Re: [tuning] re: Tuning-related Science Fair Question

I suppose I didn't make myself clear enough, but my teacher makes a big deal
out of it being an investigation instead of a demonstration; in other words,
you shouldn't know what's going to happen beforehand. She said that the
classic "Look, I made a volcano, see!" would fail but "I determined that the
most effecient proportion of baking soda to vinegar in my volcano was..."
would be acceptable. The questions should also be of the form "What is the
effect of A on B?" and not "Does B happen?" or "Which A is best?". What I
really want is an important, open, groundbreaking question of the proper
form, but if I can't find one I'll just use the obvious, "What is the effect
of the complexity of ratios on the subjective in-tune-ness of the intervals
they produce?", and make some poor souls listen to my synth blat and
interrogate them on which of two noises that sound exactly the same to them
sounds better. But I'm being cynical.

Keep the suggestions coming,
Keenan P.

Keenan Pepper wrote:
>
> I suppose I didn't make myself clear enough, but my teacher makes a big deal
> out of it being an investigation instead of a demonstration; in other words,
> you shouldn't know what's going to happen beforehand. She said that the
> classic "Look, I made a volcano, see!" would fail but "I determined that the
> most effecient proportion of baking soda to vinegar in my volcano was..."
> would be acceptable. The questions should also be of the form "What is the
> effect of A on B?" and not "Does B happen?" or "Which A is best?". What I
> really want is an important, open, groundbreaking question of the proper
> form, but if I can't find one I'll just use the obvious, "What is the effect
> of the complexity of ratios on the subjective in-tune-ness of the intervals
> they produce?", and make some poor souls listen to my synth blat and
> interrogate them on which of two noises that sound exactly the same to them
> sounds better. But I'm being cynical.

Explain why 12 tone evil temperament is out of tune.
Show how a 5 limit is so much more in tune. Show how
you "determined" that traveling up the harmonic series
is too far out for de common folk by using harmonics like
11, 13, 29, 31, 61, or 63. Compare them to 12 tone evil
temperament and the purrdy 5 limit JI.

Whadda ya think?

--
* D a v i d B e a r d s l e y
* 49/32 R a d i o "all microtonal, all the time"
* http://www.virtulink.com/immp/lookhere.htm

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keenan Pepper [mailto:mtpepper@prodigy.net]
> Sent: Sunday, August 20, 2000 3:18 PM
> To: tuning@egroups.com
> Subject: Re: [tuning] re: Tuning-related Science Fair Question
? What I
> really want is an important, open, groundbreaking question of the proper
> form, but if I can't find one I'll just use the obvious, "What is
> the effect
> of the complexity of ratios on the subjective in-tune-ness of the
> intervals
> they produce?",

The generic "open, groundbreaking question" regarding tunings, IMHO, is
really "How can a composer make beautiful music?" That is, of course, an
*art* project, not a *science* project. So we look for the science behind
the art, and that would be, again IMHO, psychoacoustics. A good place to
start reading would be William Sethares' "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale"
for the underlying mathematics of consonance and dissonance. You will find
that the conventional wisdom about "complexity of ratios" and "subjective
in-tune-ness" applies only to instruments which generate tones with harmonic
partials. Just intonation is the set of intervals which sound good when
played on these instruments.

> and make some poor souls listen to my synth blat and
> interrogate them on which of two noises that sound exactly the
> same to them
> sounds better.
> But I'm being cynical.

No, you're learning what it means to be a psychoacoustician :-). Helmholtz
did exactly that, except he used vibrating strings, tuning forks, organ
pipes, reeds and other physical means of producing sound ... and look what
he found! A more modern experiment might be to get your hands on a polygraph
(check your local police station :-), hook it up to a listener and play
music in various xentonal "harmonies" like Sethares has written, and compare
the traces with those produced when the subject hears more conventional
music.

Ed Borasky wrote,

>A good place to
>start reading would be William Sethares' "Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale"
>for the underlying mathematics of consonance and dissonance. You will find
>that the conventional wisdom about "complexity of ratios" and "subjective
>in-tune-ness" applies only to instruments which generate tones with
harmonic
>partials. Just intonation is the set of intervals which sound good when
>played on these instruments.

Many JI composers (including several on this list) do not use these
instruments. Are they using the wrong intervals? Not necessarily. Sethares
fails to consider other psychoacoustic phenomena which favor JI chords even
with inharmonic timbres (e.g., combination tones and harmonic entropy), and
ones which favor harmonic timbres even with non-JI chords (e.g., the
perception of harmonic series as single "timbres" while partial structure
that deviate greatly from harmonicity are heard instead as "chords").
However, Sethares' work is not invalid, particularly in cases of electronic
timbres where the deviations from harmonicity are slight but large enough to
audibly change the intervals of minimum roughness . . .