HTML list and Partch

>>The idea of an audio list is good, but not realistic given today's
>>bandwidth (for both server and subscriber).
>
>I don't understand what you mean by bandwidth, assuming again that we
>have a list specifically for people who can work in that environment.

I think you are underestimating the amount of bandwidth needed for even a
few real audio or mp3 files. WAV format would be out of the question.

>>A web or ftp site where users could post their files would be much
better. >>People could post to this list to reference a given file on the
audio site.
>
>Are there any reasons why this would be better other than these bandwidth
>concerns you mentioned? I can't think of any.

Probably the best idea is Starrett's suggestion of a newsgroup.

>Download times for each message from an HTML tuning list would be roughly
>the same as for a typical web page.

Typical web pages do not have sound files on them.

>We used to have a photo of Partch in the Center D Genovese used to have it
>posted of Hp viewing the Arp monster and saying something like "great
after >forty years and now that I'm dying finally an instrument I could
have used"-->not an exact qoute.

I have a copy of this.

Carl

> I think you are underestimating the amount of bandwidth needed for even a
> few real audio or mp3 files. WAV format would be out of the question.
> Typical web pages do not have sound files on them.

Clearly that depends on how long the sound file is. I was not thinking in
terms of entire compositions, but few-second audio snippets to illustrate the
musical concept we're talking about.

For example, we've recently chatted about several kinds of meantone. It
sure would be great if we could actually *hear* these different tunings rather
than just spouting numbers at each other. So, one of us could have a
two-second audio clip of, say, an authentic cadence in quarter-comma meantone,
and another two-second clip of that same cadence in third-comma meantone.

That's four seconds at (if telephony-grade WAV files are fine for such
illustrative purposes) 8K bytes per second, or 32K bits. At a connection rate
of 33.6Kbps (I average closer to 42Kbps) that would probably take somewhere
around three seconds to download, including a lot of overhead.

Gosh, is that really all that big a deal?

And yet, as with a picture, an audio comparison, even a low-fidelity one,
lets us escape the realm of silent numbers and raw theory into the realm of
direct audio experience.