Jerry and Graham the meantone bluesman

> _______________________________________________________________________________
>
> Message: 25
> Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 22:34:49 -0800
> From: "Gerald Eskelin" <stg3music@earthlink.net>
> Subject: High third: more data
>

> > Graham
> > Three phenomena were observed:
> >
> > 1) I held the note constant. One way of doing this was to concentrate on
> > the note I was singing, and ignore the new one coming from the keyboard:)
> > Otherwise, it did sound like the note I was singing rose. I attribute
> > this to the increased amount of high-pitched sound reaching my ears.
>
> Jerry
> High pitched sound? Can you be specific?

One thing that I looked around for in this discussion was some kind of
sum or difference tone explanation for a preference for a high third. As
close as I could come to anything was that the sum tone of the 5:4
and 3:2 is an 11:4, which is both a 'non-Western' and 'strong' overtone.
Unfortunately, trying to tune the sum tone to something "rational"
resulted in extremely high thirds and I abandoned that particular
numerological path.

> >
> > 2) The pitch really did rise. This tended to be to around 9:7 or 19:15,
> > or some inconsistent point around 400 cents.
>
> Welcome to the twilight zone.

If the theory I'd been pursuing made sense then this would have been
the result of trying to get the 11:4 out of its pocket.

> > By consciously correcting for the sharpening, I even hit some kind of
> > neutral third once:)
>
> Hold it right there! "Neutral" third? What's that?

For instance, 11:9 = 1.22222, not quite minor, certainly not major. I
believe some of the thirds used in Arab vocal music are in this region.
What is very interesting to me is that there is a common scale with
both a 'major' and 'minor' third in it (bottom four notes would be
considered 1 b2 b3 3 in our system). However, the pitches are all
somewhat "down" from our orientation, perhaps 1 21/20 7/6 11/9???

Can one of our Maqam experts give a comment here?

>
> > I don't know if this is stronger
> > than normal in me because, although I'm a keyboard player of sorts, I've
> > been mostly using meantone for a couple of years now. This may explain
> > where all the 7-prime limit intervals came from.
>
> Could be. Maybe you're not as "bluesy" as I thought. :-)

Some meantone tunings have very good "septimal" intervals in some keys.

"Blues notes" are really interesting and we have had some discussion
with Monz on the topic. I'm pretty happy with the blue seventh being
around 7:4, but I'm less confident in the "flat five" and the blue
third (7:5 and 7:6 could be logical guesses, but I think that the
blue third is more of a neutral third, and the b5 can be just about
anywhere...

Thanks for the uncsientific study Graham.

Bob Valentine

Robert Valentine wrote,

>One thing that I looked around for in this discussion was some kind of
>sum or difference tone explanation for a preference for a high third. As
>close as I could come to anything was that the sum tone of the 5:4
>and 3:2 is an 11:4, which is both a 'non-Western' and 'strong' overtone.

If the music is heard "live", I doubt sum tones would be an important
factor. As I recall, there are around 6 difference tones (such as x-y, 2x-y,
3x-2y, etc.) that are normally louder than the loudest sum tone.