Re: Intonational Systems Earlier Musicians had in Mind

Hello -

I appreciate encouraging comments made on my
recent post. I'm Dave Hill, La Mesa, CA. I was more
active on the list, but have had my hands full with
other things and have been less active recently, but
try to keep up generally with the list as much as
I can.

In 1985 I contributed a set of two cassettes to
the Just Intonation Network with synthesizer
demonstrations of many intervals, chords, musical
phrases, etc. in Just Intonation entitled: "The Sounds
of Just Intonation". This is still available for purchase from
the Just Intonation network. The demonstrations reveal
many interesting musical effects - musically meaningful -
which EQT's averaging obscures. Now many tuning
forum members are creating their own demonstrations
live, and technology has progressed since 1985.

Recently I have been exploring possibilities with
a Yamaha upright piano tuned to mean tone and more
recently a JI tuning scheme. Although I had worked
extensively with synthesis of just intonation intervals,
chords, and musical passages, I was very surprised to
hear an ordinary "house piano" - a regular old piano - in first
1/6 comma mean tone temperament and then 1/4 comma
MT and finally JI. To me it seemed almost
unbelievable that a piano, the proud champion of
EQT's supremacy, could have such a "change of heart" when
tuned differently. This is not some laboriously souped up
reconstructed instrument, it's a plain 12 pitch per octave
piano - but it sounds so different! You lose the circle
of 12 playable keys, but you can still do a lot with fewer
than that.

Dave Hill, La Mesa, CA

Welcome, Dave Hill.

It has taken me a few days to check back on the tuning list.
I bought your cassettes and booklet a couple of years ago and found them
very interesting.
However I do find the balance of chords awkard to listen to from
sythesizers. For instance I think
a dominant 7th as 4:5:6:7 sounds much better when the balance (of dynamics)
favours the root and dominant, the third sounding slightly less and the 7th
less again. I don't suppose computers can make this sort of adjustment now?
My orchestral colleagues and I get amuch better result tuning when we adjust
balance. Of course with your experiments on the piano these sort of
subtleties can happen readily. Of course the balance thing might not seem
an issue to many.

Cheers

Michael Hugh Dixon

-----Original Message-----
From: Ascend11@aol.com <Ascend11@aol.com>
To: tuning@onelist.com <tuning@onelist.com>
Date: Sunday, 12 December 1999 17:39
Subject: [tuning] Re: Intonational Systems Earlier Musicians had in Mind

>From: Ascend11@aol.com
>
>Hello -
>
> I appreciate encouraging comments made on my
>recent post. I'm Dave Hill, La Mesa, CA. I was more
>active on the list, but have had my hands full with
>other things and have been less active recently, but
>try to keep up generally with the list as much as
>I can.
>
> In 1985 I contributed a set of two cassettes to
>the Just Intonation Network with synthesizer
>demonstrations of many intervals, chords, musical
>phrases, etc. in Just Intonation entitled: "The Sounds
>of Just Intonation". This is still available for purchase from
>the Just Intonation network. The demonstrations reveal
>many interesting musical effects - musically meaningful -
>which EQT's averaging obscures. Now many tuning
>forum members are creating their own demonstrations
>live, and technology has progressed since 1985.
>