Re: [tuning] Brian McLaren's "Introduction to Microtonality" take aways...

Gary!
As i have stated before, Just intonation has been and continues to be used by cultures that
are melodically based not harmonically. That westerners have a preference for JI intervals in
melody is supported By Boomsliter and Creel. I know of no test where anyone has shown the desire
to make two identical sized intervals in melodic sequence the same size. In examining world music
, I have never seen this phenomenon.

Gary Morrison wrote:

> I believe, and I think Brian agrees, that beatless consonance is a clearly-audible
> phenomenon in sustained chordal harmony. "Sustained chordal harmony" here includes
> typical SATB chorales or sustained melodic-accompaniment chords, for example.
> However, we also agree that although that tuning ideal has a clearly-audible effect
> under such circumstances, there's no clear evidence that peoples' ears actually
> prefer the sound of beatless of consonance, and there are clearly many other
> influences on what gives us the impression of pitch being right. Examples include
> the desire to make two identical sized intervals in melodic sequence the same size,
> wanting to raise a leading tone to make a stronger lead to the tonic. Probably more
> importantly though, there are only so many sustained chords in real-world music, and
> when notes move by at normal speed, beatless consonance is a heck of a lot harder to
> even detect, much less prefer. And of course vibrato complicates the question even
> further.
>
> So when Brian gives you the impression that the JI concept is all a load of
> meaningless tripe, what he probably means is that it is audibly significant in
> sustained block chords, but as music departs from that pardigm, its meaningfulness
> rapidly gets overwhelmed by other tuning ideals.

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

The Wandering Medicine Show
Wed. 8-9 KXLU 88.9 fm

Gary!
The context is a result of using such singular elements. not the other way around. You have to
have the noun before the verb.

Gary Morrison wrote:

> Hearing a 4:5:6:7 chord is a lot better than just babbling endlessly about it, but
> listening to that one chord alone says very little without considering its context.

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

The Wandering Medicine Show
Wed. 8-9 KXLU 88.9 fm

--- In tuning@y..., Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@a...> wrote:
> Gary!
> As i have stated before, Just intonation has been and continues
to be used by cultures that
> are melodically based not harmonically. That westerners have a
preference for JI intervals in
> melody is supported By Boomsliter and Creel. I know of no test
where anyone has shown the desire
> to make two identical sized intervals in melodic sequence the same
size. In examining world music
> , I have never seen this phenomenon.
>

This seems strange and completely backwards to me.

In other words

1) JI (or near JI) is important for chords. A chord
(not in a functional sense but in an audible sense)
includes a melody sung against a drone, particularly
if that drone is a 3:2 dyad.

2) An unaccompanied melodist in a non-resonant room
can be 'off' by a large amount (including resultant
drift) and the pitch class vibe will be coming
through. In other words, the targets may be
interpreted as JI, however the execution will
be far off and tolerated.

3) There are lots of cultures which deal with identical
step sizes as in Western diatonic, pythagorean tuning
of Eastern pentatonics, close approximate to 7-ET
used in other Asian countries.

4) I'm inclined to think that since the ear is a
logarithmic machine, low-number ETs may be easier
to "grok" psychoacoustically than medium high
RI type numbers (16/13, things in the range between
being tunable and being indistinquishable from
an "out of tune lower valued JI"

5) There is a lot of expressive singing that doesn't
seem to match anything mathematic, whether JI
or otherwise. I tend to look at some of the bent
blues notes that way, (with no disrespect for Monz
RI analysis of said notes) and Gerald Eskelins
search for the high third may have been the same
(it seemed to be somewhere between 12ED2 and
pythagorean, but what and why?)

Not to start a fight but illuminate me on a few of these points.
I find the "E" pocket to be huge, unless a "C" is sounding.

Bob Valentine

--- In tuning@y..., BVAL@I... wrote:

> 3) There are lots of cultures which deal with identical
> step sizes as in Western diatonic, pythagorean tuning
> of Eastern pentatonics, close approximate to 7-ET
> used in other Asian countries.

. . . Middle Eastern modes which divide the minor third melodically
into two perceptually equal parts, etc. etc. I've worked with lots
and lots of different microtonal scales, and it's very clear (to my
compositional sense) that no matter how unfamiliar a particular
melodic step will be, following it with another step of the same size
has a "congruence" effect that you can hear, and use musically. This
is one reason why MOS scales work so well -- the "congruence" is only
broken at structurally important positions in the scale.

Caveat: the line between "same" and "not same" when it comes to step
sizes is pretty gray. Even if there's a 35-cent difference, there's a
bit of "sameness" there . . . and if there's only a 10-cent
difference, there's a whole lot of "sameness" in the step sizes.