Recordings of temperaments in long reverb

Hi tuners,

I know I promised to let you know on Wednesday but it took longer than I expected.
I'm feeling a bit like Herman when he posted his Alpha/Beta/Gamma examples. It's nothing big at the moment but maybe something more will come out later.
I tried to play in various tunings with an awful lot of reverb added. And I realized I really didn't like small intervals reverberated whenever they occurred -- that's why I was doing the small "quest" for scales without small intervals.
Because many of us know how meantone sounds with lots of reverb, I ommitted this one. I've made three examples and I'm still planning to play around with it later because I managed to "octave-invert" the small step in negri (the one which would normally be less than 100 cents) and I'm going to try something similar at a later time.
Here they are encoded in Rar:
www.sendspace.com/file/pagafy

Petr

Petr,

This brings up an interesting issue--tempo, tuning and dissonance with regards to acoustic environments.

Gregorian chant heard in a small room is awfully bland and dull, but in a vast cathedral, mystical and awe-inspiring.

Imagine, however a quick Beethoven Symphonic scherzo in the same space; the details would get lost, the music would be muddy and un-transparent. The best Symphonic halls are a little wet, not too much though. For clarity, tempo adjustments might have to be made...which means that if you can have clarity and the correct speed at the same time, you're in the wrong performance space!

Chamber music ought to be in a chamber---dry and crisp. I lament recordings of String Quartets, for instance, in vast concert theatre spaces--chamber music ought to be really a semi-private affair, in homes, not concert halls...it's supposed to be intimate.

Anyway, re:tuning---the small interval music we hear in various cultures probably wouldn't have evolved as it did if it were in vast cavernous spaces---dry outdoor or home environments or small temples seem the likely locales for Greek enharmonic genera, and even their ampitheatres might have a little echo, but not washes of reverb with long tails.

OTOH, a lot of static JI with glacial harmonic motion becomes divine in a nice large reverb, just as Gregorian chant does!

Ambient space is of enormous importance to music, we don't often realize just how important.

-A.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Petr Pařízek <p.parizek@...> wrote:
>
> Hi tuners,
>
> I know I promised to let you know on Wednesday but it took longer than I
> expected.
> I'm feeling a bit like Herman when he posted his Alpha/Beta/Gamma examples.
> It's nothing big at the moment but maybe something more will come out later.
> I tried to play in various tunings with an awful lot of reverb added. And I
> realized I really didn't like small intervals reverberated whenever they
> occurred -- that's why I was doing the small "quest" for scales without
> small intervals.
> Because many of us know how meantone sounds with lots of reverb, I ommitted
> this one. I've made three examples and I'm still planning to play around
> with it later because I managed to "octave-invert" the small step in negri
> (the one which would normally be less than 100 cents) and I'm going to try
> something similar at a later time.
> Here they are encoded in Rar:
> www.sendspace.com/file/pagafy
>
> Petr
>

A great point and a great post. Thank you! If you're inclined to discourse more fully on this subject, it would be much appreciated.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "msavante" <savante73@...> wrote:
>
> A great point and a great post. Thank you! If you're inclined to discourse more fully on this subject, it would be much appreciated.
>

Not much more to say really, but I should make an edit:

"if you can have clarity and the correct speed at the same time, you're in the wrong performance space!"

should have read

"if you CAN'T have clarity and the correct speed at the same time, you're in the wrong performance space!"

i.e. a hall should allow for crisp precision at the chosen ideal tempo for the music. If details get muddy, get out of the reverberating space....

AKJ wrote:

> Anyway, re:tuning---the small interval music we hear in various cultures
> probably wouldn't have evolved as it did if it were in vast cavernous
> spaces---dry outdoor or home environments or small temples seem the likely
> locales for Greek enharmonic genera, and even their ampitheatres might have
> a little echo, but not washes of reverb with long tails.
> OTOH, a lot of static JI with glacial harmonic motion becomes divine
> in a nice large reverb, just as Gregorian chant does!

It's interesting that even though my original aim was at something a bit different, both of us seem to arrive at very similar conclusions.

For me it all started last year when I was trying to answer the question why I liked meantone so much and why I didn't like, OTOH, tunings like lemba or superpelog.After a few experiments, I found out that what I liked most of all were various linear (i.e. harmonic) scales but with no more than 8 tones in the octave or something like that. For some reason which I was unable to explain at that time, I just didn't want to use small intervals in my scales and I was doing everything I could to avoid intervals under 100 cents or so. In October, I was making meantone variations on an old ciacona and I ran it through some very dense reverb--here's an excerpt from that: www.sendspace.com/file/uoylni

A few days later, I took an excerpt of my first semisixths piece and ran it through the same reverb: www.sendspace.com/file/roin30

Suddenly, when I heard the result, I was almost disgusted every time any of the voices rose or fell by the small 56-cent step. This means that although intervals in semisixths are about 2 cents away from JI, that doesn't necessarily mean that we can mix the tones of this temperament in whatever way we choose. And this gave me the explanation why I didn't want small intervals in my scales in the first place. Even though my earlier music wasn't using dense reverb, I think I was somewhat "subconsciously" trying to find a set of tones that would sound good together to me.

I think that even if we work with 5-limit JI and don't use temperaments, we can find three "basic" factors which can tell us something about distances of triads. If you také a C major triad and you want to make another triad by changing just one pitch, you can use an A minor, an E minor, or a C minor. This means that the factors changing the pitches are 10/9, 16/15, and 25/24. The interesting thing is that if I use 10/9, it sounds to me as completely "peaceful and relaxed"; if I use 16/15, I'm slightly "more curious about what happens next" but the general feeling is essentially the same; however, if I use 25/24, I suddenly feel like there's some totally different "mood" going on or simply like if it were another bit of music --- don't know how to describe that feeling with words.

Petr