source file: mills2.txt Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 13:34:10 -0700 Subject: Re: Answers to Chris Palmer From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@CompuServe.COM> > First, do any of you have any ideas on how to notate scales that divide > the octave into more or less than 12 steps? The standard 5-line system > doesn't really do it for me. Many tunings can function quite well for traditional musical frameworks, and as such traditional notation is a reasonable possibility. The traditional notation of these tunings still allows you to convey many of their nontraditional effects too. Tunings of this sort include 19TET (TET="Tone Equal Temperament"), 17TET, most meantone- and well-temperaments, and some of the more traditional Just tunings (with adaptions to show changes of tuning reference). Examples of tunings that aren't generally amenable to traditional notation are 10TET, 15TET, 16TET, 22TET, 24TET, 31TET, and most nonoctave tunings, although 24 and 31 require only the addition of quarter-accidentals. > Second, being new to this tuning thing, are there any books that will > explain the concepts? Libraries worth! Neil Haverstick just announced that he has completed his street-wise musicians' guide to 19TET. A number of people have said that they like my EPS Xenharmonic Scales Disk documentation as a general introduction. But most of the commercially-available books out there concentrate on one or two types of tunings. Fewer are truly general in nature. But that is certainly not to suggest for a moment that they're not valuable books. David Doty's Just Intonation Primer, for example, is said to be one of the most definitive and easy-to-understand books on JI. (I personally haven't had a chance to read it, but have heard nothing but good reports about it.) Bill Sethares is probably about 3/4 of the way done with what I strongly suspect will become one of the great landmark books in the field, exploring the interactions of tuning and timbre - why certain tunings sound good and bad in certain instrumental timbres, and the reverse. (I'm helping review the manuscript for him, so this one I can vouch for from first-hand experience!) And then there are the venerable old books: Partch's Genesis of a Music, Rameau's Treatises, James Tenney's and Barbour's books, for example. And, down in the nuts and bolts, there are lots of books and magazine articles on Psychoacoustics. Brian McLaren has read a lot of them, and can probably make some suggestions if you're interested in them. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 20 Oct 1996 01:55 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA03804; Sun, 20 Oct 1996 01:57:18 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA03802 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id QAA27720; Sat, 19 Oct 1996 16:57:16 -0700 Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 16:57:16 -0700 Message-Id: <199610192356.QAA12125@netcom16.netcom.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu