automatic & adaptive

Rat Tomes wrote:

>The general idea of this I call AJI for Automatic Just Intonation and I
>discuss it at http://www.kcbbs.gen.nz/users/rtomes/aji-main.htm and
>include several examples of the frequencies played for each note in the
>example pieces. In essence the idea is to recognise that if the notes
>played are, for example, C-E-G then the frequency ratios should be
>exactly 4:5:6 and so to do that.

One thing you might want to check out is the paper

W. A. Sethares, "Adaptive tunings for musical scales," Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, vol. 96, no. 1, pg. 10-19, July 1994

which describes an adaptive (or "automatic") approach to the
problem of forming scales that can match a desired set of intervals
and can simultaneously be modulated to all keys. This is done based
on the minimization of sensory dissonance (closely related to beats),
and can be made responsive to the timbre (spectrum) of the sound.
For harmonic sounds, it gives various forms of JI as youve suggested.