source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 12:43:08 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: combining different tunings simultaneously -- In Topic 2 of Digest 706 William Alves wrote: "I also wonder what, exactly, is Brian's dividing point for deciding when a tuning is a combination of tunings? It doesn't seem to me to be a straight-forward question." This strikes me as an extremely insightful comment by Bill Alves. Theoretically, meantone tuning is a combination of tempered and just intervals--so theoretically it ought to be heard as a combination of two types of different tunings. But it never sounds that way to these old ears. The issue of categorical perception is an important one. There's a well-known range within which intervals can be "mistuned" yet still heard as members of the scale. Lastly, there's the issue of combining separate tunings as whole entities, each of which boasts its own internal structure. When combining 7/oct and 5/oct, for instance, the result does not sound to my ears as though it's two different small equal temperaments. Rather, it sounds like a gapped subset of 35/oct. However, in a composition which combined 15/oct and 17/oct my ears heard 17/oct alternating with 15/oct in a regular way. The first composition used a piano timbre, though, while the second used timbral and registral alternation to keep the tunings audibly separate, so this might not be a fair test. Na'theless, my experience is that when two relatively simple tunings are combined simultaneously, the ear often preceives them as a single complex tuning. The reasons why this will occur under some circumstances, while it doesn't occur under other circumstances, remain obscure. This suggests that it is not obvious how a 24-tone subset scale embedded in a 72/oct composition will be heard. Timbre, rhythm and tonal fusion will almost certainly play a part, along with tessitura and dynamics. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 14 Jun 1996 22:01 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id NAA13789; Fri, 14 Jun 1996 13:01:47 -0700 Date: Fri, 14 Jun 1996 13:01:47 -0700 Message-Id: <009A3DC53F4BAFED.50D1@ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu