source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 12 Oct 1995 21:46:10 -0700 Subject: RE 88CET From: MMCK@delphi.com I do not mean to disparage Gary's 88CET compositions. It may well be that one of his pieces is worth more than all my efforts put together. I do think I have the lead on quantity, however. He puts his output at about half a CD. I suppose that is between 20 and 25 minutes. I just did a census of my hard disk and counted 745 files with a total playing time of about 45 hours. Some of these are duplicates, and some are definitely not worth listening to. But most are finished compositions, and some have even received favorable review by esteemed members of this list. Probably somewhat more than half of them are my "improvisations", but the rest are arrangements of other peoples compositions. I used 145 different scales. Am I losing something by committing to all this automation? Certainly. But I am also gaining other things. As they say in the programming world, I can work at a higher level and let the computer take care of the details. I think it is like the difference between writing novels with a quill pen and a word processor. Instead of a spell checker, I use a harmony checker. But transcendental and irrational tunings can't be subjected to this form of analysis unless they are first approximated in JI terms. I think it's simpler just to work within a JI framework to start with. Put in it's most fundamental terms, instrumental music is an attempt to make machines sing. In the realm of mechanical musical instruments, Temperament was the easy way. That was then. This is the electronic age. Temperament is computationally difficult, and Just Intonation is easy. Marion Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 13 Oct 1995 15:26 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id GAA28807; Fri, 13 Oct 1995 06:26:28 -0700 Date: Fri, 13 Oct 1995 06:26:28 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu