source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 16:41:42 -0800 Subject: Re: Johnny's Lingua Franca Notation From: Johnny Reinhard How arbitrary are cents? Surprisingly, not very. Firstly, they are at the threshold of human hearing for pitch differentiation. Secondly, allow total intellectualization of all pitch "points" on the line of frequency to be immediately apprehended. History has done away with Savarts which are larger than cents in favor a system which, thankfully, anchors on good old 12-tone ET (e.g. 100 cents is a semitone, 200 cents is a whole tone, etc.) Dare we admit that this is of value? Amazingly, most musicians do not realize that the ear does not hear logarithmically. It learns by rote. For example, sing alound a 7/4 and then try to find the logarithmic midpoint that bisects the interval. Knowing this interval is made up of 969 cents, one can calculate a center. If music is reduced to mathematics, why not cents? Most important - players constantly reference new pitches to constants (like open strings, harmonics, etc.) in order to find exotics. Microtonal notations that represents moving relationships that lose their constants, make it difficult to come up with the necessary hand positions to produce the appropriate sounds. It must relate. No, Gary, you don't need to mix your tunings in a single piece. But a player on an AFMM series will surely be alternating tunings from piece to piece on a single program. Re: polymicrotonal compositions: perhaps just as their are conservatives and liberals, there will be those that want to stay safe and those that want to go outside. I want to stay safe by composing intervals that I can "hear." However a listener cares not what the laws of interaction are for the soup of pitches, only that they express something that transcends their experience. Johnny Reinhard American Festival of Microtonal Music 318 East 70th Street, Suite 5FW New York, New York 10021 USA (212)517-3550/fax (212) 517-5495 reinhard@ios.com Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 1 Nov 1996 02:51 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA01822; Fri, 1 Nov 1996 02:52:10 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA01111 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id RAA29840; Thu, 31 Oct 1996 17:52:07 -0800 Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 17:52:07 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu