Illuminations

Thanks for Daniel Wolf for providing a short historical sketch of the
changes in temperament in Germany and Austria. As they used to say a few
years back, "That's news to me!" The biggest revelation for me was the
fact that the various tunings spread out UNEVENLY through different
geographical regions. This makes a lot of sense, in fact, it should be
almost self-evident, but I must confess I'd never even thought about it
before...

Probably I would be able to "plow through" "Zur musikalischen Temperatur"
by Herbert Kelletat if I can find the book. In the "mean time" (no pun
intended) it surely will be a great service to all concerned -- I'm
assuming that, at least it will be to me -- to post the "summary" to the
list. I hope it is detailed [several posts (??)], since I'm finding this
quite fascinating. I await expectantly.

Joseph Pehrson

>I don't know about anybody else, but I've got to be pretty darn interested
>in something to wade very deep into the search engine over at ONElist tuning
>archive, it's just to damn slow and user unfriendly (I think).

It's retarded, actually. They claim to be in the midst of a database
overhaul. We'll see. In the meantone, I've dumped all the digests since
Mills 1185 to a text file...

http://lumma.org/tuning_digest.zip [~7 megs]

...which one can easily search from his own machine, with the tool of his
choice. ('Notepad 2000' can open and search a 23 meg file! I'm in heaven!)

As to the question of a FAQ. It's a great idea, but it will take a great
deal of time to get something groovy, no matter how we do it. One way
would be to do an "Ask Dr. Math"-type Q&A page where shy listers could put
their questions into a form, which would be sent to a pre-determined answer
man, depending on which "subject" box was checked (i.e. ethnomusicology=
Wolf, Partch= Szanto, scale theory= Erlich, etc.). Whatever the team was,
perhaps they could agree to always post an answer to the page within a
week; to forward a message to another if the wrong "subject" was checked;
to find a fill-in when going on vacation, etc. A FAQ could be built this
way over a period of time, and it would have the benefit, as Erv Wilson
might say, of helping somebody at every step, rather than just being a
bunch of information floating around. What thinks everybody??

-Carl

>>It's retarded, actually. They claim to be in the midst of a database
>>overhaul. We'll see. In the meantone, I've dumped all the digests since
>>Mills 1185 to a text file...
>>
>>http://lumma.org/tuning_digest.zip [~7 megs]
>
>There's something worng with this zip file.
>I can't open it. Check the version you posted
>to see if it's ok.

Works for me. What version/type of un-zip software are you using?

-Carl

>It worked fine for me. I noticed that my system automatically changed the
>name to "tuning_digest".

You just couldn't see it because your mail client underlined the link.

>It might be that the file name is longer than 8 charaters. You might need
>Winzip.

That would be my suggestion.

-Carl

[David Beardsley wrote...]
>Never mind. Even with the errors I got a huge text file.

That's the size of the list, one way or another. What's wrong with having
it in one file?

>I think I'll stick with my system: individual digests in yearly directorys
>that I can search with the Windows 95/98 find utility.

Good for you! I did that file for people who didn't have their own copies
of back digests.

-Carl

>>That's the size of the list, one way or another. What's wrong with having
>>it in one file?
>
>It's so big it won't open at all in Win 95 Wordpad. Opening it
>in the Netscape Navigator takes forever (333 Pentium II).
>What are you looking at it with?

I'm using Notepad '5.0', which comes with Win2K. Here's a chart I made of
various text editors working on this file. The first number is the
approximate opening time, the second is the approximate closing time
(seconds). This was done on a dual P2-400 with 256 megs of RAM under NT
5.0, whilst I write this, download Pagano's new Tuning Punks piece, and
lots of other stuff. Your times should be similar, since I don't believe
these editors are multi-threaded. I opened the files with drag and drop --
times may be different using File->Open, knowing Windows...

Editpad
20, 5
http://www.ping.be/jg/
postcardware

Notepad 5.0
20, 0
http://www.microsoft.com/
windowsware

Textpad
10, 0
http://www.textpad.com/
shareware

NoteTab Pro
10, 1
http://www.notetab.com/
shareware (NoteTab Light is freeware)

-Carl

>>I'm using Notepad '5.0', which comes with Win2K.
>
>I don't use Win Y2K. I use Win 95 and it's a different
>opperating system.

I know that, David. Which is why I included information on EditPad,
TextPad, and NoteTab, which all run on 9x.

-Carl

>>I'm using Notepad '5.0', which comes with Win2K.
>
>I don't use Win Y2K. I use Win 95 and it's a different
>opperating system.

And I forgot about Wordpad. 95 should prompt you, "Would you like to open
this file with Wordpad instead?". I'm running 98 (which makes my machine a
single P2-400), and it took 5 seconds to open tuning_digest.txt, and 0
seconds to close it.

-Carl

For those of you with bandwidth concerns, RAR compresses the 23.6 meg
tuning digest archive to 5.0 megs, vs. pkzip's 7.something effort (and
extracts it faster, too)...

http://lumma.org/tuning_digest.rar

WinRAR is shareware...

http://www.rarsoft.com/

-Carl