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Re: Terms of endearment

🔗Joe Monzo <monz@xxxx.xxxx>

12/31/1999 1:05:01 AM

> [John Starrett, TD 465.22]
> Carl-
> I believe that there is something broke here, and that
> is a consistent accurate shorthand for different tuning
> classes. All suggestions are welcome. Science sometimes
> makes advances when good shorthand makes apparent previously
> unseen connections. Maybe it won't happen in this case, but
> it seems to me useful to have a framework and consistent
> connected symbology into which like tunings can be grouped.

Go go, go, Johnny, go go go!
... (famous Chuck Berry guitar riff...)

You're right on the money here. I'm sure that one of the
things I found so fascinating the deeper I delved into
tuning theory, was how complicated it seemed to be, and
how mystified and WRONG it has been construed so often
by so many musicians and listeners, when in fact a lot
of the complexity of tuning theory can be reduced to a
couple of very simple principles.

Abbreviations working in the way John describes reminds
me very much of how mathematics simplifies the operations
and procedures involved in describing how things work, by
representing them by simple symbols, such as letters, various
signs (plus, minus, square root, etc.), Greek letters, and
so on.

I think lattice diagrams are also a part of that 'shorthand',
in that they reduce a lot of these mathematics, which can
ultimately become quite complex, to an easily-perceived
visual model.

I register my vote for the EDI/UDI etc., and for the ideas
Carl Lumma presented in contradistinction to these. They
both have merit. Can't wait to see how this turns out...

(BTW, great subject line for what promises to be a long thread...)

-monz

Joseph L. Monzo Philadelphia monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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