reply to Bill Alves

>With all respect to Sethares' work, I must say that I view with
skepticism
>the claim that tuning systems (or consonance/dissonance for that
matter)
>must be tied to timbre.

Once again, I believe that Setheres _does_ account for _some_ of what
falls under "consonance/dissonance". Many have been struck by these
effects; Herman Miller just posted to the effect that

>On the other hand, I've also tried retuning instrument samples using
the
>methods described in Sethares' book. Timbres specifically tweaked for
>15-tet do sound better in 15-tet than harmonic timbres, and they sound
bad
>in combination with harmonic timbres in the same tuning. One of my
recent
>experiments (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/music/yeequitch-keesha.ra) uses
>these new 15-tet timbres.

Meanwhile, there is an extent to which Sethares fails to account for
consonance and dissonance; this has to do with our periodicity detection
mechanisms, and would cause us to judge a set of metallophones tuned
with their fundamentals forming a "harmonic series" consonant, and in
general explains why we prefer otonalities to utonalities -- a fact
Sethares's theories can't explain.

Bill, have you used 7-limit or higher utonalities? With harmonic
timbres, inharmonic ones, or both? What do you think of them?