looking up "meantone"

from Wikipdeia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meantone )

"Meantone temperament is a musical temperament, which is a system
of musical tuning. In general, a meantone is constructed the same
way as Pythagorean tuning, as a chain of perfect fifths, but in a
meantone, each fifth is narrowed by the same amount (or
equivalently, each fourth widened) in order to make the other
intervals like the major third closer to their ideal just ratios.

"Quarter-comma meantone is the most well known type of meantone
temperament, and the term meantone temperament is often used to
refer to it specifically."

I don't remember Gene's wikipedia handle, but I don't recognize
it in the article's history, either. I've never seen this
article before. A lot of the tuning stuff on wikipedia is
written by AugPi and Rainwarrior, who seem to be familiar with
the tuning-math stuff, or have independently discovered it.
(Rainwarrior is Brad Smith who may be subscribed. I don't
know if AugPi is, but I don't remember him having contributed.)

from the Tonalsoft Encyclopedia

"A family of tuning-systems in which the two JI "whole tones"
(with ratios of 9:8 and 10:9) are conflated into one "mean
tone" which lies between the two, the objective being to produce
or approximate JI "major 3rd"s (with a ratio of 5:4) but to
eliminate the syntonic comma and its associated problem of
commatic drift by having only one size of whole-tone.
...
"Note that while ET versions of meantone create a closed
(circular) system, the non-ET meantones (i.e., all of the
fraction-of-a-comma meantones) do not. They instead form an
open-ended chain."

So I don't see why anyone should be surprised at the claim
that there's some consensus on the issue.

-Carl

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "Carl Lumma" <clumma@...> wrote:

> I don't remember Gene's wikipedia handle, but I don't recognize
> it in the article's history, either.

My Wiki nym is kind of hard to remember: "Gene Ward Smith".