Re: [tuning] more on vibrations

We've gone round on these points more than once before, making one wonder if
it would not be better to have a closed and moderated list.

Anyway:

Particular _frequencies_ appear to have only limited affects on the human
body (for example, to make a certain brand of beer unpalatable), while in
sufficient amplitude frequencies occurring within broad _bands_ may be
associated with the capacity to disturb biological functions, e.g. to induce
epileptic seizures or to cause incontinence. I assume that most of us are
not interested in these capacities.

Chinese music theory has indeed associated particular affects with
particular pitches. However, the fixed reference pitch for Chinese music
("the yellow bell") has changed dramatically at several points in time, yet
the associations remained affixed in theory to the same tone names. Thus the
affects cannot have been frequency dependent, and must either be (a)
associated rather with intervals (which makes little sense given the minimal
intervallic variety of the tuning system), (b) associated with fixed
figurations or ornaments (which is somewhat true in Karnaktic music, but
does not seem to apply to the received repertoires of Chinese music), or (c)
false.

I would advise taking great caution with the work of Danielou. He was
basically a UNESCO bureaucrat with an strong orientalist viewpoint, more
interested in telling his informants what he thought they were doing than
actually listening to them and getting informed. His ethics as a collector
and producer of recorded musics were highly questionable, in the line of
"handing out biscuits to the natives" in return for recording their
performances, and his liner notes are often laughably wrong.

> And: "Western readers should be warned against making any hasty
> judgements about the practical value of the correspondences attributed
> to musical notes by the Chinese or Indians. These attributions are by no
> means arbitrary and are perfectly in accordance with the inevitable
> significance of musical intervals, although they often refer to certain
> kinds of correspondences that we are not accustomed to consider." These
> are ideas and concepts worthy of a lot of study and reflection, I
> believe....Hstick