High third demo

After many "Murphy's Law" setbacks, I finally have a reasonable example of
what I have been referring to as the "high third." The URL is
<http://home.earthlink.net/~stg3music/HighThirdDemo.mp3> I hope this format
is available to most of you who might be interested. If not, let me know and
I'll do my best to provide other formats.

When I got this "version" home, I noticed that the basses had moved slightly
sharp of the given piano pitch (C) likely causing the women's third to tune
fairly close to the piano's E. However, when the tenors' fifth is added, it
seems to influence the women's third to the extent that when the piano's E
is sounded again, it appears to have "sunk." Since that is not likely, the
conclusion must be the the women's third has risen, presumably because of
the addition of the tenors' fifth to the mix.

Questions? Responses? Rational explanations? Acoustic or psychoacoustic? All
opinions are welcome. No theories to be "proven" here. Only a repeatable
observation to be understood.

Jerry

P.S.: Now that I have "mastered" the skills needed for posting mp3's, I
would like to share a number of clips showing what sound like "high thirds"
to me in actual performances. Give me a week, please. (Yeah! Sure!)

I've listened to the demo quite closely and also tried to run some
spectrogram FFTs on it. Unfortunately, the voices are neither steady nor do
they come close enough to a unison to make an analysis that's really
meaningful as the pitches wave within a band of 20 cents or more. Also, I
find that the piano tones interfere with the performance. The fifth partial
of the initial piano tone is noticeably stretched above a 5:1. And finally,
since we are discussing a hughly subjective topic, it would have been useful
to cut out samples of the precised moments where Mr. Eskelin hears the
phenemonena he has reported.

So, what would be more useful is a recording made without the use of a piano
and edited down to the effect in question. This would probably be a very
short recording, so a .WAV file would be both reasonable and preferable.

Daniel Wolf

Dr. Daniel James Wolf
Komponist, Musikethnologe u.-theoretiker
Schinkel-Str. 62
60488 Frankfurt (Main)
Germany
djwolf@snafu.de

Daniel Wolf offered:
>
> I've listened to the demo quite closely and also tried to run some
> spectrogram FFTs on it. Unfortunately, the voices are neither steady nor do
> they come close enough to a unison to make an analysis that's really
> meaningful as the pitches wave within a band of 20 cents or more. Also, I
> find that the piano tones interfere with the performance. The fifth partial
> of the initial piano tone is noticeably stretched above a 5:1. And finally,
> since we are discussing a hughly subjective topic, it would have been useful
> to cut out samples of the precised moments where Mr. Eskelin hears the
> phenemonena he has reported.
>
> So, what would be more useful is a recording made without the use of a piano
> and edited down to the effect in question. This would probably be a very
> short recording, so a .WAV file would be both reasonable and preferable.

Good suggestion. I'll see what I can do. I'll also try to get a better
recording, and one that includes other inversions of the major triad. That
may prove interesting (in light of comments I have noted).

Thanks Dan,

Jerry