Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Thanks

[Paul Erlich:]
>Sorry I made you feel that way before.

Please don't be; I'm not! I'm very grateful for your passion combined
with knowledge. Interestingly, your "golden ear" may be reversed with
mine when it comes to synthesized piano voices; there, I seem to be the
one who is hard to satisfy.

[Joseph Pehrson:]
>It really sounds like just, only without all the "weirdness" of the
>changing... Or maybe I'm appreciating it more these days... although
>I really believe there is a substantial improvement in John's
>"technique"... (??).

I hope there is! I think this is still a long way from the "holy grail"
(whatever that might mean; let us say, my ears' ultimate satisfaction),
but I do find these latest tunings lovely! O'course, you have to
imagine me listening to 7, 'cause that's where I spend 80% or more of
my time...

[Margo Schulter:]
>Hello, there, John deLaubenfels and everyone.

Hello, Margo. Thank you so much for your warm wishes!

>It's very exciting to see such a promising technique developed in good
>part through this Tuning List,

Indeed this list is invaluable!

>and also to see how critical response can become more and more
>favorable as a new technique matures.

I am at most a teenager at this point...

>Just as in computer programming there are proverbially no nontrivial
>programs without bugs, so in music and tuning, trying any new method
>inevitably involves "glitches," "infelicities," and results which may
>not only illustrate the limitations of first attempts but point the
>way to next developments. The "adaptive tuning" saga so far may
>nicely illustrate these points.

True; it is still early days...

>Although I don't have the technical means I suspect may be required to
>process your files, and also the music might be a bit "modern" for me
>to judge <grin>, I am getting a great vicarious thrill hearing the
>critical response of people like Paul Erlich. When he said that your
>setting sounded like it was played on a fixed-pitch instrument, that
>was _really_ exciting!

Kyool! Are you sure you don't have the means? My tunings require
General MIDI ("GM") capability, which almost any recent (5 years?)
sound-card can be expected to support. O'course, you may not HAVE a
sound card, I can't remember if you've told the list...

>As far as the question of a base tuning -- 12-tone equal temperament
>(12-tet), or 31-tet, or something else -- I would be much inclined to
>follow the approach you outlined in a recent post: see what tuning
>makes most musical sense for a given composition. This is also Mark
>Lindley's method for deciding whether an early 16th-century lute
>piece, for example, might be best in Pythagorean, meantone, or 12-tet,
>all possible tunings in that era before 12-tet was "standardized" for
>the instrument maybe around the 1540's.

ok...

>I'm tempted to add that your arrangements might sound considerably
>_smoother_ than my idea of 16th-century 5-limit JI on a fixed keyboard
>-- or actually _two_ such keyboards -- using a 15-note tuning based on
>Zarlino's JI keyboard layout with G-D just on one keyboard and D-A on
>the other. (Zarlino uses split keys rather than two manuals, but the
>intervals should be the same.)

Smoother than you would prefer, you mean?

>Anyway, for pieces where diesis distinctions (e.g. G#/Ab) seem a
>feature rather than a bug, I would agree that your proposal for 31-tet
>is a very nice choice: it's documented by Lemme Rossi in 1666, and is
>close enough to circulating meantone 31 (1/4-comma) to be just about
>equivalent for earlier Renaissance and Manneristic music also, if your
>experiments at some point run in that direction. The precise
>mathematical symmetry of 31-tet might make things a bit simpler, and
>if you follow the "not-quite-precisely-just-consonances" approach
>sometimes advocated here, the slight difference between a 31-tet major
>third and a pure 5:4 might also be at least as much a feature as a
>compromise.

Yes, I have a first draft of a mapper from a sequence to 31-tET, but
it's got PROBLEMS: it's taking Mozart on a 50-fifths journey DOWN the
circle of fifths (C-F-Bb...), which I know can't be right! Got a few
bugs to work out yet...

If anyone can actually hear the difference between a true 5:4 and a
31-tET 5:4 (10 microtones), my hat is off to him/her. We're talking a
fraction of a cent here! The minor third and, more importantly fifth,
are more problematic, of course, but the use of the mapping isn't
tied to that problem: I would use it to identify a distinction between
notes, then let each "note" in the >12 set find its own COFT position.

>While I'm hesitant to make any proposals which might maybe be detours
>on your "road to Parnassus" which you are negotiating very
>successfully as is, I wonder about the possibility for some 18th-19th
>century music of a base scale based on an unequal 12-tone (or larger,
>as Paul Erlich has mentioned in a different context) well-temperament,
>for example.

How's that different from COFT without additional adaptive tuning
overtop? I seem to be be misunderstanding.

>The idea that occurred to me as that maybe vertical intervals in all
>transpositions could be equally consonant, but melodic steps or
>adjustments might somehow vary to give a certain kind of "key color."
>Again, this raises the question of whether such variations (originally
>in vertical tension, also) are a positive feature of the music, at
>least for some composers, or for other composers or pieces more of a
>concession to the exigencies of fixed tuning.

Well, it can't be doubted that for some music the out-of-tuneness IS an
integral part. But my own feeling for the most part is that, for older
music (before 1900, say), the problems of continuous adaptive JI cause
plenty of compromise in the intervals. And of course 5-limit tritones
are wildly out of tune.

But again, I feel I'm not really following your idea here. Could you
add more?

>This last question can be a very elusive one: if Werckmeister or Bach
>could have somehow come up with a keyboard with pure fifths and thirds
>everywhere, would they have embraced it -- or have found it too
>"bland" compared to the variety of tension in a usual
>well-temperament?

An interesting question! I can only speak for my own tastes. Of course
with my spring model, I "never" do achieve perfect JI.

>Sometimes this question of intentions can be an elusive one. When I
>see a spelled-out diminished fourth in a vocal or keyboard composition
>of the 16th century (e.g. G#-C, usually between two upper parts), I
>tend to read it as a deliberate choice for something not too far from
>32:25 (~427 cents), or at any rate an interval in meantone or some
>vocal approximation of 5-limit JI quite different from a usual major
>third.

>Thus I may not be especially pleased when I read a music history from
>40 years or so back taking a 16th-century composition with various
>neat diminished or augmented intervals of this kind and proposing that
>the notation should be interpreted by rewriting it as if this were
>12-tet, so that G#-C were just a "fancy" way of asking for Ab-C.

>For the 18th century, however, and also for 16th-century lute music
>and at least some 17th-century keyboard music (Froberger, maybe some
>Frescobaldi), questions can get a lot more complicated. For the lute,
>by around 1545 or 1550, 12-tet seems standard, and we know from two
>theorists of very different bents, the radical Vincenzo Galilei and
>the conservative Artusi, that the equivalent of diminished fourths and
>sevenths on lute to regular major thirds and sixths was a feature
>noted and exploited by composers.

>From a philosophical point of view, maybe I'd prefer to speak not of
>"pain" but of "stress" in considering either vertical or melodic
>deviations from some ideal of interval size or scale symmetry, etc.

>Thus while I might describe a tuning such as 1/4-comma meantone as not
>in any usual sense "painful" for Renaissance music, I would
>nevertheless recognize that the tempering of the fifths, for example,
>involves a degree of "stress" -- some stress possibly being a usual
>norm in music as in life.

That's the $64,000 question. For me, music is a place where the
greatest possible release from "stress" is paramount. There, it is a
joy for intervals (including 7:4) to be close to true in the midst of
frenetic 19th century (etc.) music. But I would not discount the
opposite experience, especially given how different our ears are (I use
the word "ears", of course, to refer to the ear/brain combination, and,
as for the brain, its subdivisions are endless...).

>We have evidence that in the 16th century this stress was generally
>taken for granted, but also that some attempts to remove it by the use
>of classic or adaptive JI keyboards (e.g. Zarlino's classic 5-limit
>scheme and Vicentino's 38-note adaptive scheme) were regarded as
>striking enough in effect to merit some technical complications, even
>if mainly on an experimental basis.

Yes... my own perspective is that the question of historical
faithfulness is very interesting but secondary to the question of what
draws one forward, whatever its mix of its roots. Well, I guess we all
feel that way, and the two don't HAVE to be in conflict, of course!

>However, these historical musings quite aside, "nothing succeeds like
>success." Maybe what you've done is something like my approach of
>realizing early music on synthesizer -- but in some ways more
>challenging, because you are devising new aesthetic algorithms, as it
>were, and dealing with very delicate parameters of melody and
>verticality.

Well, I won't pretend I haven't been challenged, but I do also believe
that this whole door is wiiiide open, and I don't want to puff up my
work into more than it is (I wouldn't mind this type of tuning
catching on in a big way, however; I think it's lovely!).

>Having added these odd remarks, I want again to congratulate you on
>the latest results, and also for your patience as well as creativity
>in reaching them.

Many thanks, Margo! And thanks to everyone who commented. Check out
the Mozart! And, if you don't have the means to play GM, buy a new
computer, willya? Do some dreaming at www.dell.com (tuning not endorsed
by Dell corporation!).

JdL

Thanks

🔗Shaun Van Ault <shaun.ault@oberlin.edu>

🔗John A. deLaubenfels <jadl@idcomm.com>

🔗Mark Gould <mark.gould@argonet.co.uk>

🔗Neil Haverstick <microstick@msn.com>

🔗Carl Lumma <ekin@lumma.org>