J C Francis and his esoteric Bach tunings

Now that we are on this orgy of thinking about circulating temperaments
Bach might have used, what about Sparschuch? What about Francis and his
esoteric tunings? It's squiggle city out there, but I don't know if
anyone has even made Scala files for these. Any takers?

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Gene Ward Smith" <genewardsmith@...>
wrote:
>
> Now that we are on this orgy of thinking about circulating
temperaments
> Bach might have used, what about Sparschuch? What about Francis
>and his
> esoteric tunings? It's squiggle city out there, but I don't know
>if
> anyone has even made Scala files for these. Any takers?
>

Sparschuh- typo there, GWS.

I'm sure a Freudian shrink would be throbbing in ecstasy about the
prepositional bizzarity "on this orgy", but whether we're on, in,
at, or simply stretching the extremes of the ablative in
relationship to, "this orgy", here we is. :-)

The whole thing brings up quite a few points, to some of which GWS
has already referred in the course of the debacle.

Who here has tried making Bach-appropriate WTs? I've made a dozen
over the last year, and never saved a one because they all turn out
within a couple of cents (I mean, like 1.03 cents average absolute
according to Scala, that kind of thing) of different historical WTs,
reinventing the wheel. Some were identical to historical WTs, in
different keys. Think about it- you want purity in the central keys,
fifths can't be crazy, pyth. 3d is an outer limit, blah blah. It's
not the sprawling prairie of possibilites, it's a subtle thing.

A true test of WTs would be the WTC in its entirety, ie, a lifetime
of listening and playing. That's the problem with all these parlour-
trick tests, fun as they are.

Anyway, carry on. Gene, I'm swamped so it will be literally weeks
before I can do justice to your latest test, which sounds very good.

-Cameron Bobro

> Now that we are on this orgy of thinking about circulating
> temperaments Bach might have used, what about Sparschuch?
> What about Francis and his esoteric tunings? It's squiggle
> city out there, but I don't know if anyone has even made
> Scala files for these. Any takers?

I've made them, and they're in my WellTemperamentComparator
download

http://lumma.org/music/theory/WellTemperamentComparator.zip

-Carl

Cameron Bobro wrote:

> Who here has tried making Bach-appropriate WTs? I've made a dozen > over the last year, and never saved a one because they all turn out > within a couple of cents (I mean, like 1.03 cents average absolute > according to Scala, that kind of thing) of different historical WTs, > reinventing the wheel. Some were identical to historical WTs, in > different keys. Think about it- you want purity in the central keys, > fifths can't be crazy, pyth. 3d is an outer limit, blah blah. It's > not the sprawling prairie of possibilites, it's a subtle thing. Not specifically Bach-appropriate, but a few years back I spent some time coming up with Yamaha-appropriate WTs. That is, each step of the Yamaha DX7II tuning table is almost exactly 1/20 of a Pythagorean comma. So I created temperaments in which the fifths were all tempered by 1/20, 1/10, 3/20, 1/5, or 1/4 of a comma.

The temperament of each fifth, starting with C-G, then G-D, D-A, etc.

Werckmeister III for comparison:
1/4 1/4 1/4 0 0 1/4 0 0 0 0 0 0

A few of my well-temperaments that I've mentioned on this list:
"Arrow I": 3/20 3/20 1/4 3/20 3/20 0 0 0 3/20 0 0 0
"Arrow II": 3/20 3/20 1/5 3/20 3/20 1/20 0 0 1/10 0 0 1/20
"Bug I": 3/20 1/4 1/4 3/20 0 0 1/10 0 0 1/10 0 0
"Butterfly I": 3/20 1/5 1/10 1/5 3/20 0 0 1/10 0 1/10 0 0