source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 14:45:50 -0700 Subject: Misc. Comments From: John Chalmers Kudos to Jonathan Walker for his very clear response to Scott's questions. I have had a similar experience when I once gave a lecture on microtonal music to a group of pathology residents and staff when I was on the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Attendance at path. department seminars was really abysmal, so the organizer, who was also my boss (we were studying the immunogenetics of retrovirus-induced cancer remission in chickens , a lateral step for me from the fungi I usually worked with) decided on SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to stir up interest. Well, it worked and I had a large audience, but about a 1/5 the way through, just after playing excerpts of Carrillo's Preludio a Colon and some samples of Harry Partch, the dept. chairman stood up asked what all these numbers were. I then realized that most people know very little music theory and even many musicians are unfamiliar with the type of theory we discuss on this list. So, since then I've made a point of starting with the basics whenever I speak to an audience. Re Complexity: I've tried both Erlich's and Hahn's complexity algorithms (translated into BASIC) and have found them to agree for level 1 complexity in all cases I've tried. Perhaps it would be helpful if Pauls E and H would repost their definitions of consistency. BTW, back in the 60's, Erv Wilson defined "efficiency" a tuning for an interval as the fractional accuracy, i.e., the difference between the best ET degree and the JI value divided by the step size. While using the absolute value of the error is convenient, the sign of the efficiency tells one if the approximation is sharp or flat of the JI value. I might also mention that Manuel's "pipedum" routine, presumably based on Fokker's concept of periodicity blocks in prime factor spaces (tonal lattices) illustrates the type of "weird" behavior described in your discussion. Various ET's are defined by the inter which span 0 degrees of the temperament. For example, 5-tet is defined by the 16/15 and 81/80, 7-tet by 25/24 and 81/80, and 12-tet by 128/125 and 81/80, though other sets of kommata will also yield these temperaments (at least in the case of 12; I haven't looked at the other two tets). Dan: I think your project is very interesting. Can you post some references to studies of the relationship between brain electrical activity and exposure to concordant and discordant musical intervals? --John Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 22 Sep 1996 02:54 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA28280; Sun, 22 Sep 1996 02:55:42 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA26480 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id RAA15620; Sat, 21 Sep 1996 17:55:40 -0700 Date: Sat, 21 Sep 1996 17:55:40 -0700 Message-Id: <32448EE2.1BB9@sfo.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu