source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 05:17:41 -0700 Subject: temperament From: Christian Sabat Montiel >Harpsichords and Related Topics >Tom Parsons >Subject: Re: temperaments > I read somewhere once (in Barbour?) that e.t. > was first worked out by a Chinese mathematician incredibly far back in > the past. And the author pointed out that in the Chinese musical > system there was no need for it. > (If someone knows more recent scholarship on this, I'd be interested > to hear of it.) On 27 Nov - 1 Dec 1978, there was an ASA Joint Meeting at Sheraton-Waikiki Hotel, Honolulu, Hawaii, where I spoke on Dynamic Gamut. (See JASA, Vol. 64, Supplement No. 1, Fall 1978, p. S151 CCC8, Dynamic Gamut). Inmediately before my lecture (p. S151, CCC7) Mr. George W. Mulder spoke ((National Music Camp Division of the Interlochen Center for the Arts, Interlochen, MI 49643)) on " A striving toward equal temperament: Prince Tsai- yu in 1595 at Peking, Simon Stevin shortly thereafter at Amsterdam. ABSTRACT "Did East meet West in 1595? Equal tempered approximations 1595, Peking and Amsterdam or the riddle of the abacus and logarithms. Both Tsai-yu and Stevin set down the mathematical figures for equal temperament. Tsai-yu calculated the 12th root of 2 by means of the abacus, carefully computing the appropriate root for each note separately - correct to nine decimals. Stevin's calculations on the other hand, finding 11 mean-proportional parts between 2 and 1, were based upon the 45th proposition of his French arithmetic." --Eduardo Eduardo Sabat-Garibaldi E-mail : esabat@chasque.apc.org Simon Bolivar 1260 Phone: (05982) 78 09 52 11300 Montevideo FAX : (05982) 29 83 91 (Automatico) Uruguay Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 11 Oct 1995 08:57 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id XAA11869; Tue, 10 Oct 1995 23:57:03 -0700 Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 23:57:03 -0700 Message-Id: <307BDC5F@msmail.emap.co.uk> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu