LucyTuning Commentary

> LT sounds very good, as Lucy's lullaby tape shows fairly well. I'm not
> sure it sounds any better than it "should", however.

That was pretty much my impression in my very short investigation of it:
It's a decent-sounding tuning, but it's nothing particularly amazing. That
and the fact that all of Lucy's pi-related claims - or at least the ones I've
heard - strike me as little more than touchie-feelie, "cosmic",
Chariots-of-the-Gods numerology.

For example, the fact that a stack of LucyTuned fifths spirals on forever,
a property he claims is unique to LucyTuning's pi-based derivation, is
obviously shared by any fifth other than those of equal temperaments. Now
it's true that a LucyTuned fifths stack up 88 times before the circle nearly
closes, whereas QC meantone nearly closes after 31, and third-comma nearly
closes at 19 fifths. But, to give a hypothetical example, a circle of
695.454545-cent fifths (as opposed to his ~695.492966-cent fifth), closes
after 8800 fifths. Apparently Lucy should regard that fifth as two orders of
magnitude better, and, as far as I can tell, that fifth has nothing
particularly obvious to do with pi.

But more importantly, I personally see only so much value in having
unbroken circle of identical-sized fifths. I see value in it, for example, if
it defines separate Ebs and D#s usable in their appropriate contexts. But
after you run the circle upward past somewhere around E#, or downward past Bbb
or so, it starts losing meaning. It's hard for me to envision any
intuitively-meaningful harmonic relationship between an F### and Gbb. The
fact that those two pitches are 34 fifths apart is not nearly as intuitively
or audibly meaningful to me as the fact that (in LucyTuning) they are fairly
close to a 13:8 ratio.