meantones

> It describes his advances in making timepieces sufficiently accurate to
> calculate longitude. I don't believe music is mentioned at all.

I saw a very interesting documentary on Harrison about three months ago. I
think it was a Nova, but I'm not sure (if it was, it was a step up for
Nova). It followed the entire story of the longitude prize.

LT sounds very good, as Lucy's lullaby tape shows fairly well. I'm not
sure it sounds any better than it "should", however. I don't think
anything with a fifth between 695 and 697 cents can really sound bad...

Playing around with various tunings on Graham Breed's excellent Midi Relay
software, meantones around 1/3 comma seem to have a bright sound, while
meantones around 1/4 seem to have a more solid sound. Grady and Chalmers
have both pointed out that LT is very close to Wilson's meta-meantone
(fifths are about 0.1 cents different), and both of these tunings seem to
fall very much on the 1/3 comma side of things. Kornerup's golden meantone
and Erlich's optimal meantones are very close (again the fifths are within
about 0.1 cents of eachother), and definitely seem to fall on the 1/4 comma
side of things.

Carl

At 11:25 AM 12/30/98 -0500, Carl Lumma wrote:

>LT sounds very good, as Lucy's lullaby tape shows fairly well. I'm not
>sure it sounds any better than it "should", however. I don't think
>anything with a fifth between 695 and 697 cents can really sound bad...

At least not a meantone. What about a 695c fifth with Pythagorean thirds and
a small second?

>Playing around with various tunings on Graham Breed's excellent Midi Relay
>software, meantones around 1/3 comma seem to have a bright sound, while
>meantones around 1/4 seem to have a more solid sound.

Using that descriptive vocabulary, how would you describe the sound of
12-TET, Pythagorean tuning, and just intonation?

>Grady and Chalmers
>have both pointed out that LT is very close to Wilson's meta-meantone
>(fifths are about 0.1 cents different), and both of these tunings seem to
>fall very much on the 1/3 comma side of things. Kornerup's golden meantone
>and Erlich's optimal meantones are very close (again the fifths are within
>about 0.1 cents of eachother), and definitely seem to fall on the 1/4 comma
>side of things.

--Charlie Jordan <http://www.rev.net/~aloe/music>