source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 23 Sep 1995 01:23:27 -0700 Subject: 88CET #13: Pragmatic Concerns 1 From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com> I'm going to move on to an all-new topic on this posting. John Pusey once asked about this sort of question. 88CET's nonoctave orientation poses a few logistical problems that we wouldn't normally think of from our experience with octave-based tunings. Tuning Instruments to Each Other One curious complication comes in tuning nonoctave instruments to one another. The complication is that you have to find an exact common pitch instead of an entire pitch-class to which to tune them. To illustrate this complication, think about the usual orchestral tuning procedure, wherein the principal oboe plays an 440Hz A, and the other instruments successively join in tuning to that pitch or octave equivalents to it. Since there are no octaves in a nonoctave tuning, a 'cello would have to tune to exactly an 440Hz A, which does not correspond to an open-string, as would be preferable. But this complication is not as big a deal as it might sound if the nonoctave tuning has a very accurate approximation to some other easily recognizable interval. Such a procedure for 88CET would be somewhat more complex, but certainly not impractical. Instruments could tune in pitch-range groups by unison, 7:6 subminor third, 3:2 perfect fifth, 7:4 subminor seventh, 5:2 major tenth, or 8:1 triple-octave below something like an 440Hz A. (In the triple-octave case, they would have to "aim low" by 8 cents.) Ideally some sort of electronic tuner would be used for such a thing, but since no tuner that I know of will easily read out 88CET pitches, such a procedure becomes more practical than it might immediately seem. Allowing each individual player in a large ensemble to see a tuner's display is certainly not without its complications either! A similar concern comes up in tuning the "wavesamples" within a single sampling synthesizer sound. (Ensoniq uses the word "wavesample" for a digitally recorded sound assigned to a short segment of consecutive keys on the keyboard.) I have usually found tuning wavesamples to each other by matching 7:4s, 3:2s, and such, more practical than using a tuner. Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sat, 23 Sep 1995 10:24 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id BAA27941; Sat, 23 Sep 1995 01:24:41 -0700 Date: Sat, 23 Sep 1995 01:24:41 -0700 Message-Id: <950923081920_71670.2576_HHB23-6@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu