Meantone/adaptive tuning

John deLaubenfels wrote:

>I, of all people, most certainly do NOT assume 12 fixed pitches per
>octave. I was responding to a post from Graham Breed in which he (I
>think) is advocating a fixed number of pitches per octave, in meantone.

Hmm, so what am I advocating? My position is this:

I am interested in adaptive tuning, and have been for a relatively long
time. However, the closer I got to implementing it, the less relevant it
seemed to what I wanted to do musically. As a result, I never got round to
it.

I'm not much interested in unfettered modulation, so 12 notes per octave
meantone is good enough for me for 5-limit diatonic music. Adaptive JI
offers (arguably) better tuning, but makes nothing possible that wasn't
before. However, it would mean that a lot of 7-limit chords wouldn't be
recognised as such. I'd rather know where the 7-limit intervals are than
have everything approximated to the 5-limit. I think 7-limit intervals are
too ambiguous for adaptive tuning to work with them with 12 notes to the
octave.

I have also tried more than 12 notes per octave. Firstly, my guitar has
around 19 frets to the octave[1], with a meantone tuning. Also, I have
played in 29-note schismic and 19-note meantone on keyboards. 7-limit
adaptive tuning would work with either of these mappings, however the static
tunings work well enough. Also, I don't have ideal MIDI controllers for
them (or 22) so I prefer the convenience of 12 note keyboard scales.

Plus I've tried some 12-note well temperaments which offer real
possibilities *to me* for 5-limit oriented music. Most every chord is
different, so chord changes and modulation really have a *meaning*. I feel
there's more musical freedom in this than having every chord modified to
sound the same. And then there are a lot of tunings that an adaptive
algorithm couldn't hope to reproduce, including neutral-third scales that I
may mention again today[2].

Still, there are possibilities in adaptive tuning. I got JI Relay working
over the weekend, and it does give qualitatively better results than
12-equal, with presumably the same range of modulation. I got some
"interesting" intervals by breaking the diatonic rules, but I haven't worked
out how to control them. For some people this will be ideal, but it's
largely an irrelevance for me at the moment. However, I am interested, and
may apply my own algorithms now that somebody else has done the hard work.
I'm particularly interested in using more than 12 notes to the octave.

Peace, etc

Graham
http://www.cix.co.uk/~gbreed/

[1] I know exactly how many frets per octave my guitar has, but it depends
on which octave you look at.

[2] In case I don't get around to this, I point the interested reader to
this page on my website: http://www.cix.co.uk/~gbreed/notakey.htm#3plus4 .
The uninterested reader can happily ignore it.