some idea of what JI "is", although this appears not to be an assumption Mike is comfortable making.

I'm comfortable making the assumption that I know a small part of what
JI is, and that I am able to separate it in some small way from what
JI is not.

I'm not comfortable saying that what people like or hear things
resembling as or whatever can't be conditioned by normal means, which
was the claim that started all this, if we're now talking about
subjective judgments about resemblance.

-Mike

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Ryan Avella <domeofatonement@...> wrote:
>
> The first observation I would like to make is that it is ridiculous to play this temperament the way it is intended. Who would honestly play 983 cents as a perfect fifth? And even more puzzling is why you would use an interval smaller than 1/1 to represent a major third.
>
> If I were to use these to generators to make a scale, I would honestly scrap the mapping and use 983 cents as some sort of 7/4 or 16/9, because that is what it *sounds like.* I think this is the part you don't quite understand Mike. There becomes a point when one interval no longer sounds like the one we call it, and that is exactly what Igs is describing.

I assume you mean *sounds like* in a totally subjective way, correct?
As in, 983 doesn't sound like a perfect fifth at all, it sounds like a
7/4 or a minor seventh or what not, for anyone listening. Well yes,
obviously that's the case. But what you're missing here is that the
following claims were made about all of this fields of attraction
stuff about a half a month ago

1) Fields of attraction can't be conditioned by normal means and are
unresponsive to learning and are inborn or learned in the womb
2) We're going to define an interval being "heard as" another interval
if someone would retune

The entire point of everything I'm writing is in response to these
assumptions which were stated before you joined the conversation. The
package is being sold as an inborn thing which I can't alter by just
learning more basic things for things to sound like and which for most
people correlate with JI. And there is only a very, very limited sense
in which I agree with that statement. Before criticizing anything,
I've tried my best to get people to state -exactly- what they think
can and can't be conditioned.

What you're talking about here is about value judgments: how much does
X resemble Y and that sort of thing. That's fine. And TBH, there are
plenty of things that I have in my head as reference points for
intervals which aren't really based in JI at all. Like a minor
seventh, for instance, the canonical version of which in my head is
about 1000 cents, or a minor second, the canonical version of which in
my head is 100 cents. AND, if this is the sort of thing you're going
to talk about, then you can't reasonably make the claim that it can't
be conditioned by normal means or that I can't learn to make new
labels and say that things sound like new things. Because at that
point, what's to stop me from playing 14/11 a lot and getting used to
it and just developing an affinity for that sound as a slightly sharp
major third? Not much, really.

OK, so fine. No problem there. But the point is that this is -not-
what we were just talking about for a month. I tried deliberately to
see if it WAS, because then I'd have to disagree with this notion that
conditioning is useless. Everyone said it wasn't. Instead, we came up
with this operational definition for the concept of "hearing an
interval as another interval" which is NOT just arbitrarily labeling
points and deciding how much they sound like other points. With this
fragile understanding in place, we proceeded, but now Igs seems to be
talking about what you're talking about; i.e. subjective preferences.
Except they don't seem to, because he keeps talking about "fields of
attraction" as absolute things and not just listener-specific
same/different judgments, and which (I assume?) he believes isn't
trainable, as this is what we've been talking about.

> And of course, I know the next question you are going to ask is "At what point do we stop calling X another version of Y?" Well, I've already answered that question, if you look at my first response to Igs post. There is no such definitive answer, though we know that a threshold must exist in each individual, reductio ad absurdum (see my above example).

That's fine, and I don't think that anyone would disagree with that.
It's just not what we've been talking about. The whole point of Igs
post is that he was claiming that certain temperaments like dicot
aren't "real" in a sort of absolute sense because 350 cents is
"outside the field of attraction for 5/4." If this is supposed to be
interpreted entirely in a subjective sense, like 350 cents "does not
sound like 5/4," then all I can say is that for years, that's not how
I heard it, but that I have no problem believing that's how it works
for some people. When I first got into this field, 350 cents would
switch back and forth between sounding "like 5/4" and sounding "like
6/5" and so on. And in the context of something like a dicot-tempered
1:2:3:4:5, it still sounds "like 1:2:3:4:5" to me, especially if you
use a harsh timbre. But now we're just going by what I, personally
feel is close enough to warrant an "x sounds like y" rating, and to be
honest I've heard things that are 5/4 "not sound like 5/4" anyway,
which is why I now have a more refined understanding of what it means
to actually "sound like 5/4."

Point is, if we're talking about things in a subjective sense, you
can't claim this sort of thing is universal. And I don't think it's
what Igs is saying, because he seems to be talking about something
that presumably is a bit more universal.

> What I don't quite understand is why you are responding to Igs observations as if they have no relevance. Weren't you just recently saying that you wish people would take the time to understand your own theories, instead of immediately attacking them? I think what Igs is saying definitely has some ground to it, because it is based on observation instead of the psychoacoustics you very much hate.

No offense, but this is a rather frustrating paragraph. I feel like
you're not quite filled in on the larger context of the discussion
that we all had with Carl in this situation. But if all it takes to
make you happy is for me to say I agree with the interpretation of Igs
statements that subjectively, detuned intervals start resembling other
intervals if you detune them too much, then ok, I agree with that.

I'm still not sure Igs is saying that because sometimes it seems like
he's making deeper assumptions. Also, there was never any point where
he said "OK, despite what we were calling 'fields of attraction'
before, I'm going to break with my earlier definition and Carl's view
and define them as attractors around subjective labeling points." But
if that is all he's saying, I agree. Also, I don't appreciate you
saying I hate psychoacoustics, given our 0.5-1 year history of talking
for hours and hours on XA about it.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> No, of course not. But to throw out a trivial example, 16/13 by itself
> sounds to me "like 5/4" in a somewhat meaningful way. However, 16/13
> is also just the octave inversion of 13/8. And, in a musical setting
> in which there are 13-limit otonal chords and you're arpeggiating
> things, if one of the things being arpeggiated is 16/13, and the
> "root" is heard as 1:...:13:16 for this particular point in time, then
> I think it's likely that it will "sound like 16/13" in a way which is
> also meaningful, at least to me.

Sure. I concur with all of this.

> And I want to reiterate that I hate to talk about what things "sound
> like" other things, because you're talking to a person who's been
> playing in 12-EDO since he was 2 years old, and for whom everything
> "sounds like" things that have nothing to do with JI. I have no idea
> if my "sounds like" has anything to do with your "sounds like" at all.

Maybe it doesn't. But it doesn't have to. Temperament is subjective, as I said--in the ear of the beholder (and perhaps the composer as well).

> > Let me ask you: when we say a tempered interval represents a Just one, what do you
> >think we mean?
>
> Who's we? I can tell you what I mean, but I can't tell you what anyone
> else means.

"We" could be anyone on this list. A lot of our confusion in discourse here seems to be coming from the fact that some or all of us didn't as enough questions about what it means for a tempered interval to represent a Just one when we were first meeting each other here.

> These are the things I tried to people to take a stance on:
> 1) Does a field of attraction have to do with a subjective judgment
> for when an interval resembles another? (What you seem to be saying
> now) I was told "no."

Sort of. I'd say a field of attraction, as I experience it, is literally a field of attraction--in the center of the field is one "maximally in-tune interval" which, were I to implement an adaptive JI scheme, would pull in all nearby intervals. So it's not necessarily true that all the intervals in the field sound "the same" or could subsitute for each other, it's more that if I wanted them to be Just, they'd all get tuned to the same interval.

> 2) Does a field of attraction have to do with purely psychoacoustic
> features, more like what Cam is calling a "field of interaction,"
> which a composer is free to care about or not care about in his music?
> This would be one of the few things I do agree can't really be
> conditioned too much by normal means, but I was also told "no," in a
> way I thought was unnecessarily harsh, in fact.

Also sort of. I'm not sure whether it's down to psychoacoustics or not as regards whether someone can tell when an interval becomes "in tune" or not. Some people can tune up to a 17/13 by eliminating beats, others can barely tune a 1/1 that way. I mean, either way, the center of the field is an interval that beats less than on either side of it, and this will depend on timbre, context, set, setting, and listener. I can say from my own experience that people *can* learn to hear the beatlessness of more complex intervals; time was, I couldn't hear an 11/8 as Just, but now I can. I can even get 17/13 on a good day now. However, no amount of conditioning could get me to hear 400 cents as beatless, unless I was using a funky timbre of some kind. I believe what Carl was trying to say was that no amount of conditioning will allow you to hear 1250 cents as having a stronger/wider field of attraction than 2/1, for instance. You can learn to hear the shallower minima, but you can't learn to "move the minima around".

> 3) Does a field of attraction have to do with predicting what people
> will like? I was told "no."

No. Unequivocally.

> Now it seems that you've changed this definition to what's #1 above.
> That's totally fine, I'll use whatever definition you want. But
> frankly, after hearing all this shit about me "making too many
> assumptions" and "putting words in people's mouths" and
> "misrepresenting ones position" or whatever, it shouldn't be much of a
> surprise that I made -zero- assumptions beyond what you said. And now,
> you're using this concept to talk about the usefulness of
> =temperaments= and claiming that dicot as a totally abstract
> mathematical object isn't real because 350 under laboratory conditions
> for a listener with a low value of s won't retune it to 5/4...?! What
> about in larger chords? What about adaptive dicot? What if I have a
> higher s than you? These are a million assumptions which I
> deliberately DIDN'T make, but now you're telling me it's simple and
> obvious.

Let me put it this way: I'm not saying Dicot can't exist. What I'm saying is that Dicot looks and sounds just like 2.3.11 243/242--they're nearly identical tunings, with completely different mappings. I cannot see a clear way to differentiate them musically, and for any given listener, there's only going to be one way to interpret music made in either of these two temperaments. Now, I don't even know how one would tune Dicot adaptively--5/4 and 6/5 are both consonances, and Dicot fuses them, so if you tune it adaptively where some chords are 4:5:6 and some are 10:12:15, it seems like you're not doing Dicot anymore. Maybe it would be all 4:5:6's or all 10:12:15's, I don't know. But in any case, someone hearing music in Dicot[7] is either going to hear it as a bunch of out-of-tune 5-limit triads, or a bunch of not-so-out-of-tune 11-limit neutral triads. Only one of those two temperament mappings correctly describes the listener's perception of what JI intervals are being represented in the music.

> I'm not trying to give you shit man, but I really don't understand
> what you think the big picture is. I probably have a different view of
> the big picture than you do. If it makes you feel better, I don't
> think 120391 cents is a good 3/2. I don't know how much else that
> means.

The "big picture" that I'm trying to paint here is that temperament is subject-dependent. Music is the bridge between abstract reality and phenomenal reality, and depending on who's listening, only certain temperaments can cross that bridge--and sometimes only under certain circumstances! We talk about temperaments in the abstract so much that we forget about our ears. We forget that we are going to be *hearing* all these intervals, and that what they actually sound like *matters*. Consider this proposition: I hear all triadic music written in diatonic scales, regardless of tuning, as being meantone or possibly dominant temperament. To my ears, straight Pythagorean JI *is* meantone, if you play major and minor triads, because I would tune all those triads to 5-limit sonorities in an adaptive JI scheme.

> I agree only for some cases when something sounds like an altered
> version of something else. What about the times when someone hears a
> 7/6 and a 6/5 as two different versions of the same thing, or 8/7 and
> 9/8? What are they "hearing in" there?

It depends on context, how they would tune the intervals to adaptive JI. But you might say they're hearing in dominant temperament.

> What if you play around with adaptive Bug?

How would adaptive Bug work?

> That's one way to interpret the regular mapping paradigm, sure.
> Another common one is to not care at all about what VF something like
> 16/13 produces, or how much it beats, and to simply learn to remember
> and label as many JI ratios as possible, and instead of giving them
> names like "major third" to give them names like "16/13." To them,
> 16/13 might be an interval that they remember as being, oh, I dunno...
> perhaps somewhere between a major and a neutral third, not the most
> concordant in isolation, a bit flat perhaps, sounds a bit like 5/4,
> ==sounds awesome in 13-limit chords in a way that 5/4 does not==, and
> they've just given the name for this whole package "16/13," with the
> notion that it's not concordant dyadically but is very concordant in
> larger chords just being a part of the package. Seems like there are a
> lot of people who do that as well and couldn't give a damn about
> psychoacoustics, because it doesn't matter if a dyad is really
> concordant all by itself when we have nice things like polyphony.

Well, I'm not talking only about dyads here. I thought that was clear, but maybe not. 16/13 is definitely capable of being a consonant component of some chords for some listeners. The question is, would people remember these ratios if they *weren't* consonant in some chord or another?

> I see temperaments as being melodic lattices which have certain
> intervals that we're aiming to intone in a way that creates certain
> psychoacoustic effects, and in which those intervals can combine in
> certain ways to create chords that have certain other psychoacoustic
> effects. That's it.

How is that different than what I said?

> Even more in short, 22-EDO augmented seconds in the context of
> superpyth don't sound "like 5/4" to me, nor does the C#-E# in the
> 19-EDO C C# E# F tetrachord. But now that I'm more aware of my own
> perception, I can separate the 5/4 part of it from the rest - a nice
> buzzing effect and a phantom note in the bass, maybe a partial timbral
> fusion too, etc - and leave the rest of that crap alone, like the warm
> fuzzy feeling I'd expect if this 5/4 is also a major third. Now I have
> what I feel is a more intelligent way of discussing when things sound
> like 5/4 or don't, but it's never clear to me what others mean when
> they say something "sounds like 5/4." And I also still have no way of
> knowing what crap there is left too, if there are still associations I
> have that I don't know about. And my perception changes any time I
> spend a serious stretch of time in a novel tuning too, confounding
> things even more. My entirely psychoacoustic interpretation of regular
> temperaments is delightfully compatible with all of this.
>
> Is that compatible with what you mean by seeing temperaments as
> representations of JI? If so, then I'm happy.

YES! If you're not hearing a superpyth augmented second as 5/4, then you're not hearing superpyth. If you ever find yourself wondering "am I hearing this interval as this other interval?", the simple test is to ask yourself how you would tune it in adaptive JI.

> I'm comfortable making the assumption that I know a small part of what
> JI is, and that I am able to separate it in some small way from what
> JI is not.
>
> I'm not comfortable saying that what people like or hear things
> resembling as or whatever can't be conditioned by normal means, which
> was the claim that started all this, if we're now talking about
> subjective judgments about resemblance.

Again--you can condition yourself to hear finer gradations, deeper subtleties and what not, but you can't condition yourself to completely move the hierarchy around. In a dyadic context assuming harmonic timbres, no amount of conditioning will get 11/8 to sound more concordant than 3/2. But conditioning sure can turn a "super-dissonant flat tritone" into a "piquant-but-smooth 11/8".

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>But the point is that this is -not-
> what we were just talking about for a month
> ...................
> but now Igs seems to be
> talking about what you're talking about; i.e. subjective preferences.

I don't understand. Are you conflating Carl's theory and Igs' theory into one theory? I got the impression that Igs' idea is an interpretation of Carl's, but that it doesn't start from absurd assumptions such as "inborn interval detection."

> Point is, if we're talking about things in a subjective sense, you
> can't claim this sort of thing is universal. And I don't think it's
> what Igs is saying, because he seems to be talking about something
> that presumably is a bit more universal.
>................
>.................... I feel like
> you're not quite filled in on the larger context of the discussion
> that we all had with Carl in this situation.

Again, I don't think Igs is making the same assumptions that you claim Carl has made. If anything is universal about this paradigm, it is the fact that most of hearing is subjective.

> But if all it takes to
> make you happy is for me to say I agree with the interpretation of Igs
> statements that subjectively, detuned intervals start resembling other
> intervals if you detune them too much, then ok, I agree with that.

What other statements has he made? I'm afraid I haven't been too active here in the past month, so I probably missed that conversation.

> Also, I don't appreciate you
> saying I hate psychoacoustics, given our 0.5-1 year history of talking
> for hours and hours on XA about it.

Sorry, I might have taken that quote out of context. You were telling me about how frustrated you were with psychoacoustics because it can't predict cultural conditioning. Then you went on to state that a large majority of what we hear has very little to do with psychoacoustics at all, but rather the way we have learned to respond to cultural cues.

Ryan

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 8:27 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> > And I want to reiterate that I hate to talk about what things "sound
> > like" other things, because you're talking to a person who's been
> > playing in 12-EDO since he was 2 years old, and for whom everything
> > "sounds like" things that have nothing to do with JI. I have no idea
> > if my "sounds like" has anything to do with your "sounds like" at all.
>
> Maybe it doesn't. But it doesn't have to. Temperament is subjective, as I said--in the ear of the beholder (and perhaps the composer as well).

OK, but my "sounds like" things don't have to do with JI sometimes,
like minor seconds and minor sevenths. The latter is basically 1000
cents for me and has nothing to do fundamentally with 9/5 or 7/4,
which are both types of that. Or major seconds, which could be either
9/8 or 8/7 or what have you. In fact, I'd probably pick 9/8 as the
major second in isolation 9 times out of 10.

It seems like you're asserting a paradigm where we assume that a
person has, for whatever reason, an internal cast of characters which
are ratios, and temperaments are ways to minimally distort those
things while creating more of them. Is that right?

> "We" could be anyone on this list. A lot of our confusion in discourse here seems to be coming from the fact that some or all of us didn't as enough questions about what it means for a tempered interval to represent a Just one when we were first meeting each other here.

I don't know what a true 5/4 is without any other associations on top
of it. But, I know a lot of things that I -used- to think were that,
and I was wrong. And I don't think anyone knows the answer to this
question either. Which is why I like working out mathematical tools
that don't make assumptions about those things and let people do what
they want.

> > These are the things I tried to people to take a stance on:
> > 1) Does a field of attraction have to do with a subjective judgment
> > for when an interval resembles another? (What you seem to be saying
> > now) I was told "no."
>
> Sort of. I'd say a field of attraction, as I experience it, is literally a field of attraction--in the center of the field is one "maximally in-tune interval" which, were I to implement an adaptive JI scheme, would pull in all nearby intervals. So it's not necessarily true that all the intervals in the field sound "the same" or could subsitute for each other, it's more that if I wanted them to be Just, they'd all get tuned to the same interval.

OK. I feel like this definition lumps too much stuff together for me
to find it useful. But you should feel free to use it if you want. To
be honest, sometimes the things that are most "in tune to me" are
12-EDO.

> > 2) Does a field of attraction have to do with purely psychoacoustic
> > features, more like what Cam is calling a "field of interaction,"
> > which a composer is free to care about or not care about in his music?
> > This would be one of the few things I do agree can't really be
> > conditioned too much by normal means, but I was also told "no," in a
> > way I thought was unnecessarily harsh, in fact.
>
> Also sort of. I'm not sure whether it's down to psychoacoustics or not as regards whether someone can tell when an interval becomes "in tune" or not. Some people can tune up to a 17/13 by eliminating beats, others can barely tune a 1/1 that way. I mean, either way, the center of the field is an interval that beats less than on either side of it, and this will depend on timbre, context, set, setting, and listener. I can say from my own experience that people *can* learn to hear the beatlessness of more complex intervals; time was, I couldn't hear an 11/8 as Just, but now I can. I can even get 17/13 on a good day now. However, no amount of conditioning could get me to hear 400 cents as beatless, unless I was using a funky timbre of some kind.

Right, so this is the purely psychoacoustic sense in which I agree
with Carl. Except, I only sort of agree with Carl, because it really
doesn't take that much effort to find the beating pattern in 13/10.
You basically need to learn to recognize the beating pattern of the
whole interval as not being chaotic and repeating every so often. Try
it. The same applies to things like virtual pitches. I haven't found a
single aspect of anything psychoacoustic which hasn't responded
dramatically to training, actually. But, I'm sure there's still
probably a cap on what training can do - like I doubt I'll ever get to
the point where I hear 27/20 as being bright and resonant and otonal
and all that, so in that sense I agree with limits on training. It's
just that that wasn't what Carl said.

> I believe what Carl was trying to say was that no amount of conditioning will allow you to hear 1250 cents as having a stronger/wider field of attraction than 2/1, for instance. You can learn to hear the shallower minima, but you can't learn to "move the minima around".

I think 2/1 may be somewhat of a special case, at least for me with
AP. Other than that, I don't agree with this, especially given your
definition above which I said was "lumped in." Most musicians for whom
I play 7/4 for perceive it as "the flat overtone minor 7th." Usually
they think it's neat. Sometimes they think it's too flat. Sometimes
there's this weird conflict, where it sounds cool but is still not
really right, like Carl said his barbershop director experienced.
Sometimes it goes the other way, where people hear it as too flat, but
actually "right" in its too flatness, and so on.

Here's what what I don't agree with. While some of these make sense
individually, the picture on the whole I disagree with:

1) The human auditory system "responds to" small-integer ratios in an
undefined way
2) The human brain builds this response in the womb
3) This response is not susceptible to conditioning or training
4) This response goes beyond any particular psychoacoustic phenomenon
like VFs or beatlessness
5) This response has to do with preference, which is something infants display
6) Things that are not these small integer ratios will generally be
perceived as altered versions of small integer ratios
7) No amount of training will ever change this
8) These are the things that the human brain will hear as most "right"

> Let me put it this way: I'm not saying Dicot can't exist. What I'm saying is that Dicot looks and sounds just like 2.3.11 243/242--they're nearly identical tunings, with completely different mappings. I cannot see a clear way to differentiate them musically, and for any given listener, there's only going to be one way to interpret music made in either of these two temperaments. Now, I don't even know how one would tune Dicot adaptively--5/4 and 6/5 are both consonances, and Dicot fuses them, so if you tune it adaptively where some chords are 4:5:6 and some are 10:12:15, it seems like you're not doing Dicot anymore. Maybe it would be all 4:5:6's or all 10:12:15's, I don't know. But in any case, someone hearing music in Dicot[7] is either going to hear it as a bunch of out-of-tune 5-limit triads, or a bunch of not-so-out-of-tune 11-limit neutral triads. Only one of those two temperament mappings correctly describes the listener's perception of what JI intervals are being represented in the music.

I think the solution to what you're saying is to get rid of limits.
It's something Keenan and I have been making slow strides towards
doing. Keenan has some neat stuff for rank 1 but as far as I know
nobody has it yet for rank 2.

> Consider this proposition: I hear all triadic music written in diatonic scales, regardless of tuning, as being meantone or possibly dominant temperament. To my ears, straight Pythagorean JI *is* meantone, if you play major and minor triads, because I would tune all those triads to 5-limit sonorities in an adaptive JI scheme.

Look, it's frustrating for me to keep reading statements like this
because it's always nebulous what it means. Is it just what you
prefer, subjectively? Are you talking about psychoacoustics?

Why can't you just say this: "fields of attraction are areas around
simple low-integer ratios where various psychoacoustic phenomena
occur, and I enjoy those phenomena, and prefer to tune to those
intervals when I can." Why isn't that it? That's it as far as I'm
concerned. If you said that, I'd be like OK, I have no problem with
this. This is a simple statement that I agree with made with a minimum
of assumptions. If you even said "I think that most people tend to
enjoy these phenomena," I would agree with that too. But there's this
constant hazy mix of bullshit hanging in the background about stuff
being "inborn" and stuff not responding to training and this use of
this crazy term "heard as" and so on.

Why not just say, when you hear something in pythagorean JI, the whole
thing to you sounds like a crappier version of meantone? That sounds
great to me. In some ways I agree, although sometimes when I'm
listening to meantone I want to shift everything to superpyth too. I
don't get what is different from what you're saying than from stuff
like this.

> > What if you play around with adaptive Bug?
>
> How would adaptive Bug work?

Same way as you'd do anything. Or maybe adapt it halfway to JI or something.

> Well, I'm not talking only about dyads here. I thought that was clear, but maybe not. 16/13 is definitely capable of being a consonant component of some chords for some listeners. The question is, would people remember these ratios if they *weren't* consonant in some chord or another?

Of course. Minor seconds are easy to remember even before you learn a
bunch of hip voicings that make them sound consonant.

> > Even more in short, 22-EDO augmented seconds in the context of
> > superpyth don't sound "like 5/4" to me, nor does the C#-E# in the
> > 19-EDO C C# E# F tetrachord. But now that I'm more aware of my own
> > perception, I can separate the 5/4 part of it from the rest - a nice
> > buzzing effect and a phantom note in the bass, maybe a partial timbral
> > fusion too, etc - and leave the rest of that crap alone, like the warm
> > fuzzy feeling I'd expect if this 5/4 is also a major third. Now I have
> > what I feel is a more intelligent way of discussing when things sound
> > like 5/4 or don't, but it's never clear to me what others mean when
> > they say something "sounds like 5/4." And I also still have no way of
> > knowing what crap there is left too, if there are still associations I
> > have that I don't know about. And my perception changes any time I
> > spend a serious stretch of time in a novel tuning too, confounding
> > things even more. My entirely psychoacoustic interpretation of regular
> > temperaments is delightfully compatible with all of this.
> >
> > Is that compatible with what you mean by seeing temperaments as
> > representations of JI? If so, then I'm happy.
>
> YES! If you're not hearing a superpyth augmented second as 5/4, then you're not hearing superpyth. If you ever find yourself wondering "am I hearing this interval as this other interval?", the simple test is to ask yourself how you would tune it in adaptive JI.

I think you misunderstood my point. The point is that it DOES sound
like 5/4, but my naive impression of "what 5/4 sounds like" included a
bunch of extraneous crap that wasn't actually related to 5/4.
Initially I'd have said "that doesn't sound like 5/4! I'm "hearing it
as" some other interval" but now I say "yes, that's 5/4, it's just
that 5/4 itself sounds totally different in this setting and in this
scale." In superpyth, augmented seconds are both dissonant and
concordant and 5/4. You know, I hear very clearly the VF and
periodicity buzz and etc, but it's just not consonant like major
thirds in meantone.

> > I'm comfortable making the assumption that I know a small part of what
> > JI is, and that I am able to separate it in some small way from what
> > JI is not.
> >
> > I'm not comfortable saying that what people like or hear things
> > resembling as or whatever can't be conditioned by normal means, which
> > was the claim that started all this, if we're now talking about
> > subjective judgments about resemblance.
>
> Again--you can condition yourself to hear finer gradations, deeper subtleties and what not, but you can't condition yourself to completely move the hierarchy around. In a dyadic context assuming harmonic timbres, no amount of conditioning will get 11/8 to sound more concordant than 3/2. But conditioning sure can turn a "super-dissonant flat tritone" into a "piquant-but-smooth 11/8".

If that's how you want to put it, then I think that concordance is
only a minor part of actual consonance. Again, if you can snap your
brain into hearing the 72-EDO Bach retuning I did as being diatonic,
do you still hear tritones in that as being dissonant and wanting to
resolve and so on?

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> It seems like you're asserting a paradigm where we assume that a
> person has, for whatever reason, an internal cast of characters which
> are ratios, and temperaments are ways to minimally distort those
> things while creating more of them. Is that right?

Sort of. I don't think this "cast of characters" is something that people are innately aware of. I think it's only something they become aware of when they start to notice that some intervals sound more "in tune" than others. So I'd say people have an innate capacity to sense what's "in tune", and that there's a limit on what can sound "in tune". Categorical perception does not necessarily have anything to do with this. For instance, 9/5 and 7/4 are both "minor 7ths", but there are situations where we'd single out one or the other as sounding the most "in tune" (i.e. 4:5:6:7 vs 10:12:15:18).

> I don't know what a true 5/4 is without any other associations on top
> of it. But, I know a lot of things that I -used- to think were that,
> and I was wrong. And I don't think anyone knows the answer to this
> question either. Which is why I like working out mathematical tools
> that don't make assumptions about those things and let people do what
> they want.

What does that mean, "a true 5/4 without any other associations on top of it"? Why is this important?

> OK. I feel like this definition lumps too much stuff together for me
> to find it useful. But you should feel free to use it if you want. To
> be honest, sometimes the things that are most "in tune to me" are
> 12-EDO.

Really? You can name some examples where 12-TET sounds more in tune than some adaptive JI versions of the same piece?

> Right, so this is the purely psychoacoustic sense in which I agree
> with Carl. Except, I only sort of agree with Carl, because it really
> doesn't take that much effort to find the beating pattern in 13/10.
> You basically need to learn to recognize the beating pattern of the
> whole interval as not being chaotic and repeating every so often. Try
> it. The same applies to things like virtual pitches. I haven't found a
> single aspect of anything psychoacoustic which hasn't responded
> dramatically to training, actually. But, I'm sure there's still
> probably a cap on what training can do - like I doubt I'll ever get to
> the point where I hear 27/20 as being bright and resonant and otonal
> and all that, so in that sense I agree with limits on training. It's
> just that that wasn't what Carl said.

I think you may have misconstrued him.

> I think 2/1 may be somewhat of a special case, at least for me with
> AP. Other than that, I don't agree with this, especially given your
> definition above which I said was "lumped in." Most musicians for whom
> I play 7/4 for perceive it as "the flat overtone minor 7th." Usually
> they think it's neat. Sometimes they think it's too flat. Sometimes
> there's this weird conflict, where it sounds cool but is still not
> really right, like Carl said his barbershop director experienced.
> Sometimes it goes the other way, where people hear it as too flat, but
> actually "right" in its too flatness, and so on.

Sure, it's the conflict between "pitch" perception and "interval" perception, as Benade noted (if you read the earlier parts of his book). I think most trained musicians develop a modicum of AP, like I have a weak version of it for the open strings of the guitar, and they can tell that the pitch is off even as the interval sounds in tune. But nearly everyone you've mentioned is able to distinguish between the two--hence the "flat but right" comments.

> Here's what what I don't agree with. While some of these make sense
> individually, the picture on the whole I disagree with:
>
> 1) The human auditory system "responds to" small-integer ratios in an
> undefined way

The human auditory system "responds" to beatlessness, and to harmonic timbres; it just happens that small integer ratios with harmonic timbres produce beatlessness.

> 2) The human brain builds this response in the womb

Maybe. Carl's a believer, I want to see more evidence.

> 3) This response is not susceptible to conditioning or training

We have no evidence to show that it is susceptible, but we also have a dearth of experimentation.

> 4) This response goes beyond any particular psychoacoustic phenomenon
> like VFs or beatlessness

Does it? How so?

> 5) This response has to do with preference, which is something infants display

Perhaps.

> 6) Things that are not these small integer ratios will generally be
> perceived as altered versions of small integer ratios

I don't know how I feel about this "altered versions" thing. I don't think people are innately aware of anything special about simple ratios, but they do have the innate *capacity* for this awareness. But at the same time, our Western musical categories evolved out of JI (which preceded temperament), so our categorical perception makes it tricky to separate innateness from conditioning. Regardless, I'd wager that *anyone* from any musical culture can learn to identify and achieve beatlessness.

> 7) No amount of training will ever change this

Right--no amount of training will ever make 3/2 display more concordance than 2/1.

> 8) These are the things that the human brain will hear as most "right"

Well, "most in-tune".

> I think the solution to what you're saying is to get rid of limits.
> It's something Keenan and I have been making slow strides towards
> doing. Keenan has some neat stuff for rank 1 but as far as I know
> nobody has it yet for rank 2.

Great idea.

> > Consider this proposition: I hear all triadic music written in diatonic scales, regardless of tuning, as being meantone or possibly dominant temperament. To my ears, straight Pythagorean JI *is* meantone, if you play major and minor triads, because I would tune all those triads to 5-limit sonorities in an adaptive JI scheme.
>
> Look, it's frustrating for me to keep reading statements like this
> because it's always nebulous what it means. Is it just what you
> prefer, subjectively? Are you talking about psychoacoustics?

I'm not talking about VFs, I'll tell you that much. I don't really know what I'm talking about, from a psychoacoustic perspective. All I can tell you is that if you asked me to tune a piece of triadic music in Superpyth[7] to some adaptive JI scheme, I'd probably tune it so that the triads are all 5-limit, with maybe the minors being 6:7:9.

> Why can't you just say this: "fields of attraction are areas around
> simple low-integer ratios where various psychoacoustic phenomena
> occur, and I enjoy those phenomena, and prefer to tune to those
> intervals when I can." Why isn't that it?

Because I don't have a preference for maximally-in-tune intervals.

> Why not just say, when you hear something in pythagorean JI, the whole
> thing to you sounds like a crappier version of meantone?

That's exactly what I said!

> Of course. Minor seconds are easy to remember even before you learn a
> bunch of hip voicings that make them sound consonant.

Sure, but does their tuning matter? Does +/- 20 cents on a minor 2nd do much or anything to change its sound to you? What's the difference between a 15/14 and a 19/18?

> I think you misunderstood my point. The point is that it DOES sound
> like 5/4, but my naive impression of "what 5/4 sounds like" included a
> bunch of extraneous crap that wasn't actually related to 5/4.
> Initially I'd have said "that doesn't sound like 5/4! I'm "hearing it
> as" some other interval" but now I say "yes, that's 5/4, it's just
> that 5/4 itself sounds totally different in this setting and in this
> scale." In superpyth, augmented seconds are both dissonant and
> concordant and 5/4. You know, I hear very clearly the VF and
> periodicity buzz and etc, but it's just not consonant like major
> thirds in meantone.

Okay...? So what's the problem? That initially you were confusing 5/4 with the category of a major 3rd?

> If that's how you want to put it, then I think that concordance is
> only a minor part of actual consonance.

That's a non-sequitur. Of course concordance is only a minor part of consonance; otherwise, adaptive JI would turn *everything* into 1:2:3 or something. Music dictates consonance; beatlessness and harmonicity (and who knows what else) dictates concordance.

-Igs

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 11:40 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > It seems like you're asserting a paradigm where we assume that a
> > person has, for whatever reason, an internal cast of characters which
> > are ratios, and temperaments are ways to minimally distort those
> > things while creating more of them. Is that right?
>
> Sort of. I don't think this "cast of characters" is something that people are innately aware of. I think it's only something they become aware of when they start to notice that some intervals sound more "in tune" than others. So I'd say people have an innate capacity to sense what's "in tune", and that there's a limit on what can sound "in tune". Categorical perception does not necessarily have anything to do with this. For instance, 9/5 and 7/4 are both "minor 7ths", but there are situations where we'd single out one or the other as sounding the most "in tune" (i.e. 4:5:6:7 vs 10:12:15:18).

If I understand what you're saying correctly, I disagree with this,
despite that I and most people reading this probably like 4:5:6:7 more
than 10:12:15:18. I don't think there's a need, or that it makes any
sense, from the results of these experiments, to assume there's some
mystical inborn sense of "rightness or wrongness" of music intervals.
What I think is that it's true that humans tend to enjoy pretty
patterns and interesting stimuli, and lots of them happen in the form
of neat psychoacoustic effects when you tune an interval to a
small-integer ratio. And I also think that if you walked up to my mom
on the street with a video camera and said "hey, tune this oscillator
until you find the thing that's most 'in tune,'" she'd be like
"uhhhhhhhhhh" and, perhaps if you offered her money, she'd turn the
knob until she invariably finds something exhibiting these effects and
says "is this right?" and that'd be the end of that. I doubt she'd end
up even moving to the nearest minima of HE. She'd probably turn the
dial until she got to 2/1 or something, as I've said before.

Point is, I like 4:5:6:7 because I think the sound of all of these
random things happening is interesting. It's a neat pattern. And any
sort of notion that this is the only nice pattern that humans can
possibly like where music is concerned seems ridiculous to me. All it
takes for someone to get away from this behavior is to get them to
care more about a different pattern which is more interesting, which
just so happens to be unable to occur with pitches yielding this
effect, and which one is habitually used to. For instance, the obvious
example in which history sees me out is that we all shifted from
meantone to well-temperaments and 12-EDO, because the neat effects
afforded everyone by modulating all over the place in ridiculous ways
won out over the neat effects afforded everyone by playing a major
triad and having it go bzzzzzzzzz. The latter effect has since been
reduced to something that larger, variable-pitch ensembles do as a way
to add the cherry on top of a performance.

> > I don't know what a true 5/4 is without any other associations on top
> > of it. But, I know a lot of things that I -used- to think were that,
> > and I was wrong. And I don't think anyone knows the answer to this
> > question either. Which is why I like working out mathematical tools
> > that don't make assumptions about those things and let people do what
> > they want.
>
> What does that mean, "a true 5/4 without any other associations on top of it"? Why is this important?

Because you keep using these ultra-subjective descriptions of whether
or not something "sounds like a 5/4." I can't ever apply these
descriptions to an interval, I have no idea what "a 5/4 sounds like."
I only know what the combination of a 5/4 and a million things I
associate with 5/4 sound like, many of which may not be dependent on
any psychoacoustic phenomenon to occur. So I have no idea how to
actually apply your definition. At best, this pigeonholes listeners
into a culture-dependent situation where they have to try and guess
what parts of the sound of intervals usually intoned as 5/4 are
because of the 5/4 and which parts are because of other things. At
worst, they have no idea that there are other things, and they end up
assuming that some generic category of interval is "5/4," which
conflicts with your stated desire to treat all of this as a
culture-independent thing which can't be conditioned.

> > OK. I feel like this definition lumps too much stuff together for me
> > to find it useful. But you should feel free to use it if you want. To
> > be honest, sometimes the things that are most "in tune to me" are
> > 12-EDO.
>
> Really? You can name some examples where 12-TET sounds more in tune than some adaptive JI versions of the same piece?

Yeah. Go load up Logic, and put a piano sound on, and load up 7-limit
Hermode tuning, and play any piece you like with chord progressions in
it. I hate it and think the tiny comma shifts sound like ass. If all
the pianos in the world tomorrow were destroyed and placed with
adaptive pianos, I'd shoot myself in the face. And go on XA and listen
to the Mavila adaptive comma pump, which I enjoyed but Gene hated.

> > Right, so this is the purely psychoacoustic sense in which I agree
> > with Carl. Except, I only sort of agree with Carl, because it really
> > doesn't take that much effort to find the beating pattern in 13/10.
> > You basically need to learn to recognize the beating pattern of the
> > whole interval as not being chaotic and repeating every so often. Try
> > it. The same applies to things like virtual pitches. I haven't found a
> > single aspect of anything psychoacoustic which hasn't responded
> > dramatically to training, actually. But, I'm sure there's still
> > probably a cap on what training can do - like I doubt I'll ever get to
> > the point where I hear 27/20 as being bright and resonant and otonal
> > and all that, so in that sense I agree with limits on training. It's
> > just that that wasn't what Carl said.
>
> I think you may have misconstrued him.

I doubt it, and at this point I consider these sorts of statements
unfalsifiable.

> > I think 2/1 may be somewhat of a special case, at least for me with
> > AP. Other than that, I don't agree with this, especially given your
> > definition above which I said was "lumped in." Most musicians for whom
> > I play 7/4 for perceive it as "the flat overtone minor 7th." Usually
> > they think it's neat. Sometimes they think it's too flat. Sometimes
> > there's this weird conflict, where it sounds cool but is still not
> > really right, like Carl said his barbershop director experienced.
> > Sometimes it goes the other way, where people hear it as too flat, but
> > actually "right" in its too flatness, and so on.
>
> Sure, it's the conflict between "pitch" perception and "interval" perception, as Benade noted (if you read the earlier parts of his book). I think most trained musicians develop a modicum of AP, like I have a weak version of it for the open strings of the guitar, and they can tell that the pitch is off even as the interval sounds in tune. But nearly everyone you've mentioned is able to distinguish between the two--hence the "flat but right" comments.

I have AP, but the musicians that I played it for didn't. And if they
had AP, they'd complain when something in 12-EDO was a quarter tone
off, which they usually don't. The "flat but right" comments were
paired with "crunchy but wrong" comments.

> > Here's what what I don't agree with. While some of these make sense
> > individually, the picture on the whole I disagree with:
> >
> > 1) The human auditory system "responds to" small-integer ratios in an
> > undefined way
>
> The human auditory system "responds" to beatlessness, and to harmonic timbres; it just happens that small integer ratios with harmonic timbres produce beatlessness.

You're responding to these as though I said I do agree with them, and
this is a list of things that I said I don't agree with.

I don't understand what you mean by "responds" to beatlessness. The
human auditory system causes the perceptual sensation of beating for
certain types of incoming stimuli, and doesn't cause it for other
stimuli. I don't think there's any inherent further response in the
auditory system for a stimulus which doesn't beat. I assume this is
what you meant?

(Actually, this is kind of a misnomer, because JI intervals do "beat,"
it's just that all of the partials are beating synchronously with one
another, and the polyrhythm in which they beat eventually gets so
complex that it's heard as chaotic.)

> > 3) This response is not susceptible to conditioning or training
>
> We have no evidence to show that it is susceptible, but we also have a dearth of experimentation.

I disagree. There's plenty of evidence to show that the auditory
cortex undergoes systemic changes in response to musical training and
exhibits a remarkable plasticity throughout life. There's plenty of
evidence to show that specific facets of psychoacoustics also change
in response to musical training. Pitch discrimination ability
increases with musical training -
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16839723 - Intervallic
discrimination also becomes unevenly distributed throughout the
spectrum, peaking at midpoints between categorical labels -
http://www.jstor.org/pss/40285607 - plenty of stuff on cortical
plasticity in general -
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=schulte%20musician. There's
even the other Schulte study, the "Frere Jacques" one
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12757369), where they bombarded
people with a high-entropy stimulus for a week and asked them to "find
the hidden melody," and most of them ended up finding it, resolving
things like 14:15:16 to virtual pitches in the process, in a way that
was demonstrable on an MEG. Although these studies don't directly test
with an MEG the virtual pitch perception of western musicians learning
a novel tuning system, I don't see any reason why it should be assumed
that microtonal musicians bombarding themselves with 13-limit dyads
for hours at a time each day wouldn't lead to additional adaptations,
which would be in line with all of this literature and the perceptual
learning literature at large. I'm not saying it's impossible, but
frankly I doubt it; it'd be a huge departure from the way perceptual
learning works in other modalities, and my own experience indicates
that the contrary is true.

Lastly, it would be absolutely absurd, when one is a part of a brand
new emerging field of study, to adopt the attitude that in the absence
of hyperspecific evidence that things exist that they don't. I'm not
claiming that either you or Carl are doing this, but I think it's an
attitude for anyone that's easy to fall into and that I had
unwittingly adopted for a long time, and it makes no sense. That
attitude basically rules out any sort of training from the start.

OK, so do I think this means that you'll be able to hear 27/20 as
being more beatless than 3/2? Informally, I doubt it. But,
anecdotally, I can tell you that I do believe that it's possible to
significantly improve VF perception for dyads like 9/7 and so on, to
learn a million ways in which chords are "implied" which are far more
important than how concordant individual dyads are, to filter out the
beating in a tuning like 16-EDO even with a piano timbre and barely
hear or think about it, to learn to hear more complex intervals as
exhibiting periodicity buzz/beatlessness instead of chaos, and a
million other things I won't post. I've experienced directly every one
of these so far, and I know that Keenan's experienced some of the ones
involving adaptations to higher-limit JI, and I know that Ron (and
maybe you) have experienced some of the ones involving adaptation to
more discordant tunings. So, frankly, I couldn't give a damn less
about theories saying otherwise, personally, but that's of course my
opinion. You're welcome to explore the contrary opinion just as long
as you don't tell me it's intrinsically more "scientific" without any
proof :)

> > 4) This response goes beyond any particular psychoacoustic phenomenon
> > like VFs or beatlessness
>
> Does it? How so?

This is the paradigm I'm saying I don't agree with, but you seem to be
claiming that it comprises an innate sense of "in tuneness" and
perhaps "rightness" and so on.

> > 6) Things that are not these small integer ratios will generally be
> > perceived as altered versions of small integer ratios
>
> I don't know how I feel about this "altered versions" thing. I don't think people are innately aware of anything special about simple ratios, but they do have the innate *capacity* for this awareness. But at the same time, our Western musical categories evolved out of JI (which preceded temperament), so our categorical perception makes it tricky to separate innateness from conditioning. Regardless, I'd wager that *anyone* from any musical culture can learn to identify and achieve beatlessness.

OK, so what are we talking about? We're supposedly talking about
things which nobody has to learn, I thought. If someone has the innate
capacity to recognize an interesting effect, so what? Music is full of
interesting effects.

> > 7) No amount of training will ever change this
>
> Right--no amount of training will ever make 3/2 display more concordance than 2/1.

Assuming concordance is defined as the presence and absence of
specific psychoacoustic phenomena, I agree.

> > 8) These are the things that the human brain will hear as most "right"
>
> Well, "most in-tune".

Nuh uh.

> > Look, it's frustrating for me to keep reading statements like this
> > because it's always nebulous what it means. Is it just what you
> > prefer, subjectively? Are you talking about psychoacoustics?
>
> I'm not talking about VFs, I'll tell you that much. I don't really know what I'm talking about, from a psychoacoustic perspective. All I can tell you is that if you asked me to tune a piece of triadic music in Superpyth[7] to some adaptive JI scheme, I'd probably tune it so that the triads are all 5-limit, with maybe the minors being 6:7:9.

OK, forget VFs, what about the larger picture of psychoacoustics on
the whole? It seems to me like you're asserting that small-integer
ratios have some magic power beyond measurable psychoacoustic effects.

> > Why can't you just say this: "fields of attraction are areas around
> > simple low-integer ratios where various psychoacoustic phenomena
> > occur, and I enjoy those phenomena, and prefer to tune to those
> > intervals when I can." Why isn't that it?
>
> Because I don't have a preference for maximally-in-tune intervals.

OK, so I assume you're using the phrase "maximally-in-tune" to mean
the presence or absence of various -psychoacoustic- phenomena? Really,
all of this yes-psychoacoustics-no-psychoacoustics-secret-thing-in-the-brain-likes-ratios-no-it-doesn't
business is turning into utter madness.

> > Why not just say, when you hear something in pythagorean JI, the whole
> > thing to you sounds like a crappier version of meantone?
>
> That's exactly what I said!

No, you said that pythagorean is meantone, and also you just above
corrected me that you didn't think that maximal in-tune-ness was
preferable, and now you're uncorrecting me.

> > Of course. Minor seconds are easy to remember even before you learn a
> > bunch of hip voicings that make them sound consonant.
>
> Sure, but does their tuning matter? Does +/- 20 cents on a minor 2nd do much or anything to change its sound to you? What's the difference between a 15/14 and a 19/18?

No, it doesn't, but so what? It seems like you're about to follow this
up with a direct reference to beatlessness and periodicity buzz.

> > I think you misunderstood my point. The point is that it DOES sound
> > like 5/4, but my naive impression of "what 5/4 sounds like" included a
> > bunch of extraneous crap that wasn't actually related to 5/4.
> > Initially I'd have said "that doesn't sound like 5/4! I'm "hearing it
> > as" some other interval" but now I say "yes, that's 5/4, it's just
> > that 5/4 itself sounds totally different in this setting and in this
> > scale." In superpyth, augmented seconds are both dissonant and
> > concordant and 5/4. You know, I hear very clearly the VF and
> > periodicity buzz and etc, but it's just not consonant like major
> > thirds in meantone.
>
> Okay...? So what's the problem? That initially you were confusing 5/4 with the category of a major 3rd?

Maybe; I don't know if I'd say anything concrete like that. The
problem is that initially I was confusing 5/4 with something that is
not 5/4 but may include 5/4, and hence subjective "sounds similar
to/different from" judgments don't necessarily reflect anything
inborn.

> > If that's how you want to put it, then I think that concordance is
> > only a minor part of actual consonance.
>
> That's a non-sequitur. Of course concordance is only a minor part of consonance; otherwise, adaptive JI would turn *everything* into 1:2:3 or something. Music dictates consonance; beatlessness and harmonicity (and who knows what else) dictates concordance.

The key part was this Bach retuning

http://soundcloud.com/mikebattagliamusic/bach-fugue-in-c-major-bwv952-72-edo

can you hear it? If not, you might find it useful to listen to the sequence

http://soundcloud.com/mikebattagliamusic/sets/the-categorical-experiments/

I'm curious if you can snap into the diatonic structure in 72-EDO and
still want things like tritones to resolve and so on.

-Mike

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 1:29 AM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> Although these studies don't directly test
> with an MEG the virtual pitch perception of western musicians learning
> a novel tuning system, I don't see any reason why it should be assumed
> that microtonal musicians bombarding themselves with 13-limit dyads
> for hours at a time each day wouldn't lead to additional adaptations,
> which would be in line with all of this literature and the perceptual
> learning literature at large. I'm not saying it's impossible, but
> frankly I doubt it; it'd be a huge departure from the way perceptual
> learning works in other modalities, and my own experience indicates
> that the contrary is true.

Quick clarification, I meant that I'm not saying it's impossible for
no adaptations to occur, but I doubt it. So I'm saying I strongly feel
that western musicians engaging in microtonal music training will
adapt towards it.

-Mike

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 8:28 PM, Ryan Avella <domeofatonement@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> >But the point is that this is -not-
> > what we were just talking about for a month
> > ...................
>
> > but now Igs seems to be
> > talking about what you're talking about; i.e. subjective preferences.
>
> I don't understand. Are you conflating Carl's theory and Igs' theory into one theory? I got the impression that Igs' idea is an interpretation of Carl's, but that it doesn't start from absurd assumptions such as "inborn interval detection."

No, but we all agreed to define the terms "field of attraction" and
"heard as" in a certain way and that's the definition I'm using.

I also don't feel that Carl's assumptions about inborn interval
detection are completely absurd if they're placed in the proper
context: for instance, the fusion of a harmonic series into a single
virtual pitch would appear to be something that evolutionary "just
exists" for us, without any real learning needed (although I'm not
remembering clearly when evidence of complex pitch perception in
infants starts, whether it's in utero or within the first few years or
what not). If we're talking about the specific way in which the
auditory system itself responds to stimuli, I'm all for it (although I
still wouldn't buy that training doesn't improve this sort of thing) -
because we're not talking about subjective interval labels or anything
like that. If we're talking about psychoacoustics, I'm all for that,
and if we're not talking about preferences I'm all for that too. And,
if we're going to talk about the Benade anecdote and define the term
operationally based on that, that's also fine, provided that we limit
the way we apply the results of these experiments to an actual human
being who's listening to tons of microtonal music and learning new
intervals and tonal systems and so on. It seemed like Igs was
wandering into this territory, which is why I questioned him on it.

> > Point is, if we're talking about things in a subjective sense, you
> > can't claim this sort of thing is universal. And I don't think it's
> > what Igs is saying, because he seems to be talking about something
> > that presumably is a bit more universal.
> >................
> >.................... I feel like
>
> > you're not quite filled in on the larger context of the discussion
> > that we all had with Carl in this situation.
>
> Again, I don't think Igs is making the same assumptions that you claim Carl has made. If anything is universal about this paradigm, it is the fact that most of hearing is subjective.

I'll leave that to you two to sort out. It'd make me really happy if
someone would say "yes, I'm talking about specific -psychoacoustic-
things, which can provide an aural effect that people as a baseline
tend to find interesting, although all of this might change with
conditioning."

> > Also, I don't appreciate you
> > saying I hate psychoacoustics, given our 0.5-1 year history of talking
> > for hours and hours on XA about it.
>
> Sorry, I might have taken that quote out of context. You were telling me about how frustrated you were with psychoacoustics because it can't predict cultural conditioning. Then you went on to state that a large majority of what we hear has very little to do with psychoacoustics at all, but rather the way we have learned to respond to cultural cues.

If I'm going to go on the record here and not make semi-humorous
exaggerations in the spur of the moment in XA, I do believe that
psychoacoustics matters. I believe that small-integer ratios can lead
to a number of psychoacoustic effects which many people think sound
interesting. I think that it's possible to construct a style of music
that utilizes these effects and elevates these effects to the level of
art in a way that hasn't been done historically. I think it's very
likely that people will like this type of music.

I also happen to think that it's possible to enjoy tunings that DON'T
utilize these effects, and to enjoy tunings that may have a few
"negative effects," if you just get used to them. Additionally, I
think that in a very coarse sense, many of these psychoacoustic
properties do improve with response to training, particularly where VF
perception and periodicity buzz is concerned.

Lastly, I think that on top of this is an enormous cognitive layer
comprising a ton of features which are NOT psychoacoustic and which in
many cases supercede the psychoacoustic layer in terms of importance
and in terms of what I give a damn about. This doesn't just have to
include the now-cliche "categorical perception," but could include a
million things: tonal centers, scale effects, cultural things,
awareness of how intervals subdivide into other intervals, who knows,
how much I expect certain things to happen, how much I demand that
certain things don't happen. What I've found is that "what I like" is
heavily influenced by stuff like that at the end of the day. Thus, I
believe that one needs to exercise caution in extrapolating from
psychoacoustics "what one will like."

I mean to be totally absurd with it, some of the most beautiful sounds
I've ever heard tend to be in nature, where there's noise, water,
hundreds of birds singing in birdsong at the same time, rustling of
grass, crickets, etc - all signals which are rather high in harmonic
entropy. Obviously we don't find this sort of thing undesirable and
clutch our ears in pain to keep the discordance out because of some
low-level effect in the auditory system (not that anyone is saying we
would). To me, this indicates that there has to be some kind of
-state- that you're in for things like concordance or discordance to
have the particular effect they do on you.

Of course, you can also say that the above example is irrelevant
because we care about xenharmonic music here and not musique concrete,
and despite my babbling that you really like JI. Well, that's totally
fine, I think JI is pretty awesome myself. Just don't make predictions
about how everything else sucks and you're alright with me :)

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> The key part was this Bach retuning
>
> http://soundcloud.com/mikebattagliamusic/bach-fugue-in-c-major-bwv952-72-edo
>
> can you hear it?

It sounds quasi-pentatonic to me. Like 5edo, but less boring. It does not sound diatonic.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> Igs, I'm combining your first post with this one, thus forming what
> will surely be the longest reply to any post ever made to this list.
>
> On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 12:06 PM, cityoftheasleep
> <igliashon@...> wrote:
> >
> > Now, wait just a cotton-pickin' minute. I'm not talking about nebulous concepts like "major 3rd" here. I'm talking about the ability of tempered intervals to represent rational ones. Are you suggesting that things like "temporal context, tonal center, modality, the futility of training, timbre, harmonic context, scalar context" etc. might have the power to make a 6/5 sound like a 4/3?
>
> No, of course not. But to throw out a trivial example, 16/13 by itself
> sounds to me "like 5/4" in a somewhat meaningful way. However, 16/13
> is also just the octave inversion of 13/8. And, in a musical setting
> in which there are 13-limit otonal chords and you're arpeggiating
> things, if one of the things being arpeggiated is 16/13, and the
> "root" is heard as 1:...:13:16 for this particular point in time, then
> I think it's likely that it will "sound like 16/13" in a way which is
> also meaningful, at least to me.

You don't think a 16:13 sounds "a little bit Egyptian", to use my son's description? There are associations other than assign-to-nearest-known, and I think "naive" listeners can be more attuned to them than trained listeners. As I've mentioned before, my wife is more attuned to "low-limit Just" than I am, for she generally dislikes the feeling of it very much.

We would laugh out loud if scientific tests in a lab show that people tend to choose the colors closest to primary from a given pallette, and quoting this test someone concluded that paintings should therefore be rendered only in primary colors.

Sure, I think purple is a lot like red, in a somewhat meaningful way. Therefore it "is" red, or "should be" red, or I'm really thinking "red" when I see purple? Hogwash.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> I also don't feel that Carl's assumptions about inborn interval
> detection are completely absurd if they're placed in the proper
> context:

I don't doubt that there are strong inborn perceptions, or, more likely I would think, perceptions quickly acquired due to more basic abilities. It makes more sense that raw abilities of pattern recognition are what's inborn. Teally testing this would probably entail abuse- subjecting a child from the womb to only stretched harmonic series or some such obscene thing.

Pretending the harmonic series and innate (or functionally innate because inevitabley and quickly acquired) perceptions of the harmonic series has "nothing" to do with music is foolishness, in my opinion, and leads to or lends support to extraneous fluff like the "nonoctave" crowd or the most glazed-eyed academic symbol combinatorics.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:

>
> The "big picture" that I'm trying to paint here is that temperament is subject-dependent. Music is the bridge between abstract reality and phenomenal reality, and depending on who's listening, only certain temperaments can cross that bridge--and sometimes only under certain circumstances! We talk about temperaments in the abstract so much that we forget about our ears. We forget that we are going to be *hearing* all these intervals, and that what they actually sound like *matters*. Consider this proposition: I hear all triadic music written in diatonic scales, regardless of tuning, as being meantone or possibly dominant temperament. To my ears, straight Pythagorean JI *is* meantone, if you play major and minor triads, because I would tune all those triads to 5-limit sonorities in an adaptive JI scheme.

For me, meantone as a general concept entails in practice soft, dark (broadly, wobbling around 4:5:6), whereas Pythagoren entails hard, bright. Tuning Pythagorean to 5-limit is something that would never occur to me unless I had the feeling that the Pythagorean was somehow wrong and needed to be changed. Which happens in music which, it turns out, was written in the meantone era, and sometimes with other musics, but generally doesn't happen. The other way around, the feeling that something "in JI" should be tuned to Pythagorean (i.e., 12-tET) occurs to me sometimes, mostly with tunes which, it turns out, were composed (consciously or no) in 12-tET then translated to JI, that is, with plenty of "xenharmonic" tunes which pop up on these lists.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> If I understand what you're saying correctly, I disagree with this,
> despite that I and most people reading this probably like 4:5:6:7 more
> than 10:12:15:18. I don't think there's a need, or that it makes any
> sense, from the results of these experiments, to assume there's some
> mystical inborn sense of "rightness or wrongness" of music intervals.

Nor do I! But there is an inborn capacity to hear whether something is "in tune" or not, that is usually dormant until one begins paying attention to *whether* things sound in tune. In a musical culture where literally *all* the music is made with intervals that beat (i.e. gamelan), this sense may never get developed, it may be entirely about *pitch* rather than interval. But it's patently easier to hear when beating *stops* than when it reaches a particular random pattern. I suspect the fact that Western music relies on relatively beatless intervals is one reason why our tunings do not vary as much as gamelan tunings tend to.

> Point is, I like 4:5:6:7 because I think the sound of all of these
> random things happening is interesting. It's a neat pattern. And any
> sort of notion that this is the only nice pattern that humans can
> possibly like where music is concerned seems ridiculous to me.

How many times have I said that "preference" has nothing to do with this???? How many more times do I have to say it before you recognize that I'm saying it?

> Because you keep using these ultra-subjective descriptions of whether
> or not something "sounds like a 5/4."

How about this: a 5/4 is the point of beatlessness at between 386-387 cents. Nothing more need be said about it.

> Yeah. Go load up Logic, and put a piano sound on, and load up 7-limit
> Hermode tuning, and play any piece you like with chord progressions in
> it. I hate it and think the tiny comma shifts sound like ass.

Yet, barbershop music doesn't bother you. Didn't Carl suggest this was a "timbral" thing or something?

> > I think you may have misconstrued him.
>
> I doubt it, and at this point I consider these sorts of statements
> unfalsifiable.

People can learn to recognize 13/10 as concordant, sure. I don't think Carl would argue that. But can people learn to recognize 64/63 as concordant? Can people learn to recognize 3/2 as discordant? No one has yet, to my knowledge, so the null hypothesis--that they can't--stands.

> I have AP, but the musicians that I played it for didn't. And if they
> had AP, they'd complain when something in 12-EDO was a quarter tone
> off, which they usually don't. The "flat but right" comments were
> paired with "crunchy but wrong" comments.

Either way, AP is not necessary to tell when an interval is "off" where you've learned it should be. How many of these people had taken ear-training classes? When you've drilled "this is a minor 7th" a million times to the point that you can recognize the interval whether it's sustained or arpeggiated, that's not necessarily AP but it is related to pitch perception. Again, *regardless of this* they all noticed that it was "crunchy" and "beatless", even if it sounded "wrong". My *entire* point is that the crunchiness of beatlessness is universally-perceptible to *at least* the 5-limit, and probably up to the 7-limit as well.

> You're responding to these as though I said I do agree with them, and
> this is a list of things that I said I don't agree with.

I'm correcting them into the things that I actually believe, since right now you're straw-manning me like crazy.

> I don't understand what you mean by "responds" to beatlessness. The
> human auditory system causes the perceptual sensation of beating for
> certain types of incoming stimuli, and doesn't cause it for other
> stimuli. I don't think there's any inherent further response in the
> auditory system for a stimulus which doesn't beat. I assume this is
> what you meant?

Does the auditory system not comprise any cognitive faculties? I'm not clear what, physiologically, you're including in "the auditory system".

> I disagree. There's plenty of evidence to show that the auditory
> cortex undergoes systemic changes in response to musical training and
> exhibits a remarkable plasticity throughout life. There's plenty of
> evidence to show that specific facets of psychoacoustics also change
> in response to musical training.

All of these changes consist of *enhancements* of existing faculties, much like an artist can learn to differentiate a greater variety of colors or technically analyze a painting. But again, just as an artist cannot learn to see red as green, no one can learn to hear beatlessness as beating. No one here has ever suggested that existing auditory faculties can't be enhanced with training. There is probably a limit to the complexity of intervals that can be learned to be heard as beatless, but I'm not comfortable guessing at it.

> OK, so do I think this means that you'll be able to hear 27/20 as
> being more beatless than 3/2? Informally, I doubt it.

Seriously? Played with harmonic timbres in a controlled setting, you think it's possible for someone to learn to hear 3/2 as beating more strongly than 27/20?

> But,
> anecdotally, I can tell you that I do believe that it's possible to
> significantly improve VF perception for dyads like 9/7 and so on, to
> learn a million ways in which chords are "implied" which are far more
> important than how concordant individual dyads are, to filter out the
> beating in a tuning like 16-EDO even with a piano timbre and barely
> hear or think about it, to learn to hear more complex intervals as
> exhibiting periodicity buzz/beatlessness instead of chaos, and a
> million other things I won't post.

If you think all of this stuff that you just said means that literally anything can be heard as "Just" given training, and that there is nothing special about simple-integer ratios, then you are asserting that the regular temperament paradigm is nonsense. If there's nothing special about simple-integer ratios, then they have no features that will allow them to be represented by tempered intervals. If representation is impossible, then "mapping" is absurd and fails to describe musically-meaningful properties of a tuning. In other words, that's nihilism.

> I've experienced directly every one
> of these so far, and I know that Keenan's experienced some of the ones
> involving adaptations to higher-limit JI, and I know that Ron (and
> maybe you) have experienced some of the ones involving adaptation to
> more discordant tunings. So, frankly, I couldn't give a damn less
> about theories saying otherwise, personally, but that's of course my
> opinion. You're welcome to explore the contrary opinion just as long
> as you don't tell me it's intrinsically more "scientific" without any
> proof :)

THERE ARE NO THEORIES CONTRADICTING THIS, for fuck's sake man! Wouldja STOP IT with these absurd straw men???

> > I don't know how I feel about this "altered versions" thing. I don't think people are innately aware of anything special about simple ratios, but they do have the innate *capacity* for this awareness. But at the same time, our Western musical categories evolved out of JI (which preceded temperament), so our categorical perception makes it tricky to separate innateness from conditioning. Regardless, I'd wager that *anyone* from any musical culture can learn to identify and achieve beatlessness.
> >

> OK, so what are we talking about? We're supposedly talking about
> things which nobody has to learn, I thought. If someone has the innate
> capacity to recognize an interesting effect, so what? Music is full of
> interesting effects.

Look. I wasn't born knowing how to climb a rope, but I was born with a body capable of being trained to climb a rope. I wasn't born knowing how to fly, either, but I also wasn't born with a body capable of being trained to fly. Being born with an innate capacity for something does not mean you are born already fully realizing and exploiting that capacity. I have the capacity to learn how to ballroom dance, but if I never attempt to learn it, I'll never realize that capacity. There are some things most people have the capacity to learn, and there are some things they don't. Why is this so problematic?

> OK, forget VFs, what about the larger picture of psychoacoustics on
> the whole? It seems to me like you're asserting that small-integer
> ratios have some magic power beyond measurable psychoacoustic effects.

I'm NOT! These measurable psychoacoustic effects are associated with--in fact, they probably even DEFINE--"in-tuneness". In-tuneness may be a culturally-specific concept, a value-loaded word that implies rightness or wrongness, but strip that all away and it's just a recognition that some intervals are special. The regular temperament paradigm is built on this recognition, but has been abstracted in such a way that it permits the construction of gross absurdities that turn around and violate the very foundation of the paradigm--the "specialness" of JI.

IF you wish to operate in a way that ignores the specialness of JI intervals, that's fine--but it takes you squarely outside the purview of regular temperament. Which is also fine. The regular temperament paradigm was designed by, and for, people who care about the specialness of JI intervals and consider capturing that specialness to some degree desirable in music.

> OK, so I assume you're using the phrase "maximally-in-tune" to mean
> the presence or absence of various -psychoacoustic- phenomena? Really,
> all of this yes-psychoacoustics-no-psychoacoustics-secret-thing-in-the-brain-likes-
> ratios-no-it-doesn't
> business is turning into utter madness.

I agree, so I wish you would stop reading "is capable of being made aware of" as "has a preference for and inborn awareness of."

> > > Why not just say, when you hear something in pythagorean JI, the whole
> > > thing to you sounds like a crappier version of meantone?
> >
> > That's exactly what I said!
>
> No, you said that pythagorean is meantone, and also you just above
> corrected me that you didn't think that maximal in-tune-ness was
> preferable, and now you're uncorrecting me.

Okay, subsitute "crappier" for "less-in-tune" if you want me to be pedantic about it. Pythagorean is a less-in-tune tuning of meantone, which is a temperament that maps a 5/4 to an 81/64. What I am saying essentially is that 81/64 always sounds like an out-of-tune 5/4 to me.

> > Sure, but does their tuning matter? Does +/- 20 cents on a minor 2nd do much or
> > anything to change its sound to you? What's the difference between a 15/14 and a
> > 19/18?
>
> No, it doesn't, but so what? It seems like you're about to follow this
> up with a direct reference to beatlessness and periodicity buzz.

Yep. That would be a sensible follow-up. The point is that just because you can learn to remember something doesn't mean it's a target for tempering. If it's insensitive to mistuning, then that means it lacks "specialness", and if it lacks "specialness" then it can't be represented. If it can't be represented, then you can't temper it!

> I'm curious if you can snap into the diatonic structure in 72-EDO and
> still want things like tritones to resolve and so on.

I haven't listened to it yet. But today I will listen to it *starting* with 5-ED2, and working my way back toward 12. Priming can be very powerful.

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@...> wrote:
> For me, meantone as a general concept entails in practice soft, dark (broadly, wobbling around 4:5:6), whereas Pythagoren entails hard, bright. Tuning Pythagorean to 5-limit is something that would never occur to me unless I had the feeling that the Pythagorean was somehow wrong and needed to be changed. Which happens in music which, it turns out, was written in the meantone era, and sometimes with other musics, but generally doesn't happen. The other way around, the feeling that something "in JI" should be tuned to Pythagorean (i.e., 12-tET) occurs to me sometimes, mostly with tunes which, it turns out, were composed (consciously or no) in 12-tET then translated to JI, that is, with plenty of "xenharmonic" tunes which pop up on these lists.
>

I think you are conflating "sounds good" with "sounds like JI". Triadic music in Pythagorean tuning is emphatically *not* JI. To make it sound like JI, you'd have to tune it in JI, but which JI? If you'd say "5-limit JI is the closest kind of JI to Pythagorean", then you'd be agreeing with my assertion.

But nothing I'm saying has anything to do with how music "should be" tuned, or what people like, or what sounds better. All I'm saying is that JI is clearly a "thing" that we can all hear and identify based on some constellation of known and unknown psychacoustic features, and that temperament is based on drawing an association between tempered intervals and JI intervals. It should be possible to take any music in a tempered system and trace back along the mapping to figure out what JI intervals are being represented by the tempered ones. This way, *if* we *wanted* to build an adaptive JI algorithm that was compatible with the temperament and altered the character of the temperament by as little as possible, while still rendering it in JI, we should be able to do it consistently. Perhaps we'd need to rely on musical context to do it properly. Some temperaments, like Dicot and Father, basically make this impossible.

Also, we'll likely find that regardless of the prime-limit we use to define the temperament, it will be possible to write music in that temperament that invokes a higher prime-limit than the original temperament is defined by. For instance, in Porcupine, the 250/243 5-limit temperament, it is extremely easy to invoke the 7- or 11-limit. I might even say it is "essentially" an 11-limit temperament, and is only 5-limit when strict care is taken to avoid the ubiquitous 7- and 11-limit intervals.

This is what I'm trying to talk about.

-Igs

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 12:43 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> Nor do I! But there is an inborn capacity to hear whether something is "in tune" or not, that is usually dormant until one begins paying attention to *whether* things sound in tune. In a musical culture where literally *all* the music is made with intervals that beat (i.e. gamelan), this sense may never get developed, it may be entirely about *pitch* rather than interval. But it's patently easier to hear when beating *stops* than when it reaches a particular random pattern. I suspect the fact that Western music relies on relatively beatless intervals is one reason why our tunings do not vary as much as gamelan tunings tend to.

I only agree with this if you literally define the phrase "in tune" as
referring to a sound which exhibits these effects. If instead we
define "in tune" in a totally subjective sense, meant as whether a
particular subject would define a sound as lacking some affect of "too
flat" or "too sharp" or whatever, which is what I'd naively take it to
mean, then I disagree. I'll cite again the example of 7/4, where
musicians often hear all of the effects but still think the interval
is wrong and needs to be retuned to be sharper. I'll bet if you tell
them "no, 'in tune' just means the presence of this crunchy buzzing
effect and blah blah," they'll see what you mean and be able to
identify that 7/4 fits the characteristics that you described as "in
tune," but they'd still probably rather tune it up and say that that's
what's actually "in tune."

So, in short, if you want to use the phrase "in tune" this way, that's
fine, but I think it's as confusing as the way you used "heard as."
Sooner or later words mean unwords and then toothpaste banana
yardstick? Google radiator spaceman spiff.

> > Because you keep using these ultra-subjective descriptions of whether
> > or not something "sounds like a 5/4."
>
> How about this: a 5/4 is the point of beatlessness at between 386-387 cents. Nothing more need be said about it.

Sure, I'm happy with that. It's a specific psychoacoustic effect
you're referring to. I'm happy with that.

> > Yeah. Go load up Logic, and put a piano sound on, and load up 7-limit
> > Hermode tuning, and play any piece you like with chord progressions in
> > it. I hate it and think the tiny comma shifts sound like ass.
>
> Yet, barbershop music doesn't bother you. Didn't Carl suggest this was a "timbral" thing or something?

Yes, or an expectational thing, and if expectations can override
concordance, then conditioning can override concordance in a
particularly dramatic way, the origins of which aren't apparent to the
listener.

> > > I think you may have misconstrued him.
> >
> > I doubt it, and at this point I consider these sorts of statements
> > unfalsifiable.
>
> People can learn to recognize 13/10 as concordant, sure. I don't think Carl would argue that.

Oh yes you do. I remember we were talking about tutone and he told us
that he doesn't buy that 10:13:18 "is 10:13:18" because it's too
complex and he was looking at the 3HE charts wanted to correct us on
this before he left for a chess conference and a whole raft of new
temperaments were conditioned in sin. Seems like the proper response
would have been "yes, but someone can learn to recognize 10:13:18 as
concordant!" and he'd be like "oh yeah, disregard guys. Gotta go, I
need to practice my french advance before the tournament" or
something, but I doubt that's how that conversation would have played
out.

> But can people learn to recognize 64/63 as concordant? Can people learn to recognize 3/2 as discordant? No one has yet, to my knowledge, so the null hypothesis--that they can't--stands.

I'll assume you are using the word "concordant" to refer to the
combined presence of a bunch of psychoacoustic effects. Informally, I
doubt it, although I have no real proof. But, I will say that if
"timbral expectations" like that of a piano can cause you to hate 7/4
and all that, which to me seems completely cultural and arbitrary,
then I see no reason why there couldn't be some kind of culture in
which someone finds the sound of a purely tuned JI 3/2 to be awfully
strange and intrusive, and instead finds the flat, beating 3/2 that
they're used to much less so. And, I think that this can get to the
point where the origin of this intrusiveness isn't something that's
understood by the listener introspectively at all, to the point where
they're like "bad. take this away." So if you're okay with that. I'm
happy.

> Either way, AP is not necessary to tell when an interval is "off" where you've learned it should be. How many of these people had taken ear-training classes? When you've drilled "this is a minor 7th" a million times to the point that you can recognize the interval whether it's sustained or arpeggiated, that's not necessarily AP but it is related to pitch perception. Again, *regardless of this* they all noticed that it was "crunchy" and "beatless", even if it sounded "wrong". My *entire* point is that the crunchiness of beatlessness is universally-perceptible to *at least* the 5-limit, and probably up to the 7-limit as well.

OK, probably. I'm not even sure if it's the 5-limit though. I can sort
of imagine a culture where someone hears 5/4 and is like wtf, that's
crazy until they just chill out and let it sink in and then they hear
the coherence in it. But maybe not.

> > I don't understand what you mean by "responds" to beatlessness. The
> > human auditory system causes the perceptual sensation of beating for
> > certain types of incoming stimuli, and doesn't cause it for other
> > stimuli. I don't think there's any inherent further response in the
> > auditory system for a stimulus which doesn't beat. I assume this is
> > what you meant?
>
> Does the auditory system not comprise any cognitive faculties? I'm not clear what, physiologically, you're including in "the auditory system".

Yeah, I mean the auditory system to just include things like the
peripheral auditory system (cochlea and ear and so on) and the central
auditory system (auditory cortex and all that). Obviously I think that
cognitive faculties can influence the way the auditory cortex does
stuff, so that there's top-down feedback. But I don't mean in terms of
what people think about things or whether they like things or any
further associations they make with things that come out of this
overall system.

> > I disagree. There's plenty of evidence to show that the auditory
> > cortex undergoes systemic changes in response to musical training and
> > exhibits a remarkable plasticity throughout life. There's plenty of
> > evidence to show that specific facets of psychoacoustics also change
> > in response to musical training.
>
> All of these changes consist of *enhancements* of existing faculties, much like an artist can learn to differentiate a greater variety of colors or technically analyze a painting. But again, just as an artist cannot learn to see red as green, no one can learn to hear beatlessness as beating. No one here has ever suggested that existing auditory faculties can't be enhanced with training.

No one here has ever suggested that? Bullshit :)

> There is probably a limit to the complexity of intervals that can be learned to be heard as beatless, but I'm not comfortable guessing at it.

OK, good.

> > OK, so do I think this means that you'll be able to hear 27/20 as
> > being more beatless than 3/2? Informally, I doubt it.
>
> Seriously? Played with harmonic timbres in a controlled setting, you think it's possible for someone to learn to hear 3/2 as beating more strongly than 27/20?

No... I just said although I have no proof that that sort of thing is
impossible, even given a 1984 type setting where O'Brien is telling
you that 3/2 beats and 27/20 doesn't, that I doubt it.

> > But,
> > anecdotally, I can tell you that I do believe that it's possible to
> > significantly improve VF perception for dyads like 9/7 and so on, to
> > learn a million ways in which chords are "implied" which are far more
> > important than how concordant individual dyads are, to filter out the
> > beating in a tuning like 16-EDO even with a piano timbre and barely
> > hear or think about it, to learn to hear more complex intervals as
> > exhibiting periodicity buzz/beatlessness instead of chaos, and a
> > million other things I won't post.
>
> If you think all of this stuff that you just said means that literally anything can be heard as "Just" given training, and that there is nothing special about simple-integer ratios, then you are asserting that the regular temperament paradigm is nonsense. If there's nothing special about simple-integer ratios, then they have no features that will allow them to be represented by tempered intervals. If representation is impossible, then "mapping" is absurd and fails to describe musically-meaningful properties of a tuning. In other words, that's nihilism.

No, I just said that I doubt all of that's possible, although I have
no proof. I said that training improves things, and that it's not
nihilism to say that 16-EDO doesn't sound so shitty once you've played
it for a month or so, and also that it's possible to hear the
concordance in 9/7 once you get used to it, which some people
apparently never have to get used to, and so on.

> > I've experienced directly every one
> > of these so far, and I know that Keenan's experienced some of the ones
> > involving adaptations to higher-limit JI, and I know that Ron (and
> > maybe you) have experienced some of the ones involving adaptation to
> > more discordant tunings. So, frankly, I couldn't give a damn less
> > about theories saying otherwise, personally, but that's of course my
> > opinion. You're welcome to explore the contrary opinion just as long
> > as you don't tell me it's intrinsically more "scientific" without any
> > proof :)
>
> THERE ARE NO THEORIES CONTRADICTING THIS, for fuck's sake man! Wouldja STOP IT with these absurd straw men???

I don't know what you mean by "theories," but there are definitely
attitudes on here contradicting it, and I gave an anecdote above. How
many times have we heard people talk about how 11/9 "is discordant" or
"is not concordant" or what not? Without significant additional
qualification as to who we're talking about perceive it as a
discordance, and what, exactly, "discordance" means, that statement is
only true in a statistical sense. And then if you ever throw in
something about how concordance and fields of attraction and all that
aren't subject to conditioning, you're now saying something that's
probably false.

> > OK, so what are we talking about? We're supposedly talking about
> > things which nobody has to learn, I thought. If someone has the innate
> > capacity to recognize an interesting effect, so what? Music is full of
> > interesting effects.
>
> Look. I wasn't born knowing how to climb a rope, but I was born with a body capable of being trained to climb a rope. I wasn't born knowing how to fly, either, but I also wasn't born with a body capable of being trained to fly. Being born with an innate capacity for something does not mean you are born already fully realizing and exploiting that capacity. I have the capacity to learn how to ballroom dance, but if I never attempt to learn it, I'll never realize that capacity. There are some things most people have the capacity to learn, and there are some things they don't. Why is this so problematic?

I don't have any problem with that. I have a problem taking the
sensation of periodicity buzz et al and elevating to anything above
what it actually is, which is a neat effect that you can make use of
in music if you want to.

> > OK, forget VFs, what about the larger picture of psychoacoustics on
> > the whole? It seems to me like you're asserting that small-integer
> > ratios have some magic power beyond measurable psychoacoustic effects.
>
> I'm NOT! These measurable psychoacoustic effects are associated with--in fact, they probably even DEFINE--"in-tuneness". In-tuneness may be a culturally-specific concept, a value-loaded word that implies rightness or wrongness, but strip that all away and it's just a recognition that some intervals are special. The regular temperament paradigm is built on this recognition, but has been abstracted in such a way that it permits the construction of gross absurdities that turn around and violate the very foundation of the paradigm--the "specialness" of JI.

It seems more like you're defining in-tuneness to refer to those
psychoacoustic effects. If I were going to define "in-tuneness," I'd
define it in a totally subjective manner, one which simply states
whether a listener is satisfied with the intonation of an interval or
chord or whether or not they think certain notes need to be tweaked.
And if you're really conditioned to like 12-EDO, it may be the case
that you're going to think that 7/4 is too flat, although
interestingly crunchy. The same applies to 4:5:6:7:9:11; I can't tell
you how many times I've played that chord for people and then they ask
me "now put the 12 version back on?" and I switch to lydian dominant
and they're like "ahhhhhh. much better."

It's the same reason Bosanquet came up with his 7-limit harmonium, and
played it for musicians and they were like wtf. For instance

Mr. BOSANQUET said he had frequent experience of all sorts of people
coming to hear his harmonium, and the result was, that persons with
acute ears, but not much musical education, liked the [7-limit JI]
chords, and always picked out the effects which he liked best himself
[concordance], as the result of long custom; but persons who had the
scale firmly in their heads, as no doubt the Chairman had, did not
like the departure from the usual value of the notes. They did not
think of the consonance at all; the question with them being, not
whether it was smooth, but whether it was what they were accustomed
to. The question with him was simply one of smoothness.
Mr. CUMMINGS said the chord of the sixth on Ab, at the beginning of
the second page of the example which Mr. Bosanquet played, sounded to
him very flat indeed.
Mr. BOSANQUET said that was Ab raised. It was a curious fact, that
people with highly-educated ears almost always singled out the true
minor third of the chord as disagreeable. The true minor third was
always raised.

OK, so if you're going to talk about "in-tuneness," the above is what
I see. They all heard the "smoothness," but thought it was "too flat,"
aka NOT IN TUNE. So if you want to want to DEFINE "in-tuneness" to
mean "concordance," that's fine, but I think it's a crazy definition
and I expect in another week or two Ryan will come back and have even
less idea what we're talking about.

> IF you wish to operate in a way that ignores the specialness of JI intervals, that's fine--but it takes you squarely outside the purview of regular temperament. Which is also fine. The regular temperament paradigm was designed by, and for, people who care about the specialness of JI intervals and consider capturing that specialness to some degree desirable in music.

I guess I just don't think about 5/4 as an "interval" in the broadest
sense of that word. I think of it as a property that different
intervals can have. But you seem to have misunderstood my "I doubt it"
remark above, so I don't know if this is in response to that.

> > OK, so I assume you're using the phrase "maximally-in-tune" to mean
> > the presence or absence of various -psychoacoustic- phenomena? Really,
> > all of this yes-psychoacoustics-no-psychoacoustics-secret-thing-in-the-brain-likes-
> > ratios-no-it-doesn't
> > business is turning into utter madness.
>
> I agree, so I wish you would stop reading "is capable of being made aware of" as "has a preference for and inborn awareness of."

That's fine, it's just that I tried to get people to say they were
talking entirely about psychoacoustics for quite a while and was
unsuccessful. But if that's where we're at now then I'm happy.

> > No, you said that pythagorean is meantone, and also you just above
> > corrected me that you didn't think that maximal in-tune-ness was
> > preferable, and now you're uncorrecting me.
>
> Okay, subsitute "crappier" for "less-in-tune" if you want me to be pedantic about it. Pythagorean is a less-in-tune tuning of meantone, which is a temperament that maps a 5/4 to an 81/64. What I am saying essentially is that 81/64 always sounds like an out-of-tune 5/4 to me.

OK. There are plenty of times that I happen to really like really
bright intervals like that though, but whatever you want. Of the Bach
retunings, my favorite was 17-EDO actually (although that would
probably change if we were doing a slow piece with lots of chords,
especially in a lower register).

Also, sometimes if I play chords like D-C-E-A in pythagorean, I wish
they were tuned to superpyth.

> > No, it doesn't, but so what? It seems like you're about to follow this
> > up with a direct reference to beatlessness and periodicity buzz.
>
> Yep. That would be a sensible follow-up. The point is that just because you can learn to remember something doesn't mean it's a target for tempering. If it's insensitive to mistuning, then that means it lacks "specialness", and if it lacks "specialness" then it can't be represented. If it can't be represented, then you can't temper it!

I don't get it. I can represent 16/15 by just saying 16/15, but it's
very difficult for me to pick out the periodicity buzz and all that in
it unless I'm using the harshest timbres and am really focusing.

> > I'm curious if you can snap into the diatonic structure in 72-EDO and
> > still want things like tritones to resolve and so on.
>
> I haven't listened to it yet. But today I will listen to it *starting* with 5-ED2, and working my way back toward 12. Priming can be very powerful.

That's fine, and I doubt it'll work. The point was to deliberately get
you to prime yourself by starting with 12 and working up.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@> wrote:
> > For me, meantone as a general concept entails in practice soft, dark (broadly, wobbling around 4:5:6), whereas Pythagoren entails hard, bright. Tuning Pythagorean to 5-limit is something that would never occur to me unless I had the feeling that the Pythagorean was somehow wrong and needed to be changed. Which happens in music which, it turns out, was written in the meantone era, and sometimes with other musics, but generally doesn't happen. The other way around, the feeling that something "in JI" should be tuned to Pythagorean (i.e., 12-tET) occurs to me sometimes, mostly with tunes which, it turns out, were composed (consciously or no) in 12-tET then translated to JI, that is, with plenty of "xenharmonic" tunes which pop up on these lists.
> >
>
> I think you are conflating "sounds good" with "sounds like JI".

???? I've been railing against equating sounds good with sounds like JI for years, most recently right here. I have no idea where you get this- if it's not music specifically written for JI, I think JI is more likely to sound bad, not good. So, WTF?

> Triadic music in Pythagorean tuning is emphatically *not* JI. To make it sound like JI, you'd have to tune it in JI, but which JI? If you'd say "5-limit JI is the closest kind of JI to Pythagorean", then you'd be agreeing with my assertion.

??? JI and Pythagorean are two different things. They don't translate back and forth except in cases where there was mistranslation in the first place.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> I only agree with this if you literally define the phrase "in tune" as
> referring to a sound which exhibits these effects.

Good! Then you agree!

> > How about this: a 5/4 is the point of beatlessness at between 386-387 cents. Nothing > > more need be said about it.
>
> Sure, I'm happy with that. It's a specific psychoacoustic effect
> you're referring to. I'm happy with that.

Good! We're making progress.

> Yes, or an expectational thing, and if expectations can override
> concordance, then conditioning can override concordance in a
> particularly dramatic way, the origins of which aren't apparent to the
> listener.

Well, you also mentioned the "comma shifts" as being bothersome. But concordant doesn't equal "right", and your Hermode problem isn't necessarily that you find the sounds out-of-tune, just wrong.

> > People can learn to recognize 13/10 as concordant, sure. I don't think Carl would
> > argue that.
>
> Oh yes you do. I remember we were talking about tutone and he told us
> that he doesn't buy that 10:13:18 "is 10:13:18" because it's too
> complex and he was looking at the 3HE charts wanted to correct us on
> this before he left for a chess conference and a whole raft of new
> temperaments were conditioned in sin. Seems like the proper response
> would have been "yes, but someone can learn to recognize 10:13:18 as
> concordant!" and he'd be like "oh yeah, disregard guys. Gotta go, I
> need to practice my french advance before the tournament" or
> something, but I doubt that's how that conversation would have played
> out.

Oh, yeah. Well, okay, but he's also said that he thinks 10:12:15:17 is a significant consonance, so I'm not sure why he thinks 10:13:18 isn't. But anyway, I'm not as hardline about that. I can't think of anything simpler that 10:13:18 sounds like, and I can hear it as being beatless, at least under certain ideal conditions. But I also "believe in" 13/8 and 11/8.

> > But can people learn to recognize 64/63 as concordant? Can people learn to recognize > > 3/2 as discordant? No one has yet, to my knowledge, so the null hypothesis--that
> > they can't--stands.
>
> I'll assume you are using the word "concordant" to refer to the
> combined presence of a bunch of psychoacoustic effects.

Good.

> Informally, I
> doubt it, although I have no real proof. But, I will say that if
> "timbral expectations" like that of a piano can cause you to hate 7/4
> and all that, which to me seems completely cultural and arbitrary,
> then I see no reason why there couldn't be some kind of culture in
> which someone finds the sound of a purely tuned JI 3/2 to be awfully
> strange and intrusive, and instead finds the flat, beating 3/2 that
> they're used to much less so.

But...we're checking all that "expectation" stuff at the door. So far you haven't met anyone who thinks that 7/4 is less crunchy than 1000 cents. That's the important thing: even if it sounds "wrong", those people all heard the psychoacoustic hallmarks of "in-tune" present in the 7/4. I'm sure that to gamelan musicians, a pure 3/2 would sound all kinds of wrong, but it would still sound more """in-tune""" in terms of the psychoacoustic properties it demonstrates.

> And, I think that this can get to the
> point where the origin of this intrusiveness isn't something that's
> understood by the listener introspectively at all, to the point where
> they're like "bad. take this away." So if you're okay with that. I'm
> happy.

Yep. No problem. Hell, even I feel that way about 5-limit JI--"booooooring" (and therefore unpleasant in a way that has nothing to do with discordance or psychoacoustics).

> OK, probably. I'm not even sure if it's the 5-limit though. I can sort
> of imagine a culture where someone hears 5/4 and is like wtf, that's
> crazy until they just chill out and let it sink in and then they hear
> the coherence in it. But maybe not.

I can imagine that, too, and suspect that maybe that's why Pythagorean tuning dominated so many cultures for so long, and that meantone was a relatively isolated phenomenon.

> > No one here has ever suggested that existing auditory faculties can't be enhanced with > > training.
>
> No one here has ever suggested that? Bullshit :)

I'm just waiting for Carl to swoop in and insist that you've misconstrued him gravely. But maybe he won't? Well anyway, *I* think it's absurd to think that one can't learn to recognize the regularity of increasingly-complex beating patterns up to a certain threshold. If we can do it with rhythms (I had to learn how to play a 7-against-3 polyrhythm, but eventually I figured it out and it stopped sounding chaotic), why not intervals?

