source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 31 Aug 1996 10:36:02 -0700 Subject: From McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: errors real & imagined -- In digest 763 Paul Erlich mentions: "As for factual errors, [mclaren's] post on meantone tuning was full of 'em. One Tuning Digest consisted entirely of my slam of that post. Care to reply?" -- Paul Erlich My reply is: Paul Erlich is exactly correct. Thanks for pointing this out, Paul. In retrospect it's clear that my post on meantone tuning was not only full of errors, but unclear and confusing. Mea culpa. Erlich goes on to say: "If I am expected to get your CPS/SCALA joke, surely it is not unreasonable for me to expect you to take my critical comments with a sense of humor, or for someone else to compare you with their antisemitic uncle without fearing a libel charge." (No one need fear a libel charge from li'l ole me. Libel threats are for dweebs and lusers.) Presumably Paul is referring to gtaylor's hilariously amusing stories about anti-Semitic uncles. Pardon the hell out of me, but I don't see a damn thing funny about anti-Semitism. If you visit the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. you'll see one entire room with nothing but the photographs and the shoes of a whole shetl full of men, women and children murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. When you leave that room, you'll be shaking. I don't find that hilariously amusing. I guess I have to "lighten up." Maybe then I'll be able to snicker and giggle when studying the boxcars in which families were transported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. -- In post 757, however, Paul Erlich with great acumen made several excellent points about the theory of consonance according to small integer ratios. What's particularly fascinating is the fact that both Paul Erlich and William Alves hear the neutral third as discordant, while to me it clearly sounds consonant. One of the most valuable services a forum like this one can perform is to allow us to compare notes. The idea that someone might find the neutral third discordant would never have occurred to me: and the idea that the 7/5 might be heard as *more* concordant is extremely surprising. Ivor Darreg used to point out that people tended to prefer either 19 or 22 tone equal temperament, and their preferences were generally strong. If you liked 22, you rejected 19 violently--or vice versa. At least one tuning forum member has decried 22-TET as "slimy," which presumably indicates a negative reaction to 22-TET. For my part, I prefer 22 to 19. Ivor pointed out that such consistently binary and strong preferences (hardly anyone likes both tunings equally, or is indifferent to both) might indicate personality traits. Ivor suggested that something like the Minnesota Multiphasic might be done with tunings, rather than written cues. Expanding on that idea, it occurs to me that personality types might be distinguished by, say, preference for 7/5 as opposed to the geometric mean neutral third. This is highly speculative. Anyone care to test a group of students with both Minnesota Multiphasic *and* tuning preference and see if there's a correlation twixt various personality traits and various tuning preferences? In correspondence, I recently ventured the hypothesis that folks who like primarily near-just equal temperaments like 31-TET, 19-TET, 22-TET, 41-TET, 53-TET, etc., might fall toward the left-brain purist control-freak end of the personality spectrum, while folks who mainly enjoy wildly non-twelvular equal temepraments like 13-TET, 11-TET, 9-TET, 23-TET, etc. might fall toward the right-brain intuitive New Age hippy-dippy end of the personality spectrum. Again, this is mere persiflage and wild speculation. However, the fact remains that people do tend to fall in distinct groups as regards their response to different classes of tunings. So perhaps there's a personality component involved. It'd be fascinating to play real microtonal music, tally preferences, and compare the results to personality test scores. --mclaren Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 1 Sep 1996 07:28 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA11419; Sun, 1 Sep 1996 07:29:35 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA11336 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id WAA07219; Sat, 31 Aug 1996 22:29:33 -0700 Date: Sat, 31 Aug 1996 22:29:33 -0700 Message-Id: <3229384B.D6C@sprynet.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu