Bob Valentines Orwellian comments

> From: "Paul Erlich" <paul@stretch-music.com>
> Subject: Question for Bob Valentine
>
> Hi Robert,
>

Hey, thats me!

> Recently we've been discussing some scales with a generator of about
> 271 cents (which Gene dubbed "Orwell" due to proximity to 19/84
> octave).
>

Well, now I understand where 'Orwell' came from, cute.

> Didn't you post quite a bit about 9- and 13-tone scales with this
> generator in 31-tET?

I very well may have, but since I don't think about them
that way, I wouldn't recognize it.

>
> Also, you developed some other "transposable" (=Myhill) scales --
> would you remind us of those?

I was searching for RI minima for various patterns using
a computer program. Eventually I decided the RI orientation
was not quite modelling what I wanted to hear in that it
would find minima at the "usual suspects" as well as minima
which fell into pockets that were somewhat unusual suspects
(like a scale which contained one very accurate ~14/11 and
one very accurate ~13/7).

Given a pattern, I could tell you where the program sees as
minima in "complexity/out-of-tune-ness" and the RI
interpretation he is giving there. I have a "dial" on
the complexity which does some amount of constraining of
the limit it considers as perceivable at a certain
mistuning (how good its ears are).

Currently, in anticipation of the 31et guitar, (and in
some anticipation of a further future 41et instrument,
probably a long scale guitar, something like a baritone
guitar / piccolo bass sort of creature though this is
a few years down the road and things may change... ),
I've just been cataloguing reasonable "white note scales".
("white note" is probably along the lines of 5 to 13 notes,
though in the thread working on Jackys conundrum, I
ended up with a 24-out-of-31), and occasionally
tuning the "piano" to them and fiddling about. (So
far I've only done this with 31, but some of the 41
relationships look really interesting so they are
on the "to do" list).

So here are some of the entries from 8 to 13 notes. Note
that I'm not paying a lot of emphasis at this point to
proper-ness if thats a concern, though I'm also tending
away from extreme values of L/s and "overly chromatic
sounding" scales (like 66667 in 31, not that they
aren't yet-another-wonderful-resource, just that I
don't want to go there for melodic play as a first step).

Linking to this ~7/6 generator idea, all I know is
to look for presence of ^7/31 or ^9/41 which I'll mark
with a *. What I'm more thinking of is analogs across
the meantone and pythagorean and/or schismic space
using these new white note structures (which I'll
mark with <>).

pattern 31et 41et
a b a b
aabaabab 5 2 * <> 7 2 *
2 7 * 4 7

ababababa 3 4 * 5 4 *

aabaabaaab 4 1 <> 5 2
2 9 *

aaabaaabaab 2 5 *

aabaabaabab 3 5

aababaababab 3 2 <> 3 4 !

aababaababaab 2 3 * <> 2 5 *

>
> I think your name should be popping up a lot more in Graham's list!

Lots of these have an emphasis on ~7/6, but I'm just a
"low limit but higher than five" kind of guy.

This was a good excercise for me since I gathered up these scales
from a bunch of different napkins. The reason I put the '!' on
the 12-note pattern is that this is the mapping from meantone to
pythagorean which only links the ~3/2.

2 3 3 2 3 2 3 3 2 3 2 3
0 2 5 8 10 13 15 18 21 23 26 28

4 3 3 4 3 4 3 4 3 3 4 3
0 3 7 10 14 17 21 24 28 31 34 38

I dunno if that helps at all, but thanks for giving me a poke.

Bob Valentine

>
> -Paul