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quarter comma meantone on a keyboard

🔗Ed & Alita Morrison <ESSAIM@TEXAS.NET>

12/31/2000 2:32:21 AM

Perhaps Ed Foote or some other keyboard or meantone expert could suggest tunings:
Back several hundred years ago when a keyboard might have been tuned to quarter comma meantone they had 12 keys per octave plus split keys for D# Eb and G#Ab. What pitches (frequencies) might they have used to tune their keyboards? The Xenharmonikon 6 (Summer, 1977) has a page comparing 31 equal temp. to quarter comma meantone showing that the tunings were nearly alike.
I would like to select a 12 tones per octave scale (plus the extra tones for the split keys) and make a fixed tuning onto an instrument. The selection of tones would be from the 31--meantone chart. I could start C and use the intervals of the 31 equal as: 1 (C), 3 (C#), 6 (D), 8(D#), 9(Eb), 11(E), 14(F), 16(F#), 19(G), 21(G#), 22(Ab), 24(A 440Hz), 26(A#)or 27(Bb), 29(B) and the next would be C of the next octave. I do not have any data as to what pitches they might have tuned their keyboards.
Alita Morrison

🔗Paul H. Erlich <PERLICH@ACADIAN-ASSET.COM>

1/1/2001 3:38:58 PM

Alita Morrison wrote,

>I would like to select a 12 tones per octave scale (plus the extra tones
for the split keys) and make a fixed tuning onto an instrument. >The
selection of tones would be from the 31--meantone chart. I could start C
and use the intervals of the 31 equal as: 1 (C), 3 (C#), 6 >(D), 8(D#),
9(Eb), 11(E), 14(F), 16(F#), 19(G), 21(G#), 22(Ab), 24(A 440Hz), 26(A#)or
27(Bb), 29(B) and the next would be C of the >next octave. I do not have
any data as to what pitches they might have tuned their keyboards.

Absolute pitch was not standardized and varied greatly from region to region
in the meantone era. Is that what you were asking? Or are there particular
_relative_ pitch values (for, say, 1/4-comma meantone or 31-tET; in, say,
cents) that you were looking for?