Re: TD 719 -- Thanks to Paul Erlich (correction on pelog)

Hello, there, Paul Erlich, and thank you for a very important
correction in Tuning Digest 719:

> Perhaps you meant to say a Thai-like flavor, since Thai music uses
> 7-tET, while pelog scales, if forced into a
> chain-of-fifths-within-a-small-ET framework, would suggest 9-tET,
> 16-tET, or 23-tET, with their "whole tones" _smaller_ than their
> "diatonic semitones".

That's what I _should_ have meant to say, at any rate, and I must
confess an ignorance at the time not quite permitting me such a
coherent intention.

Unfortunately, what I did more or less was simply to recall that
slendro has five notes and pelog seven, and to apply from there the
mistaken association that since slendro is typically rather close to
5-tet, pelog would be close to 7-tet. Oops!

This easy and incorrect association may reflect my unfamiliarity both
with the intonational structure of pelog -- which I've heard and
liked -- and with the theory of tunings where diatonic semitones can
be larger than whole-tones, so to speak.

Pelog I recall as a kind of 5-note mode (typically from a 7-note
tuning or gamut, as I now understand) suggesting to me as an
ethnocentric first impression something like a "Phrygian variation of
pentatonic," e.g. E-F-G-B-C-E. Looking at a few pelog scales in Scala
has educated me a bit on this, thanks to your helpful correction.

Maybe you could enlarge a bit on the different n-tet approximations.
From a psychological point of view, might this be an instance where a
tuning maybe not actually within Blackwood's criteria of "diatonic
recognizability" can nevertheless give a listener coming from a
certain cultural bias the impression of something recognizing a
diatonic European mode like Phrygian, where both whole-tones and
diatonic semitones are present?

Even with my crude understanding of pelog, of course, I should have
figured out that 7-tet wouldn't have enough sizes of intervals to
represent it.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net