a couple of questions...

Hi yall-

I subscribed about a week ago and have been enjoying the microtonal
repartee!...

I am currently a non microtonal guitarist, but while I was getting my
degree at Juilliard I also studied electronic music with Hubert Howe and we
mostly used Csound. I did some pieces based on Phi, prime numbers and the
other usual suspects. It was fascinating, but ultimately I became somewhat
dissatisfied with the sounds I was getting and have since mostly stuck with
the old wooden box with six strings. I find the electric guitar a wonderful
electronic instrument with an incredibly rich palate of sounds available
and I find it more satisfing to manipulate a guitar with my fingers rather
then type lots of code and wait a couple of hours to generate the piece.
Back then Csound on a Next was hot shit, but now I run Csound on my dinky
quadra 630 and it works great. For awhile last year I was getting lists of
the sun's spherical harmonic frequencies off the internet and making sounds
with them. Its fun, but I always end up with my box and six strings...

. Oh yes, while I was at Juilliard we did a production of Partch's"
Revelation in the Courthouse park", directed by Danlee Mitchell. I was
lucky to get to play "Guitar I" in the production (we did two
performances). It was alot of fun to play Partch's original guitar.
Although I glanced at his book then (this was in '90), I was not able to
penetrate his whole thesis. Right now I have been studing his book closley
and find it a remarkable mix of brilliance and crankism. I find his notion
that what the ear responds to is ratios (as some kind of abstraction)
rather than to the overtone series per se interesting but dubious. If it
were not for overtones, there would be no beating phenomena that make a
justly tuned interval just in the first place.

I don't see 4/3 as an abstract utonal generation or some kind of "three
limit" interval, but rather as the interval between the third and fourth
partial. Alternately it can be thought of as dividing a string in 3 and
then making another string 4 of those lengths. Or, it is 3/4 of a string in
relation to the whole string. To my mind these are more concrete ways of
deriving ratios. Perhaps I dont understand yet what Partch was getting at.
(I have a small piece up as part of my guitar page on harmonics and string
divisions, but its badly in need of revision
http://www.users.interport.net/~dante/division.html)

Anyway, since woodworking is not my thing, I do not ever expect to be able
to refret a guitar. What I was wondering was does anybody know if someone
is currently making a guitar with interchangable fretboards? I see a real
nice one in Scheider's book "The Contemporary guitar" (1985), that he says
is made by Tom Stone of Intonation Systems in Iowa. A search on the net
turns up nothing, so I dont know if anything like this is being made by
anyone. The series of fretboards is just what I would drool over - various
just, harmonic, historical and cultural intonations. Anybody who can help
me out here, I would appreciate it greatly.

For something completely different - have people looked at what intervals
birds sing in? or humpback whales? I think it would be very interesting!

regards,

dante