Re: [tuning] Re: question on equal temperaments

Joe Monzo wrote,

My only contention is with your little analogy here... That 'bolt a
400-horsepower engine to a barn door, that's how you fly' bit bothers
me a bit, because since a very young age the Wright Brothers have been
heroes to me, and while I understand the point this author (who is it
?) is making, that quote denigrates the Wrights's achievement a great
deal.

Darn, you would have to go and ask who's quote that is wouldn't you?;
'cause I forget! (It's one of those things I read and said, "yeah,
I've got to write that down..." I'll rack my brain and see if I can't
dig the whole bit up later.) However, I'm quite sure that denigrating
the Wrights's achievement wasn't the intention (his or mine!). The
quip was originally made in the context of AI (at its inception),
regarding the potential folly of a paradigm that gets too excited
about a speaking, artificial chess whiz... where 'bolting a
400-horsepower engine to a barn door' represents a (decidedly
favorable) contrast to say, 'tying wings to your arms and flapping off
the edge of a cliff' (like the birds do...).

Dan

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "D.Stearns" <STEARNS@C...> wrote:
>
> Darn, you would have to go and ask who's quote that is wouldn't
> you?; 'cause I forget! (It's one of those things I read and
> said, "yeah, I've got to write that down..." I'll rack my brain
> and see if I can't dig the whole bit up later.)

Ah, don't worry about it. Just thought I'd ask, since it pissed
me off a bit. Actually, I got a chuckle out of it too, at first...

> However, I'm quite sure that denigrating the Wrights's achievement
> wasn't the intention (his or mine!).

Right - I knew that, as I made clear. But still, intentional
or not, its humorous value didn't impress his point on *me* as
strongly as he wished it to, because of my admiration for what
the Wrights accomplished.

Plus, after I thought about, the parallel with Partch seemed
really interesting... I guess that however disparate their
lives were, the people one admires would naturally have a lot
in common.

> The quip was originally made in the context of AI (at its
> inception), regarding the potential folly of a paradigm that
> gets too excited about a speaking, artificial chess whiz...
> where 'bolting a 400-horsepower engine to a barn door' represents
> a (decidedly favorable) contrast to say, 'tying wings to your arms
> and flapping off the edge of a cliff' (like the birds do...).

Yes, well, the 'existing body of theory' regarding flight, to
which I referred, was mainly of the latter type... and it wasn't
very successful (... a real understatement).

-monz
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html

Paul!
As you know I do not accept that the Thai use 7 ET who like the Burmese and the Chopi
might say this is what they do. Measurements show substantial difference is a larger way that
western deviation from 12 ET. BTW I have a Chopi tuning sent to me by Andrew Tracy at
http://www.anaphoria.com/depos.html

Paul Erlich wrote:

> But to me, the transposability and uniformity of
> ETs are a very valuable feature, valuable enough
> to have led to the adoption of two of them by
> Western civilization and Thai civilization,
> respectively.

-- Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria island
www.anaphoria.com

--- In tuning@egroups.com, Kraig Grady <
kraiggrady@a...> wrote:
> Paul!
> As you know I do not accept that the Thai use 7 ET who like the
Burmese and the Chopi
> might say this is what they do. Measurements show substantial
difference is a larger way that
> western deviation from 12 ET. BTW I have a Chopi tuning sent to me
by Andrew Tracy at
> http://www.anaphoria.com/depos.html

At the very least, the Thai system is a 7-tone "well-
temperament" -- they modulate their pentatonic
melodies around the circle of fifths, and conceive
of these as exact transpositions. As to the accuracy,
imagine having to tune 12-tET by playing
_melodies only_ and trying to make the diatonic
scale sound the same in all keys. This is akin to
how Thai musicians must tune their instruments --
they have no equivalents to the modern piano
tuner's "third tests", no fifths within 2 cents of just,
etc. -- it's a much more judgmental proposition.

Paul Erlich wrote,

> As to the accuracy, imagine having to tune 12-tET by playing
_melodies only_ and trying to make the diatonic scale sound the same
in all keys.

Hey, I've tried exactly this same approach with some equal tunings
just to try and get "something else" out of them. And in fact, a bunch
of my newer pieces are using some tunings (i.e., 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and
11 note scales, many of which don't resolve at the octave) that were
derived by ear on the fretless guitar and then taken to the keyboard,
tuning tables, (etc.), and the results, to my ears anyway, have been
very "fresh." I'm really excited by this process so far -- boatloads
of spectacularly odd and inveigling "incidental harmonies"!

Dan

Joe Monzo wrote,

> Stearns has invented a very simple modification of 72-tET notation
into 144-tET,

Hey Joe, thanks for the kind words and stuff... I just wanted to add
that my initial hope for the 144-tET notation was a pretty simple (and
for me) practical one. At that time I still had some dim and wayward
wisp of a hope that some of my pieces might someday be performed by
someone other than myself, and I saw this as the best bet, notation
wise anyway, for free pitch instruments to legitimately approximate
the various composites of tuning systems that I was using. My
reasoning was that those who could already tackle the 72-tET
notation -- which I had learned from Joe Maneri, or more accurately
from Joe's book which he had kindly given to me -- could then approach
the modified glyphs much as most performers tend to approach the
various varieties of quartertone notations: as a note approximately
halfway between one (familiar) note and another. Needless to say none
of this ever happened, but I went ahead with the notational conversion
of a lot of scores anyway as I was on a roll (to nowhere of course).

Dan