nessie

[Monzo]
>Perhaps this only works when there is a numerary nexus among the tones
being >compared?

It certainly works best that way.

[Monzo]
>As far as objective characterization, well, I'm not so sure what
>"flourescent lightingness" or "tropicalness" sound like...

One thing I always come back to with just intonation is its power to tickle
my ear. As a kid, I would always stop to listen keenly when I heard a
choir, especially a barbershop one. I remember asking why they sounded
different. When I first started listening to YES, I thought the vocals
were really something to hear (I must have been factoring out Steve Howe :)

When I first heard 11-limit hexads (on an Ivor/Genovese slide guitar), I
was blown away by the subtlety and power of the sensations I was getting.
When I got Dave Hill's The Sounds of Just Intonation, I was happy to hear
somebody else talk about this, and to relate the experience of the higher
limits to what it must have been like for Europeans hearing the first
5-limit choirs.

At the keyboard I've had plenty of exposure to 12, and comparing to 5-limit
just, it's like the difference between a hostess cupcake and a mango.
Eating the cupcake, you think it's delicious. But try the mango, and the
flat, one-track flavor of the cupcake is unthinkable. Man, I love mangos.

Getting back on track, these are just words I use to describe how it sounds
to me. I think Mark Nowitsky once agreed that the 7/4 sounded like a
flourescent light. The 11 seems to add a lush, tropical sound to the pentad.

[Morrison]
>That very closely coincides with my impressions of those prime factors.

I'm pretty impressed by the ability of language to communicate these
things. That is, if forced to answer the "do other people see red"
question, I'd say yes. I think this stuff sounds the same, more or less,
to most of us.

I remember in "theory" class, our AI described the augmented triad as
spacey and the perfect fourth/fifth as square. I thought this was right on.

Carl

> >That very closely coincides with my impressions of those prime factors.
>
> I'm pretty impressed by the ability of language to communicate these
> things.

By the way, another word I use to describe 7s (Carl said "flourescent
lightingness") is that 7-based intervals have a certain "zap" to them.