source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 21:10:17 -0800 Subject: QC Meantone and Subtle Differences From: Gary <71670.2576@compuserve.com> A tuning lister opined, directly to me, that my assessment that quarter-comma meantone is not subtly different from 12TET, but very significantly different. I'd like to clarify my statement and forward on what, in my warped sense of humor, I found to be an amusing illustration of what I meant by subtly different. Actually, I'm slightly rephrasing it here. I absolutely agree with you that QC meantone is very clearly audible as distinct from 12TET. I found that it was more clearly recognizable than 12TET as a byproduct of my assessment of whether LucyTuning had clearly audible meaning to it. But my point earlier was that there's different, and then there's DIFFERENT. Let's suppose that at 9AM tomorrow morning, a Baltimore radio station were to play, say a short set of Bach Sinfonia, in quarter-comma meantone. I suspect that something on the order of a quarter of the listening audience (many of whom are fighting traffic on the way to work) would hear it and notice that something is curiously unusual about it. Now let's suppose that, at that exact same time a Richmond radio station were to play that same set of Sinfonia with all major thirds tuned down to 16:13, all minor thirds at 7:6, minor sevenths tuned down to 7:4, and tritones tuned to 10:7. I suspect that most of the Baltimore listeners won't hear the unusual nature of the meantone performance over the gut-wrenching screams echoing from 50 miles away in Richmond! Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 5 Mar 1996 14:23 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id FAA09989; Tue, 5 Mar 1996 05:23:20 -0800 Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 05:23:20 -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