> > Seriously? Played with harmonic timbres in a controlled setting, you think it's possible > > for someone to learn to hear 3/2 as beating more strongly than 27/20?
>
> No... I just said although I have no proof that that sort of thing is
> impossible, even given a 1984 type setting where O'Brien is telling
> you that 3/2 beats and 27/20 doesn't, that I doubt it.

So, do you doubt that 27/20 can sound more beatless than 3/2, or do you doubt that 27/20 **can't** sound more beatless than 3/2? I'm unclear on the wording.

> No, I just said that I doubt all of that's possible, although I have
> no proof. I said that training improves things, and that it's not
> nihilism to say that 16-EDO doesn't sound so shitty once you've played
> it for a month or so, and also that it's possible to hear the
> concordance in 9/7 once you get used to it, which some people
> apparently never have to get used to, and so on.

Okay. I'm comfortable with all of those claims. As long as you're not claiming that training can lead to a complete psychoacoustic re-wiring of the auditory system, whereby beatless intervals start being heard as beating and vice-versa, I'm happy.

> > THERE ARE NO THEORIES CONTRADICTING THIS, for fuck's sake man! Wouldja STOP IT > > with these absurd straw men???
>
> I don't know what you mean by "theories," but there are definitely
> attitudes on here contradicting it, and I gave an anecdote above. How
> many times have we heard people talk about how 11/9 "is discordant" or
> "is not concordant" or what not? Without significant additional
> qualification as to who we're talking about perceive it as a
> discordance, and what, exactly, "discordance" means, that statement is
> only true in a statistical sense. And then if you ever throw in
> something about how concordance and fields of attraction and all that
> aren't subject to conditioning, you're now saying something that's
> probably false.

Alright, I'll buy that. But I'd like to take a little step back and re-frame "concordance" in terms of "the amount of mistuning a ratio can endure before the psychoacoustic effects associated with that ratio are significantly diminished". By Benade's analysis, the "special intervals" were beatless but bounded closely on either side by heavy and chaotic beating. Think about that for a bit.

> I don't have any problem with that. I have a problem taking the
> sensation of periodicity buzz et al and elevating to anything above
> what it actually is, which is a neat effect that you can make use of
> in music if you want to.

Aaaaaaand I'm definitely not doing that.

> It seems more like you're defining in-tuneness to refer to those
> psychoacoustic effects.

How much more explicit can I be? YES, that's exactly what I'm doing.

> If I were going to define "in-tuneness," I'd
> define it in a totally subjective manner, one which simply states
> whether a listener is satisfied with the intonation of an interval or
> chord or whether or not they think certain notes need to be tweaked.

That's a definition that will not permit of any quantitative tools or analyses, such as the Regular Mapping Paradigm. It places "in-tuneness" squarely outside of the realm of science and into the realm of aesthetics. In which case, all discussions of it become meaningless, as we'll all be reduced to saying "I like this!" "Oh yeah? Well, I think it sucks, and prefer this instead." Which is boring and stupid and a waste of time.

> And if you're really conditioned to like 12-EDO, it may be the case
> that you're going to think that 7/4 is too flat, although
> interestingly crunchy. The same applies to 4:5:6:7:9:11; I can't tell
> you how many times I've played that chord for people and then they ask
> me "now put the 12 version back on?" and I switch to lydian dominant
> and they're like "ahhhhhh. much better."

Well, the 12-TET version *is* some kind of essentially-tempered version, where all the dyads are 5-limit consonances. Perhaps that has some explanatory power, beyond just the "12-TET is familiar and therefore good" conjecture?

> OK, so if you're going to talk about "in-tuneness," the above is what
> I see. They all heard the "smoothness," but thought it was "too flat,"
> aka NOT IN TUNE. So if you want to want to DEFINE "in-tuneness" to
> mean "concordance," that's fine, but I think it's a crazy definition
> and I expect in another week or two Ryan will come back and have even
> less idea what we're talking about.

I've heard similar stories related about African musicians tuning an octave sharp because they like it that way or are used to it that way, and plenty of people here have argued that 5/4 as a major 3rd is "wrong" for some kinds of music and therefore out-of-tune. And it could be objected that people have been putting pianos in-tune not by eliminating beats, but by counting them, for centuries. So then we're left with this problem that the term "in tune" doesn't actually describe anything other than accuracy at achieving an arbitrary desired interval, in which case it's totally relative and not defined in terms of audible properties of sound. If that's the kind of definition you prefer for it, we can settle on a different term. We can use concordance if you prefer.

> I guess I just don't think about 5/4 as an "interval" in the broadest
> sense of that word. I think of it as a property that different
> intervals can have. But you seem to have misunderstood my "I doubt it"
> remark above, so I don't know if this is in response to that.

Alright, how about this: we can define the identity of any JI interval by its being the only perceptibly-beatless interval within some identifying range of the interval spectrum. And we can say an interval is in the field of attraction of some JI interval IFF it is nearer to that JI interval than any other JI interval. Same goes for chords of arbitrary size. Then we can say a tempered interval or chord represents a Just interval or chord IFF it is in the field of attraction of that interval/chord. Is any of this problematic for you?

> That's fine, it's just that I tried to get people to say they were
> talking entirely about psychoacoustics for quite a while and was
> unsuccessful. But if that's where we're at now then I'm happy.

Yes. JI intervals get their identities by being the only intervals in a given locality of the interval spectrum that display the perceptible constellation of properties we use to define "Justness". These qualities are objective, and present or absent on a continuum; sensitivity to them, however, is to some degree subjective, can be enhanced through training, and can be enhanced or disguised through musical context. Are you happy with all of that?

> OK. There are plenty of times that I happen to really like really
> bright intervals like that though, but whatever you want. Of the Bach
> retunings, my favorite was 17-EDO actually (although that would
> probably change if we were doing a slow piece with lots of chords,
> especially in a lower register).

Sure, I like it that way too. But if you asked me to retune the piece in such a way that it maximized this constellation of psychoacoustic properties that together make up "concordance" and are associated with JI, 5-limit adaptive JI all the way. In other words, my concordance-maximizing version of Superpyth[7] would be identical with my concordance-maximizing version Meantone[7], Flattone[7], etc. They might not all *be* meantone, though--if you wrote a piece with a bunch of min7(no3) chords, I'd probably want to tune them as 4:6:7's, suggesting that sometimes, I'm actually hearing meantone as superpyth.

> I don't get it. I can represent 16/15 by just saying 16/15, but it's
> very difficult for me to pick out the periodicity buzz and all that in
> it unless I'm using the harshest timbres and am really focusing.

So, what about 16/15 is being "represented", if you can't even pick out the interval itself? How do you represent something if you can't even recognzie the genuine article?

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@...> wrote:
> > I think you are conflating "sounds good" with "sounds like JI".
>
> ???? I've been railing against equating sounds good with sounds like JI for years, most
> recently right here. I have no idea where you get this- if it's not music specifically written
> for JI, I think JI is more likely to sound bad, not good. So, WTF?

I meant, "I think you're presuming that I am conflating the terms."

Imagine this: you have this computer music program that for whatever reason adaptively retunes everything fed into it to the nearest JI intervals. Some kind of Partchian-Melodyne AI monstrosity. You feed into it a piece of music written and performed in Pythagorean tuning that does occasionally hit some major and minor triads. Is there anything other than 5-limit triads to which you could reasonably expect this program to retune those major and minor triads, based on your understanding of what JI "is"?

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
> > If I were going to define "in-tuneness," I'd
> > define it in a totally subjective manner, one which simply states
> > whether a listener is satisfied with the intonation of an interval or
> > chord or whether or not they think certain notes need to be tweaked.
>
> That's a definition that will not permit of any quantitative tools or analyses, such as the Regular Mapping Paradigm. It places "in-tuneness" squarely outside of the realm of science and into the realm of aesthetics. In which case, all discussions of it become meaningless, as we'll all be reduced to saying "I like this!" "Oh yeah? Well, I think it sucks, and prefer this instead." Which is boring and stupid and a waste of time.

I think I agree with Igs here, and here is an example why:

If we define in-tuneness as a feeling of satisfaction, then what about an interval like 11/8? I really enjoy the sound of 11/8, and I can't quite get enough of it. However, it sounds "too flat" or "too sharp" to me.

However, if we define in-tuneness as a specific psychoacoustic phenomena, we don't get absurd contradictions between feeling and perception. I can say that 7/4 and 11/8 are in-tune, despite the fact that they sound like they are too sharp or too flat.

Ryan

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@> wrote:
> > > I think you are conflating "sounds good" with "sounds like JI".
> >
> > ???? I've been railing against equating sounds good with sounds like JI for years, most
> > recently right here. I have no idea where you get this- if it's not music specifically written
> > for JI, I think JI is more likely to sound bad, not good. So, WTF?
>
> I meant, "I think you're presuming that I am conflating the terms."
>
> Imagine this: you have this computer music program that for whatever reason adaptively retunes everything fed into it to the nearest JI intervals. Some kind of Partchian-Melodyne AI monstrosity. You feed into it a piece of music written and performed in Pythagorean tuning that does occasionally hit some major and minor triads. Is there anything other than 5-limit triads to which you could reasonably expect this program to retune those major and minor triads, based on your understanding of what JI "is"?
>
> -Igs
>

As I keep saying, Just intonation is intonation "of" something, Without that something being given, an intelligent program would leave the Pythagorean tuning alone, as the fifths would be Justly intoned and it would have to be assumed that they are the intervals which are intended to be tuned just.

Your example here can be worded like this: We are going to alter a work of art. What changes are most natural?

To which I would say, do you mean to restore a work of art? Do do this we need to study the history of the work of art. Here we have a piece tuned Pythagorean. Is it tuned so because it has been defaced by earlier "restorers" or simply damaged by neglect and ignorance? Or is it tuned so because it was meant to be tuned so? After all, there are large periods in which Pythagorean tuning is the most likely intended tuning of the authors! Tuning the fifths pure would be the Just intonation for these authors.

Or do you mean to change a work of art? Well, you're on your own there. Or you can go by the "rules" of what sounds "natural" of your own time. In our time and place, that means 12-tET (use autotuning) and 4/4 time (use beat-detective and snap-to-grid).

Now, let's look at your question like this: "limited to primary colors, and not allowed to mix them, what would you call this purple?"

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@...> wrote:
> As I keep saying, Just intonation is intonation "of" something, Without that something being given, an intelligent program would leave the Pythagorean tuning alone, as the fifths would be Justly intoned and it would have to be assumed that they are the intervals which are intended to be tuned just.
>

"Intension" is not relevant here. Intonation is intonation "of" something, yes--but of what? Of a scale, of chords, of abstract harmonic relationships that can be filled by a variety of tunings. For any chord derived from the diatonic scale, there is a way to intone that chord that sounds "Just". What's the problem?

> Your example here can be worded like this: We are going to alter a work of art. What
> changes are most natural?

Not so fast! We are not "altering" the work, but translating it. Think of the Pythagorean as written in Spanish, the adaptive JI in Latin. How do we translate one to the other? It seems that you are arguing that a translation is impossible, in the most pedantic way possible. But it's patently *not* impossible, we can translate all sorts of tunes into all sorts of tunings, as Mike demonstrated, and still maintain recognizable relationship to the original. Dostoyevsky wrote in Russian, and maybe some of his genius is lost in translation, but his meaning, emphatically, is not! If we can intelligibly translate Dostoyevsky into English, are you really going to tell me we can't intelligibly translate Pythagorean into adaptive JI? That the composer's intention of writing in Pythagorean means that only that intonation can hope to render the composer's meaning?

Hell, if I can recognize the Mona Lisa depicted in ASCII characters, I'd think going from Pythagorean to adaptive JI would be a no-brainer.

-Igs

Igs - sometimes we jump around and refer to the same point in
different places in the discussion. I'm going to group similar points
together in my reply.

=="In-tuneness"==

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 5:45 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> > I only agree with this if you literally define the phrase "in tune" as
> > referring to a sound which exhibits these effects.
>
> Good! Then you agree!
//snip
> Well, you also mentioned the "comma shifts" as being bothersome. But concordant doesn't equal "right", and your Hermode problem isn't necessarily that you find the sounds out-of-tune, just wrong.

If you gave me a piano tuned to Hermode tuning, and this was before I
knew anything about microtonality, and you asked me to describe it,
I'd say it was out of tune. I wouldn't say that it was "in tune but
out of tune," I'd just say it was out of tune. Those would be the
words I used. The fact that the crunchiness of the chords I was
hearing means that it's "in tune" in some strange esoteric way or that
those are local minima of places where that happens or whatever would
be the furthest thing from my mind. Obviously we as educated
microtonalists know the full extent of what's going on, but those
would be the words I used.

> But...we're checking all that "expectation" stuff at the door. So far you haven't met anyone who thinks that 7/4 is less crunchy than 1000 cents. That's the important thing: even if it sounds "wrong", those people all heard the psychoacoustic hallmarks of "in-tune" present in the 7/4. I'm sure that to gamelan musicians, a pure 3/2 would sound all kinds of wrong, but it would still sound more """in-tune""" in terms of the psychoacoustic properties it demonstrates.

Yes, it would sound more in-tune with regards to the thing that they
probably wouldn't call in-tune.

> > If I were going to define "in-tuneness," I'd
> > define it in a totally subjective manner, one which simply states
> > whether a listener is satisfied with the intonation of an interval or
> > chord or whether or not they think certain notes need to be tweaked.
>
> That's a definition that will not permit of any quantitative tools or analyses, such as the Regular Mapping Paradigm. It places "in-tuneness" squarely outside of the realm of science and into the realm of aesthetics. In which case, all discussions of it become meaningless, as we'll all be reduced to saying "I like this!" "Oh yeah? Well, I think it sucks, and prefer this instead." Which is boring and stupid and a waste of time.

You're right, I don't think regular tempering has anything to do with
"in-tuneness." I think it has to do with creating tuning systems such
that the intervals in them have intervals and chords which exhibit
certain psychoacoustic effects. And I think it's up to the composer
how much he or she cares at all about those effects, how much he or
she demands they be in the chords played, how much error he or she
wants in his or her (can't we have a gender-neutral word in the
English language?) tunings, and if he or she even cares at all. Many
on XA don't seem to care at all: these sorts of effects are just one
of a number of cool things that you can do with microtonality, and the
only reason that they care at all about regular temperaments is that
we've managed to digest them down into scala-file form and throw them
out there along with the rest of the sqrt(phi) tunings and such. I
think if you propose this definition of "in-tuneness" over there then
people will hate it, even though you're technically just proposing a
definition for a term and not making any predictions about perception.

The phrase "in tuneness," and even worse, the phrase "xyz interval is
'heard as' 5/4," both seem like they're talking about subjective
things. At least in a naive sense people I know would use those words
to mean various subjective things. Honestly, it seems ass backwards to
redefine subjective words to mean nonsubjective things just so we can
use those words. And as for the subjective things that they're
referring to, I assume there's probably some analysis that can be done
with regards to creating a model of categorical perception, but that's
not what regular temperament theory is for. So people wanting to learn
the theory would have to learn an alternate definition of those
phrases which makes them refer entirely to psychoacoustic phenomena.
But it's going to be confusing for anyone reading unless they happen
to stumble on this "Rosetta stone" post here. And saying that 8/7 is
"more in-tune" than 9/8 is a good way to get western musicians to
write you off immediately. Many Western musicians have an initial
reaction to regular temperaments as being "out of tune" at first, such
that all of the chords they're used to are replaced with all these
weird crunchy chords they'd probably very much describe as being "out
of tune."

Of course, if the tuning is supposed to be JI, then it does make sense
to talk about an interval on an instrument being "out of tune" because
you hear it beating, because it's not what it's supposed to be to get
the effect you're going for. That's the same thing as a piano tuner
saying that a major third is "out of tune" because it doesn't beat. I
assume things like that are neither here nor there in this discussion.

=="Identities"==

> > I guess I just don't think about 5/4 as an "interval" in the broadest
> > sense of that word. I think of it as a property that different
> > intervals can have. But you seem to have misunderstood my "I doubt it"
> > remark above, so I don't know if this is in response to that.
>
> Alright, how about this: we can define the identity of any JI interval by its being the only perceptibly-beatless interval within some identifying range of the interval spectrum. And we can say an interval is in the field of attraction of some JI interval IFF it is nearer to that JI interval than any other JI interval. Same goes for chords of arbitrary size. Then we can say a tempered interval or chord represents a Just interval or chord IFF it is in the field of attraction of that interval/chord. Is any of this problematic for you?

No, it's not problematic in terms of understanding what you mean, but
in terms of the terminology you're proposing I think it's terrible.
"Heard as" was bad, "in tune" is worse, and now you're talking about
"identities." I obviously understand what you're trying to say, but
it's just like you keep using this extremely loaded terminology that I
disagree with, and that's coming from someone who's severely toned
down semantic disagreements in this past year or so.

> > That's fine, it's just that I tried to get people to say they were
> > talking entirely about psychoacoustics for quite a while and was
> > unsuccessful. But if that's where we're at now then I'm happy.
>
> Yes. JI intervals get their identities by being the only intervals in a given locality of the interval spectrum that display the perceptible constellation of properties we use to define "Justness". These qualities are objective, and present or absent on a continuum; sensitivity to them, however, is to some degree subjective, can be enhanced through training, and can be enhanced or disguised through musical context. Are you happy with all of that?

You just defined "identity" to mean this, but I don't like the term
because I think it's confusing. It seems really loaded, even if you're
defining it in a non-loaded way, and I think newcomers are going to
get really confused because they won't have the ability yet to
introspectively differentiate between this and other factors which
might conceivably go into a thing called an "identity."

==More terminological confusion==

> > Oh yes you do. I remember we were talking about tutone and he told us
> > that he doesn't buy that 10:13:18 "is 10:13:18" because it's too
> > complex and he was looking at the 3HE charts wanted to correct us on
> > this before he left for a chess conference and a whole raft of new
> > temperaments were conditioned in sin. Seems like the proper response
> > would have been "yes, but someone can learn to recognize 10:13:18 as
> > concordant!" and he'd be like "oh yeah, disregard guys. Gotta go, I
> > need to practice my french advance before the tournament" or
> > something, but I doubt that's how that conversation would have played
> > out.
>
> Oh, yeah. Well, okay, but he's also said that he thinks 10:12:15:17 is a significant consonance, so I'm not sure why he thinks 10:13:18 isn't. But anyway, I'm not as hardline about that. I can't think of anything simpler that 10:13:18 sounds like, and I can hear it as being beatless, at least under certain ideal conditions. But I also "believe in" 13/8 and 11/8.

OK, are you now using "sounds like" in a totally subjective sense??
Because you just told me that you don't want to use subjective
descriptions for "heard as," but now we're over to "sounds like," and
it seems like you're just talking about subjective resemblance. This
is why I think this terminology is confusing and if we want to talk
about psychoacoustics, we should just talk about it directly. Also, if
we steal these words for psychoacoustic things, how do we talk about
subjective things if we actually want to?

"No, the other 'in tune.' No, not that one, the other one. Yes, that
one. Wait, are you sure you get that it's that one? No, not that one!
YES, THAT ONE! HOW MANY MORE TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY THAT ONE?! OK, now
it's the other one." is a pretty good summary of my impression of this
conversation thus far.

> I've heard similar stories related about African musicians tuning an octave sharp because they like it that way or are used to it that way, and plenty of people here have argued that 5/4 as a major 3rd is "wrong" for some kinds of music and therefore out-of-tune. And it could be objected that people have been putting pianos in-tune not by eliminating beats, but by counting them, for centuries. So then we're left with this problem that the term "in tune" doesn't actually describe anything other than accuracy at achieving an arbitrary desired interval, in which case it's totally relative and not defined in terms of audible properties of sound. If that's the kind of definition you prefer for it, we can settle on a different term. We can use concordance if you prefer.

I'd rather talk about concordance, but even that can be misleading if
we're not -exactly- sure what we're talking about, because the way
we're talking about it now there's more than one component, all of
which have different characteristics and which vary differently with
respect to mistuning. So far I know of three for sure effects: the
activation of a virtual fundamental, periodicity buzz, and
beatlessness. You might be able to throw something else in that has to
do with combination tones, but I'm not sure exactly what it'd be. If
we want concordance to refer to some kind of weighted average of all
of this stuff, then it should also be known that each of these effects
each "break" differently, for instance: periodicity buzz is much more
"fragile" than VF perception and can sometimes even occur for
inharmonic chords which are still "isoharmonic." But as a qualitative,
weighted average of a bunch of phenomena, it sort of makes sense.

The problem happens when you define it in terms of psychoacoustic
factors that you don't know about, and treat its meaning as "how
consonant it is apart from musical context." It seems like you agree
this is undesirable, but Paul used this definition earlier and I hate
it. I think it's bad because it ends up including cultural effects
that you don't know about, presumably including things which
completely dominate the "consonance" of the sound even apart from any
explicit musical context that we might not even know about. I mean
this in a less trivial sense than "my culture doesn't use this
interval so it's weird and bad and dissonant."

This is why I don't like to talk about "concordance" unless we're all
on the same page that this word means specifically the presence of
certain psychoacoustic factors, and that the "net effect" will be
nothing more than those psychoacoustic factors. Then I'm happy and
view that as a good modern understanding of concordance. Discordance
is a bit harder to define - is it the absence of these qualities? Is
white noise discordant? etc.

> Alright, I'll buy that. But I'd like to take a little step back and re-frame "concordance" in terms of "the amount of mistuning a ratio can endure before the psychoacoustic effects associated with that ratio are significantly diminished". By Benade's analysis, the "special intervals" were beatless but bounded closely on either side by heavy and chaotic beating. Think about that for a bit.

You want concordance to refer to mistuning sensitivity? I'd rather it
refer to the extent to which the effects occur at any point. We can
talk about the concordance of ratios that aren't JI, for instance,
like 510 cents, and conclude that they're sort of concordant but not
as much as 4/3 but more than 27/20 and so on.

> Sure, I like it that way too. But if you asked me to retune the piece in such a way that it maximized this constellation of psychoacoustic properties that together make up "concordance" and are associated with JI, 5-limit adaptive JI all the way. In other words, my concordance-maximizing version of Superpyth[7] would be identical with my concordance-maximizing version Meantone[7], Flattone[7], etc. They might not all *be* meantone, though--if you wrote a piece with a bunch of min7(no3) chords, I'd probably want to tune them as 4:6:7's, suggesting that sometimes, I'm actually hearing meantone as superpyth.

