source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 13:46:23 -0700 Subject: A challenge for list members From: Jeff Welty Hello all, I've been on this list now about 8 months and have found it very enlightening. I must admit, though, when the discussion gets too technical about ratios of super-rational numbers etc, at times my eyes glaze over -- which, of course, is not to say that these aren't important discussions. What I find myself struggling with, is that for someone like myself, a technical discussion may have some intellectual meaning to my brain, but what are my ears going to hear as the product of the discussion? Sooo, I've been thinking -- I'd really really like to have a library, a web page or something where I could go and get a synopsis of a technical idea, theory, argument and some actual sound, or MIDI files that would demonstrate the idea so my intellect and ears can be "singing from the same songsheet", if you know what I mean. Then I got to thinking in a similar vein, it'd also be very nice to have a library of music that could take one from traditional 12 tone equal step tuning, to a variety of alternate tunings, but instead of making the jump to *extreme* variation from TET, there would be a progression of individual songs that would allow ones ears to get accustomed to the final desired tunings in a series of steps. It's very akin to the first time I ever had a beer, I really didn't think it was all that great, but after a while I did develop a taste for light beers, but wasn't all that crazy about darker brews, but over the years, I generally wouldn't touch a light beer anymore, because I have come to a point where I much prefer the full bodied flavor of a dark brew. So, list members, what I'm asking I suppose, is to have my ears slowly seduced into enjoying alternate tunings the way my taste buds were seduced into drinking a dark beer! Positive steps are regularly posted in this direction, I will point out, in annoucements of concerts, or reviews of CDs. It would also be nice to know if the piece of music was going to sound totally bizarre and unpalatable if you were expecting something close to TET. I suppose some sort of rating might be nice that would let you know based on someone else's subjective sense how "out there" a piece is from TET. I must admit I don't have the time, experience or resources necessary to build either one of these libraries I spoke of, but I did want to make it known from my point of view these kinds of libraries would be extremely useful. Jeff Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 23:02 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id OAA20189; Fri, 7 Jun 1996 14:02:30 -0700 Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 14:02:30 -0700 Message-Id: <199606072059.AA27870@felix.dircon.co.uk> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu