Re: Tunings, keyboard mappings (Joseph Pehrson and Paul Erlich)

Hello, there, Paul Erlich and Joseph Pehrson.

Please let me offer my response to your dialogue that the
author-reader relationship is often an unpredictable one, and that
"misunderstandings" (or possibly unexpected but engaging new
interpretations) are a normal part of this process.

There's a saying that all nontrivial programs have bugs, and I would
say that nontrivial presentations such as yours on 22-tet, Paul, may
invite many reader responses. You bring in historical tuning limits,
the nature of modality and tonality, a 22-tet tuning and subsets of it
new to many people, and what I find rather playful "remappings" (not
necessarily to a specific keyboard layout) of interval names such as
"perfect seventh" for something about as wide of 3:2 as a 19-tet fifth
is narrow of this just ratio.

Trying to understand such a tuning in terms of keyboard mappings,
Joseph, is what I consider one natural and concrete approach. Of
course, I agree with Paul that such a mapping is only one lens through
which to view a tuning, so to speak -- but it's a starting point.

As far as the topicality on this Alternate Tuning List of discussions
about subsets of tunings, specifically equal divisions of the octave
(n-tone equal temperaments or n-tet's for short), mapped to keyboards,
I would say that it is very topical.

For example, mapping a given six tones of 12-tet to a keyboard octave
is a starting point where I would consider a natural response on this
Tuning List to be: "Yes, 12-tet is one possible equal division with
lots of six-note possibilities in itself, but why don't we make this
experiment even more fascinating by also trying corresponding six-note
(or n-note) subsets of 11-tet, or 17-tet, or 19-tet, or 24-tet, or
31-tet, or 53-tet -- or, of course, 22-tet?"

As for reader difficulties in comprehending intricate theoretical
statements, by authors including myself, I would consider it routine,
a flaw neither of the author or the reader, but a natural part of the
imperfect but engaging process of communication.

Most respectfully,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net