Yes, I agree, except again I don't think it's necessarily true in a
subjective sense that you're actually hearing meantone as an altered
version of superpyth and this is why I hate this use of
counter-intuitive terminology.

==Training==

> > No... I just said although I have no proof that that sort of thing is
> > impossible, even given a 1984 type setting where O'Brien is telling
> > you that 3/2 beats and 27/20 doesn't, that I doubt it.
>
> So, do you doubt that 27/20 can sound more beatless than 3/2, or do you doubt that 27/20 **can't** sound more beatless than 3/2? I'm unclear on the wording.

You're asking a specific question about heirarchical orderings of
concordance. If we're talking about hearing 27/20 as being
specifically -MORE BEATLESS- than 3/2, then the answer I'm most
comfortable giving is "for our purposes here, probably not."

One relevant thing to this is that I've noticed that I can "target"
specific intervals, like I'm all over the sound of 9/7 these days and
its buzzing and all that but don't hear these usual concordance
effects as strongly with 9/5. This might change if I get a 26-EDO
guitar or something, I dunno, but for now 9/7 has been "activated" in
a way that 9/5 and 27/20 hasn't for me. I assume you've read my
continued posts about this so I won't spell it out again. And I'm
referring to my subjective experience of psychoacoustic phenomena,
which has most likely been bolstered by un-psychoacoustic training
(what good are psychoacoustic properties if you're not aware of them,
after all?).

It also may be the case that my new perception of 9/7 has carried over
to other high-limit dyads too, as a part of some kind of general,
systemic adaptation. But, at least for me, there is some extent to
which heirarchical orderings can differ from interval complexity if
you get more accustomed to more complex ones and skip some in the
middle. In light of that, your question about 3/2 can be interpreted
as - do think that it's ever possible for someone to have 27/20 be
"activated" to the extent that I wrote above, but not 3/2? Well, I'm
not really comfortable ruling out that the brain can't ever end up
being configured in such a state somehow literally no matter what, but
I doubt that's something that any human being in a normal setting
would likely experience, because something like 3/2 is audibly present
in most harmonic timbres. And, these are things you're typically
exposed to while still in the womb. So I would doubt that it's
possible to hear 27/20 as "activated" but not 3/2.

But the question of how much this kind of raw, sonic concordance ties
directly over to something music without need for any additional
training, perhaps of a more "logical" nature is not at all settled by
talking about these sorts of things; there are lots of people with
amusia for instance, who can hear periodic timbres just fine, but
don't understand music at all and hear the whole thing as chaotic and
ridiculous and "discordant." (There's someone on this board who has
this awesome story about having amusia as a kid and then it going away
as he got older, but I won't call him out on it unless he wants to
volunteer.)

> > > No one here has ever suggested that existing auditory faculties can't be enhanced with > > training.
> >
> > No one here has ever suggested that? Bullshit :)
>
> I'm just waiting for Carl to swoop in and insist that you've misconstrued him gravely. But maybe he won't? Well anyway, *I* think it's absurd to think that one can't learn to recognize the regularity of increasingly-complex beating patterns up to a certain threshold. If we can do it with rhythms (I had to learn how to play a 7-against-3 polyrhythm, but eventually I figured it out and it stopped sounding chaotic), why not intervals?

I'm sure Carl agrees that "the auditory system in general" improves
with training. I've never, ever, ever heard him say that one can learn
to recognize higher-limit intervals, which would be local maxima of HE
for some s but perhaps minima with a finer s, as being concordant.
Never heard him say that, and if anything the entire body of
interaction I've ever had with him has been completely in line with
the opposite of this. If Carl wants to go on record as saying this
I'll let him do that himself.

==Misc==

> Yep. No problem. Hell, even I feel that way about 5-limit JI--"booooooring" (and therefore unpleasant in a way that has nothing to do with discordance or psychoacoustics).

Yeah, but I mean literally intrusive though, like diminished-chord intrusive.

> Well, the 12-TET version *is* some kind of essentially-tempered version, where all the dyads are 5-limit consonances. Perhaps that has some explanatory power, beyond just the "12-TET is familiar and therefore good" conjecture?

Sure, but there's no real reason why someone should end up liking one
over the other. Gene, I'm sure, likes 31-EDO C-E-G-A#-D-F^ more than
he likes 31-EDO C-E-G-Bb-D-F#.

> > I don't get it. I can represent 16/15 by just saying 16/15, but it's
> > very difficult for me to pick out the periodicity buzz and all that in
> > it unless I'm using the harshest timbres and am really focusing.
>
> So, what about 16/15 is being "represented", if you can't even pick out the interval itself? How do you represent something if you can't even recognzie the genuine article?

Because there's more to 16/15 than its perception as a dyad. There are
larger chords, for one. There's also the sense in which 16/15 is a 5/4
above a 3/2, which is a 16/15 ratio placed away from the root, so it
has meaning purely in a "logical sense" in terms of labeling where the
current pitch is at relative to 1/1. There's definitely plenty of ways
to talk about 16/15 that make sense other than its intonation, as long
as we know what we're talking about.

One question you might ask is if it's a good thing to conflate those
uses. I think that's a good discussion to have, but this is long
enough as is for now.

-Mike

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 11:22 PM, Ryan Avella <domeofatonement@...> wrote:
>
> I think I agree with Igs here, and here is an example why:
>
> If we define in-tuneness as a feeling of satisfaction, then what about an interval like 11/8? I really enjoy the sound of 11/8, and I can't quite get enough of it. However, it sounds "too flat" or "too sharp" to me.
>
> However, if we define in-tuneness as a specific psychoacoustic phenomena, we don't get absurd contradictions between feeling and perception. I can say that 7/4 and 11/8 are in-tune, despite the fact that they sound like they are too sharp or too flat.

What I mean is that the phrase "in-tuneness" is something that already
has a definition to most people, and one which refers to a subjective
phenomenon. So if we use those same words, I think people will be
confused. Same as if an interval is "heard as" another interval, which
Igs also has proposed defining as if an interval is closest to some
minima of harmonic entropy. What do we do if we actually do, for
whatever reason, want to talk about the subjective sensation of
in-tuneness? What if I actually do want to say that some interval
sounds like (the category of) 5/4?

And, although I usually tend to let people call things what they want,
in this case I'd like to know, why do we even need to go there? We can
just talk about psychoacoustics and let that be that. Why even make
the jump to talking about "in-tuneness" at all? It seems obvious to me
that people will join this list and we'll tell them that 11/8 is in
tune, and they'll say that they like it but it's not in tune, then
we'll have to tell them what "in tune" means, and they might be
confused at first but eventually they'll get it, and so on.
Furthermore, anyone who's just reading the archives will never get it.
Why not just pick a clear, intuitive definition instead of
reappropriating something else?

If you really want to use this terminology, which I feel is very
confusing and loaded, go ahead, but I'm not going to use it. I think
there have been lots of arguments on this list because one person
didn't understand the terminology of another person and that this is
just a recipe for more of that.

Lastly, I have to ask: what did you mean that you heard 11/8 as too
sharp or too flat?

-Mike

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 1:23 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
>
> > Imagine this: you have this computer music program that for whatever reason adaptively retunes everything fed into it to the nearest JI intervals. Some kind of Partchian-Melodyne AI monstrosity. You feed into it a piece of music written and performed in Pythagorean tuning that does occasionally hit some major and minor triads. Is there anything other than 5-limit triads to which you could reasonably expect this program to retune those major and minor triads, based on your understanding of what JI "is"?
> >
> > -Igs
> >
>
> As I keep saying, Just intonation is intonation "of" something, Without that something being given, an intelligent program would leave the Pythagorean tuning alone, as the fifths would be Justly intoned and it would have to be assumed that they are the intervals which are intended to be tuned just.
>
> Your example here can be worded like this: We are going to alter a work of art. What changes are most natural?

I feel like this conversation is a trainwreck, so I'll jump in. I
don't think that this is what Igs is saying.

Somewhere in the middle of our back and forth giant novella-sized
posts, Igs said he was using the following definitions for these
terms:

IN TUNE - displaying the effects of low-integer JI ratios, in the
"field of interaction" of a low-integer JI ratio, AN ENTIRELY
PSYCHOACOUSTIC THING, does not have to do with subjective preferences
FIELD OF ATTRACTION - what you called field of interaction, STILL JUST
PSYCHOACOUSTIC, does NOT refer to categorical perception or subjective
labels
HEARD AS - an interval x is "heard as" y if x is in the field of
interaction with y

So you might be like, "that definition of in tune is crazy, that's not
what I'd call 'in tune' at all, obviously in-tuneness is subjective
and complex, etc. And I don't perceive JI intervals as altered
versions of other ones, I perceive categories as altered versions of
other categories. Igliashon, I sternly admonish you!" But Igs agrees
all that stuff is true. He's just saying that he's redefining these
words above to the definitions I gave above for the sake of this
conversation. I happen to think this choice of terminology is
extremely loaded, and counter-intuitive, and that if you explicitly
define a term like that, which has more than one informal meaning, to
mean something totally different, it only makes it worse. For now I'm
rolling with it.

But given these stated definitions, we can translate from Engliashon
to English as follows:

"If I have a computer program which adaptively retunes the chords in a
piece of music so that harmonic entropy is minimized and everything is
as concordant as possible, and I feed it in a piece of music written
in Pythagorean tuning, is there any reason why we should assume it
won't tune this to 5-limit JI?"

And your response can be translated from Bobroese to English as follows:

"Yes, it probably would, and it would sound more harmonic and
concordant and buzzy and all that, but the whole concept is stupid
because it'll probably make Medieval music sound like shit."

I think this is a good example of why we shouldn't use loaded
terminology for things, because it makes communication difficult. I
think, in fact, if we'd all actually just agree to NOT use loaded
terminology, and try to be as precise and specific as possible, we
might finally be able to move on past these endless disagreements
which are not disagreements at all. Then we could get to the things
which actually are disagreements and figure out what projects to
tackle next. Thus ends my report.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@> wrote:
> > As I keep saying, Just intonation is intonation "of" something, Without that something being given, an intelligent program would leave the Pythagorean tuning alone, as the fifths would be Justly intoned and it would have to be assumed that they are the intervals which are intended to be tuned just.
> >
>
> "Intension" is not relevant here. Intonation is intonation "of" something, yes--but of what? Of a scale, of chords, of abstract harmonic relationships that can be filled by a variety of tunings. For any chord derived from the diatonic scale, there is a way to intone that chord that sounds "Just". What's the problem?

Intention is not just relevant, it is necessary in order to speak of "just intonation". 81:64 is Justly intoned, according to Pythagorean intention. A ditone is not a major third, unless by intention you declare it such.

>
> > Your example here can be worded like this: We are going to alter a work of art. What
> > changes are most natural?
>
> Not so fast! We are not "altering" the work, but translating it. Think of the Pythagorean as written in Spanish, the adaptive JI in Latin. How do we translate one to the other? It seems that you are arguing that a translation is impossible, in the most pedantic way possible. But it's patently *not* impossible, we can translate all sorts of tunes into all sorts of tunings, as Mike demonstrated, and still maintain recognizable relationship to the original.

You don't consider Mike's examples "altered"?

>Dostoyevsky wrote in Russian, and maybe some of his genius is lost >in translation, but his meaning, emphatically, is not!

Music and language are not precise analogs, at all. I think the parallels are grossly exaggerated in fact, but that is to be expected in an age when advertisement and propaganda are so powerful.

>If we can intelligibly translate Dostoyevsky into English, are you >really going to tell me we can't intelligibly translate Pythagorean >into adaptive JI?

It depends on the piece, and where the meanings and structures of it lie. I met a young composer who is working in a language of fifths and fourths, hardcore Pythagorean you might say- tuning his vertical sonorities to "5-limit Just" would destroy them. The same is true of any structure in which "thirds" are ditones which are by-products of pure fifths. This includes the "open strings" skeleton in my own music, incidentally.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> HEARD AS - an interval x is "heard as" y if x is in the field of
> interaction with y

The point of using something like field of interaction rather than field of attraction is to get away from the grossly unmusical and
(Godwin's Law adjective) idea that an interval is "heard as" rather than "heard in relation to".

For example, part of the identity of the 12-tET M3 is that it is NOT "5:4". Its beating, its very non-5:4ness, is an essential part of its character and identity.

Of course partials 4 and 5, and probably 9 and 7 and who knows how many others, play a part in the identity of any interval we broadly call a "major third". But a point of reference is not an identity. Purple is either red or blue, just because it lies right between those two primaries. It is purple as much because it is NOT red OR blue, but both and neither.

"If you could choose only primary colors, would you not choose cyan, magenta and yellow?"

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 5:38 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > HEARD AS - an interval x is "heard as" y if x is in the field of
> > interaction with y
>
> The point of using something like field of interaction rather than field of attraction is to get away from the grossly unmusical and
> (Godwin's Law adjective) idea that an interval is "heard as" rather than "heard in relation to".

If we're going by how likely people are to misinterpret things, I
don't think "heard in relation to" is a much better word choice,
unfortunately.

> For example, part of the identity of the 12-tET M3 is that it is NOT "5:4". Its beating, its very non-5:4ness, is an essential part of its character and identity.
>
> Of course partials 4 and 5, and probably 9 and 7 and who knows how many others, play a part in the identity of any interval we broadly call a "major third". But a point of reference is not an identity. Purple is either red or blue, just because it lies right between those two primaries. It is purple as much because it is NOT red OR blue, but both and neither.

Right, and Igs agrees that what you're saying is true. He's just
literally defined, for the purposes of this conversation, the word
"identity" to mean what I said above. He doesn't mean anything about
cognitive references or anything, he totally agrees with you and I do,
he's just used that choice of word. If you don't believe me, go take a
look at this huge stream of emails that's been sent back and forth
between us over the past few days. It reads like this:

Igs:
"I hear pythagorean as meantone."

Me:
"But you're talking about something entirely psychoacoustic, right?
Not like, categorical distinctions or anything, or subjective choices
of labels. You mean pythagorean is 'heard as' meantone in a totally
psychoacoustic sense, right, using your definition - that you'd
increase the concordance if you tune it to meantone, right? Because I
disagree if you're talking about categories [insert 3 paragraphs here
on categorical perception]."

Igs:
"Yes, just psychoacoustics."

...5 minutes later...

Igs:
"We have an inborn sense of what 'in-tune' is."

Me:
"Are you talking about concordance again? Because I disagree if you
mean actually, subjectively in-tune, western musicians tend to hate
4:5:6:7:9:11 and blah blah. I only agree if you're talking about
psychoacoustics, like we can all hear things that are beatless, but I
totally disagree if you mean something subjective, because [insert 3
paragraphs here about categorical perception]."

Igs:
"Yes damn it, psychoacoustics!!!"

...5 minutes later...

Igs:
"81/64 basically sounds like 5/4 to me."

Me:
"When you say 'sounds like,' you mean 'heard as' again? Not like, it
subjectively sounds like it to you? Or that like, you hear 81/64 as a
crappier version of 5/4, but being the same? Because I agree but
that's not true for all intervals blah blah categorical perception
blah, and then I disagree that's true for everyone, because [insert 3
paragraphs here about categorical perception]."

Igs:
"Yes, Mike, psychoacoustics. PSYCHOACOUSTICS, MIKE. @#$*(&@(#$ GOD DAMN IT"

...5 minutes later...

Igs:
"Thus, in closing, Pythagorean temperament doesn't really exist,
because it 'is' meantone."

Me:
"When you say 'exist,' do you mean in this strictly psychoacoustic
sense that is the same as you meant when you said 'heard as?' Also,
when you say 'is' here, do you mean psychoacoustically, Pythagorean
doesn't maximize concordance, and as such there's no point shooting
for it as a target temperament? Or does 'is' just mean is?"

Igs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVu949oYnXg

Well, the last one hasn't happened yet, but I'm pretty sure that's how
he'll respond.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 5:38 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
> >
> > --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@> wrote:
> >
> > > HEARD AS - an interval x is "heard as" y if x is in the field of
> > > interaction with y
> >
> > The point of using something like field of interaction rather than field of attraction is to get away from the grossly unmusical and
> > (Godwin's Law adjective) idea that an interval is "heard as" rather than "heard in relation to".
>
> If we're going by how likely people are to misinterpret things, I
> don't think "heard in relation to" is a much better word choice,
> unfortunately.

I hope you are wrong but sadly you are probably not.

"81/64 basically sounds like 5/4 to me." is pretty much the opposite of "psychoacoustics". One beats a lot, the other beats hardly if at all. So I'm still trying to figure out what Igliashon is saying.

Okay, since this has devolved into an argument over semantics and terminology, I'm going to concede to all of your objections and request that you furnish some non-value-loaded words for all the concepts I've articulated (which you find agreeable) so that we can actually proceed to talk about what I was actually trying to talk about.

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> Igs - sometimes we jump around and refer to the same point in
> different places in the discussion. I'm going to group similar points
> together in my reply.
>
>
> =="In-tuneness"==
>
> On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 5:45 PM, cityoftheasleep
> <igliashon@...> wrote:
> >
> > --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@> wrote:
> > > I only agree with this if you literally define the phrase "in tune" as
> > > referring to a sound which exhibits these effects.
> >
> > Good! Then you agree!
> //snip
> > Well, you also mentioned the "comma shifts" as being bothersome. But concordant doesn't equal "right", and your Hermode problem isn't necessarily that you find the sounds out-of-tune, just wrong.
>
> If you gave me a piano tuned to Hermode tuning, and this was before I
> knew anything about microtonality, and you asked me to describe it,
> I'd say it was out of tune. I wouldn't say that it was "in tune but
> out of tune," I'd just say it was out of tune. Those would be the
> words I used. The fact that the crunchiness of the chords I was
> hearing means that it's "in tune" in some strange esoteric way or that
> those are local minima of places where that happens or whatever would
> be the furthest thing from my mind. Obviously we as educated
> microtonalists know the full extent of what's going on, but those
> would be the words I used.
>
> > But...we're checking all that "expectation" stuff at the door. So far you haven't met anyone who thinks that 7/4 is less crunchy than 1000 cents. That's the important thing: even if it sounds "wrong", those people all heard the psychoacoustic hallmarks of "in-tune" present in the 7/4. I'm sure that to gamelan musicians, a pure 3/2 would sound all kinds of wrong, but it would still sound more """in-tune""" in terms of the psychoacoustic properties it demonstrates.
>
> Yes, it would sound more in-tune with regards to the thing that they
> probably wouldn't call in-tune.
>
> > > If I were going to define "in-tuneness," I'd
> > > define it in a totally subjective manner, one which simply states
> > > whether a listener is satisfied with the intonation of an interval or
> > > chord or whether or not they think certain notes need to be tweaked.
> >
> > That's a definition that will not permit of any quantitative tools or analyses, such as the Regular Mapping Paradigm. It places "in-tuneness" squarely outside of the realm of science and into the realm of aesthetics. In which case, all discussions of it become meaningless, as we'll all be reduced to saying "I like this!" "Oh yeah? Well, I think it sucks, and prefer this instead." Which is boring and stupid and a waste of time.
>
> You're right, I don't think regular tempering has anything to do with
> "in-tuneness." I think it has to do with creating tuning systems such
> that the intervals in them have intervals and chords which exhibit
> certain psychoacoustic effects. And I think it's up to the composer
> how much he or she cares at all about those effects, how much he or
> she demands they be in the chords played, how much error he or she
> wants in his or her (can't we have a gender-neutral word in the
> English language?) tunings, and if he or she even cares at all. Many
> on XA don't seem to care at all: these sorts of effects are just one
> of a number of cool things that you can do with microtonality, and the
> only reason that they care at all about regular temperaments is that
> we've managed to digest them down into scala-file form and throw them
> out there along with the rest of the sqrt(phi) tunings and such. I
> think if you propose this definition of "in-tuneness" over there then
> people will hate it, even though you're technically just proposing a
> definition for a term and not making any predictions about perception.
>
> The phrase "in tuneness," and even worse, the phrase "xyz interval is
> 'heard as' 5/4," both seem like they're talking about subjective
> things. At least in a naive sense people I know would use those words
> to mean various subjective things. Honestly, it seems ass backwards to
> redefine subjective words to mean nonsubjective things just so we can
> use those words. And as for the subjective things that they're
> referring to, I assume there's probably some analysis that can be done
> with regards to creating a model of categorical perception, but that's
> not what regular temperament theory is for. So people wanting to learn
> the theory would have to learn an alternate definition of those
> phrases which makes them refer entirely to psychoacoustic phenomena.
> But it's going to be confusing for anyone reading unless they happen
> to stumble on this "Rosetta stone" post here. And saying that 8/7 is
> "more in-tune" than 9/8 is a good way to get western musicians to
> write you off immediately. Many Western musicians have an initial
> reaction to regular temperaments as being "out of tune" at first, such
> that all of the chords they're used to are replaced with all these
> weird crunchy chords they'd probably very much describe as being "out
> of tune."
>
> Of course, if the tuning is supposed to be JI, then it does make sense
> to talk about an interval on an instrument being "out of tune" because
> you hear it beating, because it's not what it's supposed to be to get
> the effect you're going for. That's the same thing as a piano tuner
> saying that a major third is "out of tune" because it doesn't beat. I
> assume things like that are neither here nor there in this discussion.
>
>
> =="Identities"==
>
> > > I guess I just don't think about 5/4 as an "interval" in the broadest
> > > sense of that word. I think of it as a property that different
> > > intervals can have. But you seem to have misunderstood my "I doubt it"
> > > remark above, so I don't know if this is in response to that.
> >
> > Alright, how about this: we can define the identity of any JI interval by its being the only perceptibly-beatless interval within some identifying range of the interval spectrum. And we can say an interval is in the field of attraction of some JI interval IFF it is nearer to that JI interval than any other JI interval. Same goes for chords of arbitrary size. Then we can say a tempered interval or chord represents a Just interval or chord IFF it is in the field of attraction of that interval/chord. Is any of this problematic for you?
>
> No, it's not problematic in terms of understanding what you mean, but
> in terms of the terminology you're proposing I think it's terrible.
> "Heard as" was bad, "in tune" is worse, and now you're talking about
> "identities." I obviously understand what you're trying to say, but
> it's just like you keep using this extremely loaded terminology that I
> disagree with, and that's coming from someone who's severely toned
> down semantic disagreements in this past year or so.
>
> > > That's fine, it's just that I tried to get people to say they were
> > > talking entirely about psychoacoustics for quite a while and was
> > > unsuccessful. But if that's where we're at now then I'm happy.
> >
> > Yes. JI intervals get their identities by being the only intervals in a given locality of the interval spectrum that display the perceptible constellation of properties we use to define "Justness". These qualities are objective, and present or absent on a continuum; sensitivity to them, however, is to some degree subjective, can be enhanced through training, and can be enhanced or disguised through musical context. Are you happy with all of that?
>
> You just defined "identity" to mean this, but I don't like the term
> because I think it's confusing. It seems really loaded, even if you're
> defining it in a non-loaded way, and I think newcomers are going to
> get really confused because they won't have the ability yet to
> introspectively differentiate between this and other factors which
> might conceivably go into a thing called an "identity."
>
>
> ==More terminological confusion==
>
> > > Oh yes you do. I remember we were talking about tutone and he told us
> > > that he doesn't buy that 10:13:18 "is 10:13:18" because it's too
> > > complex and he was looking at the 3HE charts wanted to correct us on
> > > this before he left for a chess conference and a whole raft of new
> > > temperaments were conditioned in sin. Seems like the proper response
> > > would have been "yes, but someone can learn to recognize 10:13:18 as
> > > concordant!" and he'd be like "oh yeah, disregard guys. Gotta go, I
> > > need to practice my french advance before the tournament" or
> > > something, but I doubt that's how that conversation would have played
> > > out.
> >
> > Oh, yeah. Well, okay, but he's also said that he thinks 10:12:15:17 is a significant consonance, so I'm not sure why he thinks 10:13:18 isn't. But anyway, I'm not as hardline about that. I can't think of anything simpler that 10:13:18 sounds like, and I can hear it as being beatless, at least under certain ideal conditions. But I also "believe in" 13/8 and 11/8.
>
> OK, are you now using "sounds like" in a totally subjective sense??
> Because you just told me that you don't want to use subjective
> descriptions for "heard as," but now we're over to "sounds like," and
> it seems like you're just talking about subjective resemblance. This
> is why I think this terminology is confusing and if we want to talk
> about psychoacoustics, we should just talk about it directly. Also, if
> we steal these words for psychoacoustic things, how do we talk about
> subjective things if we actually want to?
>
> "No, the other 'in tune.' No, not that one, the other one. Yes, that
> one. Wait, are you sure you get that it's that one? No, not that one!
> YES, THAT ONE! HOW MANY MORE TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY THAT ONE?! OK, now
> it's the other one." is a pretty good summary of my impression of this
> conversation thus far.
>
> > I've heard similar stories related about African musicians tuning an octave sharp because they like it that way or are used to it that way, and plenty of people here have argued that 5/4 as a major 3rd is "wrong" for some kinds of music and therefore out-of-tune. And it could be objected that people have been putting pianos in-tune not by eliminating beats, but by counting them, for centuries. So then we're left with this problem that the term "in tune" doesn't actually describe anything other than accuracy at achieving an arbitrary desired interval, in which case it's totally relative and not defined in terms of audible properties of sound. If that's the kind of definition you prefer for it, we can settle on a different term. We can use concordance if you prefer.
>
> I'd rather talk about concordance, but even that can be misleading if
> we're not -exactly- sure what we're talking about, because the way
> we're talking about it now there's more than one component, all of
> which have different characteristics and which vary differently with
> respect to mistuning. So far I know of three for sure effects: the
> activation of a virtual fundamental, periodicity buzz, and
> beatlessness. You might be able to throw something else in that has to
> do with combination tones, but I'm not sure exactly what it'd be. If
> we want concordance to refer to some kind of weighted average of all
> of this stuff, then it should also be known that each of these effects
> each "break" differently, for instance: periodicity buzz is much more
> "fragile" than VF perception and can sometimes even occur for
> inharmonic chords which are still "isoharmonic." But as a qualitative,
> weighted average of a bunch of phenomena, it sort of makes sense.
>
> The problem happens when you define it in terms of psychoacoustic
> factors that you don't know about, and treat its meaning as "how
> consonant it is apart from musical context." It seems like you agree
> this is undesirable, but Paul used this definition earlier and I hate
> it. I think it's bad because it ends up including cultural effects
> that you don't know about, presumably including things which
> completely dominate the "consonance" of the sound even apart from any
> explicit musical context that we might not even know about. I mean
> this in a less trivial sense than "my culture doesn't use this
> interval so it's weird and bad and dissonant."
>
> This is why I don't like to talk about "concordance" unless we're all
> on the same page that this word means specifically the presence of
> certain psychoacoustic factors, and that the "net effect" will be
> nothing more than those psychoacoustic factors. Then I'm happy and
> view that as a good modern understanding of concordance. Discordance
> is a bit harder to define - is it the absence of these qualities? Is
> white noise discordant? etc.
>
> > Alright, I'll buy that. But I'd like to take a little step back and re-frame "concordance" in terms of "the amount of mistuning a ratio can endure before the psychoacoustic effects associated with that ratio are significantly diminished". By Benade's analysis, the "special intervals" were beatless but bounded closely on either side by heavy and chaotic beating. Think about that for a bit.
>
> You want concordance to refer to mistuning sensitivity? I'd rather it
> refer to the extent to which the effects occur at any point. We can
> talk about the concordance of ratios that aren't JI, for instance,
> like 510 cents, and conclude that they're sort of concordant but not
> as much as 4/3 but more than 27/20 and so on.
>
> > Sure, I like it that way too. But if you asked me to retune the piece in such a way that it maximized this constellation of psychoacoustic properties that together make up "concordance" and are associated with JI, 5-limit adaptive JI all the way. In other words, my concordance-maximizing version of Superpyth[7] would be identical with my concordance-maximizing version Meantone[7], Flattone[7], etc. They might not all *be* meantone, though--if you wrote a piece with a bunch of min7(no3) chords, I'd probably want to tune them as 4:6:7's, suggesting that sometimes, I'm actually hearing meantone as superpyth.
>
> Yes, I agree, except again I don't think it's necessarily true in a
> subjective sense that you're actually hearing meantone as an altered
> version of superpyth and this is why I hate this use of
> counter-intuitive terminology.
>
>
> ==Training==
>
> > > No... I just said although I have no proof that that sort of thing is
> > > impossible, even given a 1984 type setting where O'Brien is telling
> > > you that 3/2 beats and 27/20 doesn't, that I doubt it.
> >
> > So, do you doubt that 27/20 can sound more beatless than 3/2, or do you doubt that 27/20 **can't** sound more beatless than 3/2? I'm unclear on the wording.
>
> You're asking a specific question about heirarchical orderings of
> concordance. If we're talking about hearing 27/20 as being
> specifically -MORE BEATLESS- than 3/2, then the answer I'm most
> comfortable giving is "for our purposes here, probably not."
>
> One relevant thing to this is that I've noticed that I can "target"
> specific intervals, like I'm all over the sound of 9/7 these days and
> its buzzing and all that but don't hear these usual concordance
> effects as strongly with 9/5. This might change if I get a 26-EDO
> guitar or something, I dunno, but for now 9/7 has been "activated" in
> a way that 9/5 and 27/20 hasn't for me. I assume you've read my
> continued posts about this so I won't spell it out again. And I'm
> referring to my subjective experience of psychoacoustic phenomena,
> which has most likely been bolstered by un-psychoacoustic training
> (what good are psychoacoustic properties if you're not aware of them,
> after all?).
>
> It also may be the case that my new perception of 9/7 has carried over
> to other high-limit dyads too, as a part of some kind of general,
> systemic adaptation. But, at least for me, there is some extent to
> which heirarchical orderings can differ from interval complexity if
> you get more accustomed to more complex ones and skip some in the
> middle. In light of that, your question about 3/2 can be interpreted
> as - do think that it's ever possible for someone to have 27/20 be
> "activated" to the extent that I wrote above, but not 3/2? Well, I'm
> not really comfortable ruling out that the brain can't ever end up
> being configured in such a state somehow literally no matter what, but
> I doubt that's something that any human being in a normal setting
> would likely experience, because something like 3/2 is audibly present
> in most harmonic timbres. And, these are things you're typically
> exposed to while still in the womb. So I would doubt that it's
> possible to hear 27/20 as "activated" but not 3/2.
>
> But the question of how much this kind of raw, sonic concordance ties
> directly over to something music without need for any additional
> training, perhaps of a more "logical" nature is not at all settled by
> talking about these sorts of things; there are lots of people with
> amusia for instance, who can hear periodic timbres just fine, but
> don't understand music at all and hear the whole thing as chaotic and
> ridiculous and "discordant." (There's someone on this board who has
> this awesome story about having amusia as a kid and then it going away
> as he got older, but I won't call him out on it unless he wants to
> volunteer.)
>
> > > > No one here has ever suggested that existing auditory faculties can't be enhanced with > > training.
> > >
> > > No one here has ever suggested that? Bullshit :)
> >
> > I'm just waiting for Carl to swoop in and insist that you've misconstrued him gravely. But maybe he won't? Well anyway, *I* think it's absurd to think that one can't learn to recognize the regularity of increasingly-complex beating patterns up to a certain threshold. If we can do it with rhythms (I had to learn how to play a 7-against-3 polyrhythm, but eventually I figured it out and it stopped sounding chaotic), why not intervals?
>
> I'm sure Carl agrees that "the auditory system in general" improves
> with training. I've never, ever, ever heard him say that one can learn
> to recognize higher-limit intervals, which would be local maxima of HE
> for some s but perhaps minima with a finer s, as being concordant.
> Never heard him say that, and if anything the entire body of
> interaction I've ever had with him has been completely in line with
> the opposite of this. If Carl wants to go on record as saying this
> I'll let him do that himself.
>
>
> ==Misc==
>
> > Yep. No problem. Hell, even I feel that way about 5-limit JI--"booooooring" (and therefore unpleasant in a way that has nothing to do with discordance or psychoacoustics).
>
> Yeah, but I mean literally intrusive though, like diminished-chord intrusive.
>
> > Well, the 12-TET version *is* some kind of essentially-tempered version, where all the dyads are 5-limit consonances. Perhaps that has some explanatory power, beyond just the "12-TET is familiar and therefore good" conjecture?
>
> Sure, but there's no real reason why someone should end up liking one
> over the other. Gene, I'm sure, likes 31-EDO C-E-G-A#-D-F^ more than
> he likes 31-EDO C-E-G-Bb-D-F#.
>
> > > I don't get it. I can represent 16/15 by just saying 16/15, but it's
> > > very difficult for me to pick out the periodicity buzz and all that in
> > > it unless I'm using the harshest timbres and am really focusing.
> >
> > So, what about 16/15 is being "represented", if you can't even pick out the interval itself? How do you represent something if you can't even recognzie the genuine article?
>
> Because there's more to 16/15 than its perception as a dyad. There are
> larger chords, for one. There's also the sense in which 16/15 is a 5/4
> above a 3/2, which is a 16/15 ratio placed away from the root, so it
> has meaning purely in a "logical sense" in terms of labeling where the
> current pitch is at relative to 1/1. There's definitely plenty of ways
> to talk about 16/15 that make sense other than its intonation, as long
> as we know what we're talking about.
>
> One question you might ask is if it's a good thing to conflate those
> uses. I think that's a good discussion to have, but this is long
> enough as is for now.
>
> -Mike
>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@...> wrote:
> The point of using something like field of interaction rather than field of attraction is to get > away from the grossly unmusical and (Godwin's Law adjective) idea that an interval is "heard > as" rather than "heard in relation to".

Fine then, "heard in relation to". I should never have brought the words "heard as" into this discussion.

> For example, part of the identity of the 12-tET M3 is that it is NOT "5:4". Its beating, its
> very non-5:4ness, is an essential part of its character and identity.

> Of course partials 4 and 5, and probably 9 and 7 and who knows how many others, play
> a part in the identity of any interval we broadly call a "major third". But a point of
> reference is not an identity. Purple is either red or blue, just because it lies right between
> those two primaries. It is purple as much because it is NOT red OR blue, but both and
> neither.

RIGHT...but you can still say a purple is more "reddish" than "bluish", and if it's more reddish, then you can still intelligibly answer the question of "what primary color predominates in identifying this shade of purple?" with *RED*. Or you can expand your sense of what constitutes a primary color, such that purple *becomes* a primary color. Get really good, and you can identify aubergine, violet, lilac, fuchsia, lavender and mauve. But no matter who you are, purple is never going to look like a shade of green (unless you're colorblind in some odd way). And there's going to be a limit to what you can learn to differentiate.

But this is an even worse metaphor than my language one, because we're in danger of conflating "perceptual categories" with "things that display certain effects". I really, really don't want to go there.

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@...> wrote:
> "81/64 basically sounds like 5/4 to me." is pretty much the opposite of "psychoacoustics". > One beats a lot, the other beats hardly if at all. So I'm still trying to figure out what
> Igliashon is saying.

To my ears, the nearest Just identity that the intervals from about 370 to 411 cents sound like they could be representing is 5/4. 81/64 is not a Just identity, because it's not beatless. 81/64 is 408 cents, so it's in the range of intervals I would describe as representing 5/4--***IF*** I was going to describe it in terms of JI. In the context of the regular mapping paradigm, we are *always* talking about some interval representing some other interval, which of course means that the interval doing the representing ***lacks*** some of the features of the interval that it is representing!

The fact that in 408 cents, the partials doing the most obvious interaction are partials 4 and 5, is what I'm talking about. So maybe you can interpret what I'm saying in those terms.

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@> wrote:
> > "81/64 basically sounds like 5/4 to me." is pretty much the opposite of "psychoacoustics". > One beats a lot, the other beats hardly if at all. So I'm still trying to figure out what
> > Igliashon is saying.
>
> To my ears, the nearest Just identity that the intervals from about 370 to 411 cents sound like they could be representing is 5/4. 81/64 is not a Just identity, because it's not beatless. 81/64 is 408 cents, so it's in the range of intervals I would describe as representing 5/4--***IF*** I was going to describe it in terms of JI. In the context of the regular mapping paradigm, we are *always* talking about some interval representing some other interval, which of course means that the interval doing the representing ***lacks*** some of the features of the interval that it is representing!
>
> The fact that in 408 cents, the partials doing the most obvious interaction are partials 4 and 5, is what I'm talking about. So maybe you can interpret what I'm saying in those terms.
>
> -Igs
>

The nearest "beatless" interval is 5:4, yes of course. I don't know about the partials most interacting to give us a reference point for 81:64. It's almost exactly in the middle of 5:4 and 9:7, there may be some way to perceive that. I don't doubt that being right there in zone of equal beating between 6:5 and 5:4 contributes to "placing" a middle third, for example. And in both cases there's a nearby reference coincidence (14:11 and 11:9, respectively). So all those things could be contributing to the "feel" and "possible identity" of an interval, not to mention obviously conditioned stuff like "third" or "mi" etc.

Claiming to hear it as the 81st partial is numerology- the remote possibility that this could be so lies so far beyond the empirical that the most open-minded take on that would be, who knows such things?

Say, here's something I'm sure we can agree on: there isn't any reasonable doubt what "microtemperaments" "represent", is there?

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@...> wrote:
> The nearest "beatless" interval is 5:4, yes of course.

Hooray!

> I don't know about the partials most interacting to give us a reference point for 81:64.
> It's almost exactly in the middle of 5:4 and 9:7, there may be some way to perceive that. > I don't doubt that being right there in zone of equal beating between 6:5 and 5:4
> contributes to "placing" a middle third, for example. And in both cases there's a nearby > reference coincidence (14:11 and 11:9, respectively). So all those things could be
> contributing to the "feel" and "possible identity" of an interval, not to mention obviously > conditioned stuff like "third" or "mi" etc.

I didn't say the partials most interacting, I said most *obviously* interacting. And of course that will be timbre, listener, and context-dependent. I can imagine a scenario where the interaction between the 11th and 14th partials is heard more strongly at 408 cents than those of the 4th and 5th partials--consider an 8:11:14 triad approximated by 0-560-968, with 408 cents representing the 14/11--but it's really hard to imagine hearing the interactions of the 22nd, 28th, and 33rd partials over those of the 4th, 5th, and 6th. So I doubt a Pythagorean major triad could reasonably be said to represent a 22:28:33 chord (1/1-14/11-3/2), since I can't imagine any discernible features of 22:28:33 that would enable it to be represented with less than 100% accuracy.

> Claiming to hear it as the 81st partial is numerology- the remote possibility that this
> could be so lies so far beyond the empirical that the most open-minded take on that
> would be, who knows such things?

I'm glad we agree.

> Say, here's something I'm sure we can agree on: there isn't any reasonable doubt what
> "microtemperaments" "represent", is there?

I should think not.

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> What I mean is that the phrase "in-tuneness" is something that already
> has a definition to most people, and one which refers to a subjective
> phenomenon.

Another definition of the phrase will suffer if we limit the possible meanings of "in-tune," however. For example, we can't say things like Miracle[N] is more in-tune than Meantone[N]. I suppose we could use the word "accurate," but in what sense would it be accurate?

In my opinion Miracle[N] is more accurate than Meantone[N] because its identities are more "in-tune."

> Lastly, I have to ask: what did you mean that you heard 11/8 as too
> sharp or too flat?

Does 11/8 not sound sharp of a fourth or flat of a tritone to you?

Ryan

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Ryan Avella" <domeofatonement@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@> wrote:

> > Lastly, I have to ask: what did you mean that you heard 11/8 as too
> > sharp or too flat?
>
> Does 11/8 not sound sharp of a fourth or flat of a tritone to you?

Don't know what Mike thinks, but 11/8 doesn't sound sharp or flat to me, it just "sounds". In isolation I think its "interval class" is "augmented fourth", but that's conditioning of course.

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Ryan Avella <domeofatonement@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> > What I mean is that the phrase "in-tuneness" is something that already
> > has a definition to most people, and one which refers to a subjective
> > phenomenon.
>
> Another definition of the phrase will suffer if we limit the possible meanings of "in-tune," however. For example, we can't say things like Miracle[N] is more in-tune than Meantone[N]. I suppose we could use the word "accurate," but in what sense would it be accurate?
>
> In my opinion Miracle[N] is more accurate than Meantone[N] because its identities are more "in-tune."

Nuh uh.

> > Lastly, I have to ask: what did you mean that you heard 11/8 as too
> > sharp or too flat?
>
> Does 11/8 not sound sharp of a fourth or flat of a tritone to you?

Sometimes to -me- it does, but I thought this was supposed to be
because I'm a trained musician with strong western categorical
perception. How about this question: how does it sound in the context
of 26-EDO, in meantone's C D E F# G A B C?

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@> wrote:
> > The nearest "beatless" interval is 5:4, yes of course.
>
> Hooray!

That's never been in doubt or mystery. 3:2 is really beatless and "Just", and close by, in the great scheme of things. So if you're tuning to beatlessness, you could tune 81:64 to 3:2.

> I didn't say the partials most interacting, I said most *obviously* interacting. And of course that will be timbre, listener, and context-dependent. I can imagine a scenario where the interaction between the 11th and 14th partials is heard more strongly at 408 cents than those of the 4th and 5th partials--consider an 8:11:14 triad approximated by 0-560-968, with 408 cents representing the 14/11--but it's really hard to imagine hearing the interactions of the 22nd, 28th, and 33rd partials over those of the 4th, 5th, and 6th. So I doubt a Pythagorean major triad could reasonably be said to represent a 22:28:33 chord (1/1-14/11-3/2), since I can't imagine any discernible features of 22:28:33 that would enable it to be represented with less than 100% accuracy.

Sure, but why should a Pythagrean ditone within a fifth need to be "representing" anything? Why can't it just be what it is? Even if we put a lot of weight on the harmonic series in perception (and I do put a lot of weight there), the ditone has a strong identity of its own, beating as it does right there in the middle of two simpler harmonic relationships.

I think a problem plaguing tuning theory arises from the fact that there is plenty of music from the meantone era that was indeed written with 5:4 in mind, and it is true that the 12-tET M3, which is a Pythagorean ditone, does indeed represent 5:4 when playing this particular music.

It does NOT follow from this that the Pythagorean ditone represents 5:4 in ALL instances, nor that there any inherent tendency in the ditone to "want" to be a 5:4, nor that every ditone "is really" a major third.

Now, if we listen to the interval formed by 388 cents with anything other than the most clinical synthetic tones, it is a different story.
Even in cases in which we can distinguish 388 cents from 5:4, why would we want to? There is no reason to make the distinction other than to acknowledge the most subtle shadings, if you're into that.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@...> wrote:
> That's never been in doubt or mystery. 3:2 is really beatless and "Just", and close by, in
> the great scheme of things. So if you're tuning to beatlessness, you could tune 81:64 to > 3:2.

And I can imagine a listener who would do just that, presuming they have only the crudest ability to detect beatlessness.

> Sure, but why should a Pythagrean ditone within a fifth need to be "representing"
> anything? Why can't it just be what it is? Even if we put a lot of weight on the harmonic
> series in perception (and I do put a lot of weight there), the ditone has a strong identity > of its own, beating as it does right there in the middle of two simpler harmonic
> relationships.

Well, if you're making the case that ditone has a "strong identity of its own", you're making a case for the 81-limit. If there's some kind of special effect that the ditone gives (what is it?) and that effect audibly diminishes from mistuning the ditone, then that's another argument entirely.

> I think a problem plaguing tuning theory arises from the fact that there is plenty of
> music from the meantone era that was indeed written with 5:4 in mind, and it is true that > the 12-tET M3, which is a Pythagorean ditone, does indeed represent 5:4 when playing > this particular music.
>
> It does NOT follow from this that the Pythagorean ditone represents 5:4 in ALL instances, > nor that there any inherent tendency in the ditone to "want" to be a 5:4, nor that every
> ditone "is really" a major third.

Look, representation isn't some arbitrary thing that a composer gets to decide. I can't just "decide" that I want 158.921 cents to represent a 3/2. People are going to hear what they hear, and decide what they decide. I don't think the ditone represents 5/4 to someone who doesn't know what a ditone or a 5/4 or is or what it means for something to beat or what JI is. To that person there is no ditone, there is no representation happening, there's just sound. The whole idea of temperament is completely nonsensical unless you have experienced and understood a certain set of things. A prerequisite is an ability to listen analytically and focus in on certain aspects of sound. That's a learned skill.

