source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 18:38:31 -0800 Subject: Re: 1. mood made in mode: mad? 2. Bach From: Gary <71670.2576@compuserve.com> I guess there's a fine line between illustrating a point by a simplified example, and choosing an example where the enormity of the oversimplification distracts people from your point! My point about moods is that the minutia are not as audible as their cummulative effect. When people first study a tuning, they often crank out cent errors in approximations to certain interesting harmonies. Then they'll pump out a few example chords on their SoundBlaster boards or MIDI synths, sustained for five to ten seconds. In that sort of laboratory environment, it's pretty easy to pinpoint the exact sensation of 19's 7-cent flat major third or perfect fifth, or its almost exact minor third and major sixth. Those laboratory discoveries, however, become pretty hard to attribute much meaning to when the chords go flying by in eighth notes at 120bpm, as they often do in realistic music. It's pretty hard to tell a 7-cent-flat major third from a 13-cent-sharp major third when that interval sounds for a grand total of a half or quarter second, in among a forest of other notes, many nonharmonic. But although it's pretty hard to zero in on the qualities of any one chord, their cummulative effects are very clearly audible over the duration of a even a short composition. What exactly the relationship between the mathematical qualities of a tuning and its cummulative mood, is hard to say. Can such a cummulative effect be consistent across a huge variety of compositions? Yes, provided that you're listening for the right thing. Listen for something more like the overall hue of the painter's varnish rather than the colors of the paints at any point on the canvas. Listen for the position of the TV's "tint" or "color" knobs rather than whether the image has reds or greens or whites in it. Look for what turns titanium white into cream white, not the fact that the color is white. It affects all of the other colors in the scene similarly. Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 23 Feb 1996 18:21 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id JAA17681; Fri, 23 Feb 1996 09:20:55 -0800 Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 09:20:55 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu