source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 08:28:51 -0800 Subject: Post from Brian McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: technology and intonation -- A tenth century text on organ building laid out the rules for pipe length exactly as Pythagoras would have in the Greek era. Start with a pipe and call it C. Divide it into 4 parts, remove one and you have the pipe for the low F. Divide the C pipe into 3, throw away one part, and the resulting pipe sounds a G above C. Divide the G pipe into three, add one part to it, and the result is D below G. The instructions continue in the same way, producing a completely standard Pythagorean scale that effectively translates the tuning of a monochord into fixed ratios of pipe length. This is a typical reaction to new technology. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, new forms of technology typically start by taking on the modes and habits of older forms of tehcnology. Only gradually does the new technology start to develop unique and novel modes of use. For example, early printing presses used type designed to fool its readers into thinking the letters had been written by hand. Each letter was carefully designed to imitate the shape of a letter written in ink with a square-nibbed pen; printers of the 1490s even used multiple typesets with different inks to produce the effect of illumination by scribes with red ink for special words, etc. Early television programs imitated plays; early Internet applications imitate magazines--for example, this tuning forum. The world wide web is not limited to ASCII text, as is this tuning forum, and soon sounds will be sent attached to graphics and text as a matter of course (this still takes too much bandwidth today--a 44.1 khz stereo soundfiles demands 10.5 megs of data per minute). In the 1450s Duke Philip's organ designer Henri Arnaut came up with the idea of modifying the Pythagorean system to keep as many fifths pure as possible while still making as many keys as possible listenable (i.e., triads without excessive beats). This was in retrospect a failed attempt to use the new technology of the modern organ for polyphonic music; meantone tuning did the opposite of Arnaut's procedure, keeping thirds just while shaving bits off each fifth. Meantone proved so successful that, according to Alexander J. Ellis and others, it remained the dominant form of tuning through the 1840s. In between the 1500s and the 1840s, many different peculiar variants of meantone were tried. Example: an organ at Bucksburg, build around 1615, boasts 14 keys per octave. Handel's harpsichord also uses 14 keys to the octave. I have pictures in my files of many peculiar-looking keyboards which have as many as three tiers of keys--one set of ordinary white keys, a second set of black keys with some extra smaller keys *in between* B and C, and a third tier of keys, also blac keys, which reproduce the conventional black keys but translated by a comma up. Mersenne's Harmonie Universelle is full of such illustrations, but many such keyboards were actually built. Between 1500 and 1800 there was no such thing as "a standard keyboard instrument keyboard"--there were a lot of different types of keyboards, since all musical instruments throughout that period were hand-made. Such extended meantone keyboards flourished during the 17th and 18th century, a period when standardization was not the norm, and when musical tuning--like spelling!-- was considered a matter of individual taste within the overall limits of the meantone system. (It's important to remember that because meantone is a general method in which fifths are altered to preserve just thirds, there are *many* different flavors of meantone. 1/3 comma, 1/4-comma, 1/6 comma, 1/11 comma--known as 12-TET--and variants such as the irregular circulating temperaments of Marpurg and Werckmeister and Kirnberger.) The next great technological leap was made by Henry Maudslay, who worked at the smithy in Woolwich Royal Arsenal in the early late 1700s. Joseph Brahma, an entrepeneur who wanted to build an unpickable lock to cash in on a highly-publicized series of robberies in London, hired Maudslay as an apprentice locksmith. By 1797, Maudslay asked for a raise of thirty shillings a week (to support his wife and children) and Brahma refused, so Maudslay walked out and started his own workshop on Oxford street in London. Maudslay's first product was a new lathe he had designed. A lathe is basically a machine which uses a screw as a moving base for a knife; the knife can cut wood, or if made of tempered steel, iron or copper. The 1800 Maudslay lathe was far larger than any of its predecessors (which were mainly used for ornamental work on small gewgaws) and his sliding tool-rest was perfectly mounted on accurately planed triangular bars. Because Maudslay was a fanatic for accuracy, he built his lathes to extraordinarily fine tolerances for the era; but the big suprise was not that Maudslay's lathe could turn out more accurate work faster than any other lathe. The real shock came when people realized that they could use Maudslay lathes to machine extremely accurate and regular screws and bars for use in *other* lathes, which in turn could produce *other* machine tools... Starting with extremely accurate screws, it is possible to build a huge variety of precision machine tools. These tools in turn make possible the creation of even more precise machine tools. The process builds on itself in much the same way as the development of ever-more-powerful silicon chips has led to silicon compilers which in turn allow the construction of even more powerful computer chips by automated methods. The end result of Maudslay's lathe was that woodworking, metalworking, manufacture, toolmaking, and factories were all revolutionized. Maudslay's lathe changed the nature of warfare and it made Britain the greatest sea power in the world. It also made possible the modern orchestra and the modern piano. How so? Napoleonic warfare depended on the fact that rifles were inaccurate. They were inaccurate because there was no way to rifle barrels with precise accuracy or to turn out standardized gun parts with high precision at high speed. This meant that if you shot at an enemy more than a few score yards away, your shot probably wouldn't hit. So Napoleonic warfare depended on masses of infantry marching in lockstep toward one another until they got close enough to mow each other down. Britain became a great sea power when it built and equipped enough ships to rule the seas; but this wasn't possible without turning out more than 1400 block-and-tackle units to haul sails up and down *on each and every ship* (and that's only on 3rd-class ships. First-line ships used > 2000 blocks!). These blocks and winches and pulleys were made of wood by hand. There weren't enough carpenters in Britain (or in Europe) for all the blocks the British navy needed, and you couldn't run a ship without 'em. Marc Isambard Brunel came to Maudslay in 1800 with an idea to turn out these blocks for the Royal Navy using his new lathe; by 1808, the first large-scale mass production facility in the world, Maudslay's factory, was turning them out by the truckload. To string a piano you need huge amounts of wire, and--even more important--you need precision machines to build the die through to draw the wire, and more precision machines to loop the wire at the ends, and even *more* precision machines to wind the lower strings. Maudslay's lathes made it possible to build such precision machinery, and as a result the piano rapidly evolved from a relatively thin-voiced instrument strung at low tension in the 1830s to a robust instrument with three wires per note at high tension and wound strings on the lower octaves by the 1880s--all due to the tidal wave of change produced in manufacturing by Madslay's lathe. Woodwind instrument had always been nortoriously dicey in their intonation, in large part due to the problems of precisely boring amd machining wood (essentially the same problem as rifling a musket barrel). By the 1880s woodwinds had reached high standards of precision (though they still depended crucially on those temperamental reeds). Moreover, woodwinds plummeted in price along with brass instruments as precision machine tools proliferated. The valves of brass instrument benefited most of all from Maudslay's lathe because of the precision tools built to bend and seal them. Eventually, wire strings became so common that they replaced gut strings in the string instruments, leading to the godawful screeching-train sound of modern string instruments and a corresponding increase in sheer volume (and a precipitous drop in listenability--the average violin solo noawdays sounds like a cat being castrated). -- The upshot of these precision machine tools was the 12 tone equal tempered scale. Musical instruments built by mass production could not be economically individualized so as to accomodate dozens of different meantone variants. To make money turning out modern musical instruments, you must *standardize*--all exactly alike. When you build only one or two harpischords per year, you can easliy afford to use exotic three-tier keyboards fitted to special custom meantone tuning schemes... but when you build 100 pianos a year you must settle on a single rigid standard keyboard. As soon as musical instruments became mass-market commodities, their tuning also had to be standardized to make a profit for the manufacturer. The result--as Ivor Darreg pointed out for many years--was that 12-TET was foisted on the musical world by musical instrument manufacturers, rather than by musical theorists, performers, or composers. As Lou Harrison has pointed out, the advantages of 12-tet are "almost entirely economic." In fact Ellis reports that meantone "sounds by far the sweetest" of all the intonations he tried; clearly *technology* forced 12 equal tones on musicians, and they went along *reluctantly.* With the advent of the digitial synthesizer the iron fist of 12 made itself manifest in the velvet glove of digital technology. As Ivor pointed out, once people started to hear pure unadulterated exactly precise 12, they fled from it in droves. Pianos and string instruments strayed gracefully from 12, especially in the upper and lower registers-- the octaves on a piano are systematically stretched, and vioinists tend to bend pitches whenever they possibly can. But with the earliest digital synthesizers, there was no choice--the intonation was burned into the ROMs and listeners and composers and performers were stuck with pure perfect 12. And the beats drove them crazy, so they slathered on hockey-rink reverb, they used phase shifting and multitrack tape and echo... And as soon as retunable synths appeared, a mass exodus from 12 began in earnest. Today we're in the middle of that intonational diaspora. It has been created and supported by the technology used in our instruments. As computers move ever closer to real-time MIDI generation of Csound-type timbres, it will become easier and easier to specify with precision *both* tuning and timbre--and to control the interaction of the two. This will produce the next revolution in tuning, probably within the next generation or two, based on the ideas of William Sethares, John R. Pierce, Jean Clause Risset, J. M. Geary and James Dashow. Hot diggity! --mclaren Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:32 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA11636; Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:34:02 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA13342 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id JAA24326; Fri, 15 Nov 1996 09:33:55 -0800 Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 09:33:55 -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