You can tell me that in your world-view, 81/64 is a special unique interval that you can sometimes hear as representing 5/4 and sometimes not. And I can't tell you your wrong. But I can tell you that I *always* hear 81/64 as representing 5/4, and that I can't think of any circumstance where it wouldn't sound more "in-tune" to me tuned that way. What I *can* think of are circumstances where I wouldn't *want* the music to sound "in-tune" to me, where I'd like the 5/4 "roughed up" a bit. But that's entirely different. If you think I'm conflating acoustics with aesthetics, you've gotten it totally wrong.

> Even in cases in which we can distinguish 388 cents from 5:4, why would we want to?
> There is no reason to make the distinction other than to acknowledge the most subtle
> shadings, if you're into that.

See, now it seems like *you're* the one making some absolute claims. What's this "why would we want to?" crap? Why can't I say "why would we want to distinguish 408 cents from 5/4?", and then just poo-poo whatever reasons you give because I disagree with them or find them irrelevant?

-Igs

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 12:25 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> Okay, since this has devolved into an argument over semantics and terminology, I'm going to concede to all of your objections and request that you furnish some non-value-loaded words for all the concepts I've articulated (which you find agreeable) so that we can actually proceed to talk about what I was actually trying to talk about.

So now we're arguing on XA again, and I never answered this. So I'll
answer it now.

Now on XA, after yet another round of me not being sure where the hell
you are on the Carl Lumma vs The Nihilists divide, and keeping in mind
that this entire discussion is in the context of a big background
discussion about fields of attraction and conditioning, it seems like
you're now talking about lowest-badness mapping searches like the one
Graham has on his temperament finder. But I'm not sure if you're
saying they're useful or what not, because you're back to talking
about finite "real temperaments" for some listener again. And with
regards to that, you said this:

"What I've been getting at the whole time, which you would have seen
had you not gotten hung up on semantic issues, is that the concept of
fields of attraction implies a finitude of possible
temperament-interpretations of any given tuning. Given any listener's
experience of fields of attraction, any tuning will be (and perhaps
must be) interpreted according to those fields of attraction. Not
necessarily for dyads, not necessarily independent of context.
But--and here's the important part--any temperament which maps
intervals across *that listener's* fields of attraction or otherwise
supplies a "confusing" mapping, which cannot be disambiguated by some
context, *does not exist for that listener*."

And now we're back where we started. What the frig does "does not
exist for that listener" mean? Why can't the listener just raise or
lower his value of s and then it'll now "exist?" If Keenan has is "I
love microtemperaments" hat on and thinks 750 cents in 8-EDO makes no
sense as 3/2, why can't he just put his "I love slendro" hat on and
then it will make sense for him that way? It may not be the best
slendro, but it's not going to be like 750 cents makes no sense as 3/2
anymore.

I assume you're going to be like, "but Mike, if he puts his slendro
hat on, how do you know the s in HE is changing? How do you know that
it's not his categorical perception changing?" And all I can say is
that there is no "HE s" to change. It's a fictional parameter to get a
curve to correlate best with some aspect of someone's perception. And
in real life, although we like to talk about these different
perceptual aspects as being totally separate things, I see it more
like there's no defined spot where one "ends" and another "begins,"
with all of these parts influencing one another and changing and so
on.

The point is that the whole thing is very mysterious to me, and I
don't know how it works. And, for me to actually believe that someone
CAN'T get their value of "s" to a certain point, no matter how
"likely" it seems IN A BRAND NEW FIELD WITH NO LITERATURE, I'd have to
make some very subtle assumptions about how extremely mysterious,
complex perceptual processes work that I don't want to make. And,
then, I'd have to convince myself that it's more "scientific" to make
those assumptions because there's no evidence to the contrary - IN A
FIELD THAT HAS NO LITERATURE AT ALL. So no, I'm not willing to do
that, and anything that you want to talk about involving me making
subtle assumptions is something I will disagree with.

What I'd like is to remove all this philosophy from the discussion,
and to remove the epistemiology from it. So there's no real specific
terminology I want you to use other than that. If you doubt that
something is practically possible, just say it; don't say it's
"impossible" or "not real" or something. If you think something sounds
better tuned a certain way, then just say that, not that the other way
is "heard as" this. If you think that x has more of a psychoacoustic
phenomenon than y, and that's really all you want to say, then just
say that and leave it at that! There's to need to bring these loaded,
divisive, epistemiological terms into it. If epistemiology is really
not what you want to talk about, then I don't see what's being lost by
leaving it out of the discussion.

I mean, in what sense is any mathematical object "real?" It's a
totally abstract mathematical object. What it seems like you're trying
to do is assert the "most scientific way" to use it or something, but
I totally disagree with your methods if that's what you're doing.

-Mike

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 3:17 AM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> What I'd like is to remove all this philosophy from the discussion,
> and to remove the epistemiology from it. So there's no real specific
> terminology I want you to use other than that. If you doubt that
> something is practically possible, just say it; don't say it's
> "impossible" or "not real" or something. If you think something sounds
> better tuned a certain way, then just say that, not that the other way
> is "heard as" this. If you think that x has more of a psychoacoustic
> phenomenon than y, and that's really all you want to say, then just
> say that and leave it at that! There's to need to bring these loaded,
> divisive, epistemiological terms into it. If epistemiology is really
> not what you want to talk about, then I don't see what's being lost by
> leaving it out of the discussion.

Well, now you're telling me to erase everything and start over. OK,
I'll do that. If you want to know what terminology will "make me
happy," I don't really care what words you call things, just please be
precise in saying exactly what you want to say and nothing more.
That's all I demand.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@> wrote:
> > That's never been in doubt or mystery. 3:2 is really beatless and "Just", and close by, in
> > the great scheme of things. So if you're tuning to beatlessness, you could tune 81:64 to > 3:2.
>
> And I can imagine a listener who would do just that, presuming they have only the crudest ability to detect beatlessness.

And if you understand "field of attraction" in a Partchian rather than Lumman sense, this is what "naturally happens" on a compositional level. This is a reasonable scenario, as a compositional approach. Unfortunatley both understandings are easily twisted to the 19th Century practice of proving that tonal Western music is the most bestest.

>
>
> > Sure, but why should a Pythagrean ditone within a fifth need to be "representing"
> > anything? Why can't it just be what it is? Even if we put a lot of weight on the harmonic
> > series in perception (and I do put a lot of weight there), the ditone has a strong identity > of its own, beating as it does right there in the middle of two simpler harmonic
> > relationships.
>
> Well, if you're making the case that ditone has a "strong identity of its own", you're making a case for the 81-limit.

That's tuning-list jive. Try "3-limit".

>If there's some kind of special effect that the ditone gives (what >is it?) and that effect audibly diminishes from mistuning the >ditone, then that's another argument entirely.

Try thinking "real life" instead of "tuning list". I already described a "special effect" of the ditone that does not suffer detuning. Stack some pure fifths. That's the sine qua non, the raison d'etre, the main ingredient, of "81/64" in the first place.

>
> You can tell me that in your world-view, 81/64 is a special unique >interval that you can sometimes hear as representing 5/4 and >sometimes not. And I can't tell you your wrong. But I can tell you >that I *always* hear 81/64 as representing 5/4, and that I can't >think of any circumstance where it wouldn't sound more "in-tune" to >me tuned that way.

5/4 sounds flat as hell in a structure of pure fifths.

Don't you see that you are begging the question by equating the ditone with the major third of western harmonic music in the first place? Sure if you lump the ditone in with that major third, the most beatless major third is 5:4. And that's as far as it goes on anything like a general or "objective" level.

>What I *can* think of are circumstances where I wouldn't *want* the >music to sound "in-tune" to me, where I'd like the 5/4 "roughed up" >a bit. But that's entirely different. If you think I'm conflating >acoustics with aesthetics, you've gotten it totally wrong.

And in a Just quintal structure a 5:4 sounds like, and is, the byproduct of a grievously flat fifth.

>
> > Even in cases in which we can distinguish 388 cents from 5:4, why would we want to?
> > There is no reason to make the distinction other than to acknowledge the most subtle
> > shadings, if you're into that.
>
> See, now it seems like *you're* the one making some absolute claims. What's this "why would we want to?" crap? Why can't I say "why would we want to distinguish 408 cents from 5/4?", and then just poo-poo whatever reasons you give because I disagree with them or find them irrelevant?

Because in any but the most clinical synthetic settings- which I deliberately and specifically mentioned in order to obviate such sophistries as the one you now present- the pitch fluctuation of intervals within 2 cents of simple harmonic intervals makes it unlikely that those intervals are reliably distinguishable from "pure" in the first place.

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 6:12 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
> >
> > Well, if you're making the case that ditone has a "strong identity of its own", you're making a case for the 81-limit.
>
> That's tuning-list jive. Try "3-limit".
//snip
> Try thinking "real life" instead of "tuning list". I already described a "special effect" of the ditone that does not suffer detuning. Stack some pure fifths. That's the sine qua non, the raison d'etre, the main ingredient, of "81/64" in the first place.

I should note that what you're doing here is equating 81/64 with
something like 9/8 * 9/8, or more generally 81/1 with something like
3/1 * 3/1 * 3/1 * 3/1. I was waiting for this to come up in your
conversation with Igs because I think it's behind a lot of the
discussion that we're having now. I'd might make the argument that
this isn't at all some kind of fixed, immutable law of perception,
giving any special power to 81/64 because of its prime factorization.
For example, you often talk about how the meantone 5/4 gains an
additional perceptual component because it ends up being placed on the
spiral of 3/2's. One might instead apply this same argument to 408
cents, which only gains its mojo above from your own, learned
association with 81/64 and the spiral of 3/2's (or 9/8's). This is
quite different from an interval like 3/2, which actually has
identifiable psychoacoustic phenomena associated with it.

In fact, 81/64 in the first sense and 81/64 in the second sense are
rather different: one is supposed to refer to this mini-field of
interaction that probably doesn't perceptually exist at all for most
people, whereas the second refers to a learned, perhaps "tonal" sense
of how this interval breaks down =logically= into a stack of smaller
intervals, within simpler fields of interaction like 3/2 or 9/8 or
whatever. These two things don't seem to have anything to do with one
another at all.

9/8 is an even more important case than 81/64. And with 9/8, as with
81/64, one may be able to make different associations. As an example,
consider 30-EDO. 30-EDO has a good approximation to 9/8, which happens
not to be the same thing as a stack of two of its best approximations
to 3/2. 16-EDO, 21-EDO, 28-EDO, etc all have this same property as
well; they're "inconsistent" in the 9-limit and as such have two
mappings for 9. In cases like these, you end up with two 9/4's - the
"prime" one, which is now just its own interval, concordant in its own
way, between something like 7/4 and 11/4 - and the "composite" one,
which is made up of two 3/2's. The former is useful in chords like
8:9:10:11, whereas the latter is useful in chords like 8:10:12:15:18.
I think it's a neat feature for a tuning to have and in some sense can
change the sound of 9/8 in a slightly "colder" way once you
internalize it.

Igs just brought up this same thing in a post to me, this time dealing
with 16/15. 16/15 itself is pretty far gone compared to 9/8; in
isolation I don't find it to have too much psychoacoustically
concordant activity going on. In the sensation of larger chords,
perhaps. But what it does have for me is lots of logical, "tonal"
merit as being a 5/4 below a 3/2, or a "perfect fifth" below a "major
third" or perhaps both.

The thing is that in JI, and in the theory we're all using, and in the
thing you just said, 16/15 is both at once. It's not just taken as
this mini psychoacoustic "field of interaction" or whatever, but also
taken to be this compound interval, reachable as a point in a lattice
of prime basis vectors. It is -assumed- that 16/15, in fact, as a
mini-field of interaction, will be reachable by the interval in the
field for 3/2 plus the interval in the field for 5/4. The same applies
to 9/8.

Is there a difference between these two uses of the terms "16/15,"
"9/8," or "81/64" - the "intonational sense" and the "tonal,
composite, modulatory sense?" Definitely. So is it right to equate the
two?

I have a fairly strong opinion on this but I'm curious what you have
to say first. (And Igs too, if he's reading my writing anymore :)

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 6:12 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
> >
> > --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@> wrote:
> > >
> > > Well, if you're making the case that ditone has a "strong identity of its own", you're making a case for the 81-limit.
> >
> > That's tuning-list jive. Try "3-limit".
> //snip
> > Try thinking "real life" instead of "tuning list". I already described a "special effect" of the ditone that does not suffer detuning. Stack some pure fifths. That's the sine qua non, the raison d'etre, the main ingredient, of "81/64" in the first place.
>
> I should note that what you're doing here is equating 81/64 with
> something like 9/8 * 9/8,

that's why it's called a ditone...

or more generally 81/1 with something like
> 3/1 * 3/1 * 3/1 * 3/1.

...and that is how it has been derived for literally thousands of years. That's its origin and distinct identity.

I was waiting for this to come up in your
> conversation with Igs because I think it's behind a lot of the
> discussion that we're having now. I'd might make the argument that
> this isn't at all some kind of fixed, immutable law of perception,
> giving any special power to 81/64 because of its prime factorization.
> For example, you often talk about how the meantone 5/4 gains an
> additional perceptual component because it ends up being placed on the
> spiral of 3/2's. One might instead apply this same argument to 408
> cents, which only gains its mojo above from your own, learned
> association with 81/64 and the spiral of 3/2's (or 9/8's). This is
> quite different from an interval like 3/2, which actually has
> identifiable psychoacoustic phenomena associated with it.

There are only a handful of intervals that have anything like an "absolute" identity in abstract contexts. I think that's QED. I would think that we use these intervals as general reference points, but the concept that intervals that are other than these few are "heard as" these intervals just doesn't make sense.

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 7:57 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
>
> or more generally 81/1 with something like
> > 3/1 * 3/1 * 3/1 * 3/1.
>
> ...and that is how it has been derived for literally thousands of years. That's its origin and distinct identity.

I don't know how to evaluate this. I don't think I'd call that its
"distinct identity" any more than I'd call its distinct identity a
"slightly sharp major third," which is what it sounded like in 53-EDO
a second ago.

> There are only a handful of intervals that have anything like an "absolute" identity in abstract contexts. I think that's QED. I would think that we use these intervals as general reference points, but the concept that intervals that are other than these few are "heard as" these intervals just doesn't make sense.

I don't get what on earth you mean by "identity" here, since I thought
you just finished chastising Igs about using this term in the exact
same way. I just don't think there are "identities" in that sense, nor
that intervals are really "heard as" any other interval in anything
other than a categorical sense. I can obviously say "this sounds like
a messed up 5/4," but I'm also aware that in this particular sense
we're talking about I'm just picking noteworthy labels along a
continuous perceptual parameter. Other than that, I hear a smooth
continuum of psychoacoustic effects come in and out as an interval
increases in width, and that's it.

That's it, I don't know why it ever has to be any more than that. I
don't even think "we" use them as reference points for anything,
except for people who deliberately use them as reference points for
things. I didn't even know that 5/4 existed until a few years ago.

As for 81/64 - if you think that 81/64 is a crappy example, think
about my example for 9/8 or 16/15 instead. I think there's a distinct
musical phenomenon that happens when you have something that you
"know" is "two fifths" or "two 3/2's" in a logical sense or whatever,
and that that's not necessarily the same phenomenon that happens when
you hear the harmonics of a dyad beating against one another in a 9
against 8 polyrhythm or whatever. That's all. I think it's interesting
that that's even a point. To me it's rather magical that stacking
intervals to form some sort of tonal or harmonic map can provide a
strong enough perceptual effect for it to "be a point."

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 7:57 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
> >
> > or more generally 81/1 with something like
> > > 3/1 * 3/1 * 3/1 * 3/1.
> >
> > ...and that is how it has been derived for literally thousands of years. That's its origin and distinct identity.
>
> I don't know how to evaluate this. I don't think I'd call that its
> "distinct identity" any more than I'd call its distinct identity a
> "slightly sharp major third," which is what it sounded like in 53-EDO
> a second ago.

The identity of the 81:64 is found in the context of its "native environment". It is distinct- you'll hear if you deviate from pure 3:2's in an environment of successive pure 3:2's.

>
> > There are only a handful of intervals that have anything like an "absolute" identity in abstract contexts. I think that's QED. I would think that we use these intervals as general reference points, but the concept that intervals that are other than these few are "heard as" these intervals just doesn't make sense.
>
> I don't get what on earth you mean by "identity" here, since I thought
> you just finished chastising Igs about using this term in the exact
> same way. I just don't think there are "identities" in that sense, nor
> that intervals are really "heard as" any other interval in anything
> other than a categorical sense.

You don't think an octave is recognizable as "octave, 2:1, "identity" etc." as a lone dyad, outside of a musical environment?

>I can obviously say "this sounds like
> a messed up 5/4," but I'm also aware that in this particular sense
> we're talking about I'm just picking noteworthy labels along a
> continuous perceptual parameter. Other than that, I hear a smooth
> continuum of psychoacoustic effects come in and out as an interval
> increases in width, and that's it.
>
> That's it, I don't know why it ever has to be any more than that. I
> don't even think "we" use them as reference points for anything,
> except for people who deliberately use them as reference points for
> things. I didn't even know that 5/4 existed until a few years ago.

I was talking about relationships between harmonic partials. You claim that unconsciously or no, we don't incorporate beating into our perceptions of intervals?

>
> As for 81/64 - if you think that 81/64 is a crappy example, think
> about my example for 9/8 or 16/15 instead. I think there's a distinct
> musical phenomenon that happens when you have something that you
> "know" is "two fifths" or "two 3/2's" in a logical sense or whatever,
> and that that's not necessarily the same phenomenon that happens when
> you hear the harmonics of a dyad beating against one another in a 9
> against 8 polyrhythm or whatever. That's all. I think it's interesting
> that that's even a point. To me it's rather magical that stacking
> intervals to form some sort of tonal or harmonic map can provide a
> strong enough perceptual effect for it to "be a point."

I don't see how you can say this and still miss my points.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@...> wrote:

> And in a Just quintal structure a 5:4 sounds like, and is, the byproduct of a grievously flat fifth.

Really? Why isn't it just a diminished fourth?

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "genewardsmith" <genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "lobawad" <lobawad@> wrote:
>
> > And in a Just quintal structure a 5:4 sounds like, and is, the byproduct of a grievously flat fifth.
>
> Really? Why isn't it just a diminished fourth?
>

hahaha! as I brought up the "syntonic 5:4" of the Pythagorean diminished fourth just a week or two ago, and specifically (deliberately) referred to "open strings" and ancient usages earlier in this particular conversation, I didn't think it necessary to explain what I meant by "Just quintal structure".

Let my tune my lyre of 7 strings to consecutive pure fifths. You show me the diminished fourth.

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:48 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
>
>
> The identity of the 81:64 is found in the context of its "native environment". It is distinct- you'll hear if you deviate from pure 3:2's in an environment of successive pure 3:2's.

Now you're the one using value-loaded words I don't get. What do you
mean "the identity of the 81:64 is found?" Do you mean, "one way to
get 81/64 to have a musical effect that depends on it being tuned as
81/64 is to connect it to the tonic by 3/2's?"

> > I don't get what on earth you mean by "identity" here, since I thought
> > you just finished chastising Igs about using this term in the exact
> > same way. I just don't think there are "identities" in that sense, nor
> > that intervals are really "heard as" any other interval in anything
> > other than a categorical sense.
>
> You don't think an octave is recognizable as "octave, 2:1, "identity" etc." as a lone dyad, outside of a musical environment?

Well, first off, you said "octave," which is a level beyond what the
psychoacoustic phenomena we're talking about here, because of things
like octave equivalence, which for me exists on steroids because the
"pitch chromas" for AP repeat every octave. But let's roll with that
anyway.

So what exactly are you asking - if an octave is recognizable as an
octave outside of a musical environment? So if like, we're walking on
the street or something, and the random sound of an octave occurs?
Then my answer is, I don't know what you mean by "is recognizable"
really - recognizable by who? That sort of random occurrence probably
happens thousands of times in a single day but I never notice it. My
jazz musician friends and I at one point made a game out of
recognizing musical intervals in ordinary sounds - they're obviously
all around us but it's not like something that you just recognize
because of the workings of the brain or whatever. In fact, it's quite
difficult to snap your brain into that frame of reference at first.

You can make the argument that the brain DOES recognize octaves,
because they're in the timbres we hear, so the brain in fact does
automatically "recognize" them on an unconscious level because it
fuses them. Yeah, OK, but I'm not sure that extrapolates directly over
to "recognizing interval identities," key word RECOGNIZING, in music.
Timbral fusion has to do with the presence of an entire harmonic
series, not just dyads.

So you don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that 5/4 has no -effect- in
music - it obviously does - but we keep talking about "recognition"
for some reason. The sense in which my brain "recognizes" a harmonic
series in a timbre is not the same sense in which I cognitively
recognize an interval and say "that's 5/4!"

> > That's it, I don't know why it ever has to be any more than that. I
> > don't even think "we" use them as reference points for anything,
> > except for people who deliberately use them as reference points for
> > things. I didn't even know that 5/4 existed until a few years ago.
>
> I was talking about relationships between harmonic partials. You claim that unconsciously or no, we don't incorporate beating into our perceptions of intervals?

What do you mean "incorporate into"...? I think that we -perceive-
beating and beatlessness and periodicity buzz and all of that, and
that we can remember intervals exhibiting the latter effects as
noteworthy. But no, I don't think that I'm like "oh, this 520 cent
interval 'is concordant' because it's in the 'field of attraction of'
4/3." That would be like saying "oh, this chaotically beating interval
is not chaotically beating because if I flatten it by 20 cents, it
wouldn't beat." The only sense in which something like this is true,
for me, is a categorical one.

It seems like your question is whether or not "we," as human beings,
tend to build interval identities around minima like that. And I think
the answer is that the people in this community sure do, in a sense
that could reasonably be called an identity. And musicians playing
adaptive pitch instruments very well may, which has been brought up
before, but that it's not at all clear to me in what sense this sort
of thing jumps over into anything like an "identity." Seems more like
the identities are the categories they're used to, and they've learned
to play them a bit flat or sharp or whatever in different situations
to get a certain effect on the sound, which they have no problem
destroying liberally by playing vibrato and such any time they want.

-Mike