source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 12:51:56 -0800 Subject: Lurker as Learner From: "Fred Kohler" Hello everyone, Although I have posted here once or twice, I have never introduced myself. I don't consider myself a lurker so much as a learner. I first knew something was up when, as a teenager tuning my guitar, I discovered that if I tuned the open strings' adjacent 5ths and 4th to my liking that the high an low open E strings would beat like mad. Something wasn't adding up. The search for why led me to learn a little music theory, a little acoustic theory and the basis of 12-TET. I wasn't aware that anyone was attempting anything different until I stumbled across Partch's 'Genesis of a Music' at the Vancouver Public Library. It was an awakening. During the Seventies I built a few analog synth kits and tuned some of the oscillators so that I could hear 7/4 et al. I decided 'normal' music was 'out of tune' and that JI was the only way to go. After designing some circuitry to convert analog synths to JI, I concluded that it would be too difficult and expensive for me with my limited resources to pursue with the technology of the time. I simply gave up for awhile. Ten years later I wrote a program in Basic on my Amiga PC to input and playback JI with the ratios based on 3, 5, 7, 9, 15, 21, 25, 35, 49. Using these as both numerators and denominators in a tonal array, Partch style, I was able to play four part harmony using 256 point user defined waveforms (both limits of Amiga Basic.) Again, due to the limits of my tools, and the feeling that I was working in isolation, I lost interest. Several more years passed. In 1994 in a book called 'The Musicians Guide to MIDI' by Christian Braut, I found out about the MIDI Tuning Standard and the Just Intonation Network. Reading 'The Just Intonation Primer' by David Doty revealed that tunable synths had been around for a several years already! When, in 1995, I started exploring the internet, one of the first things I checked out was the newly minted Just Intonation Network web page. That page mentioned this forum, so here I am. Since coming here I have learned as much as I did in all those lonely years before. I have learned that JI isn't necessarily 'the only way to go' and that there is a growing community of innovators pushing the boundaries of tuning into areas I never dreamed of. I believe that, with ever-improving technology of music making and world wide communication, that the theories and techniques discussed here will increasingly move out of the province of academics and isolated visionaries and into the mainstream. Thanks, and I hope I haven't taken too much of your time. ---Fred. -------------------------------------------------------- Fred Kohler, #7-240 Burnside Rd E, Victoria, BC, Canada phone:(250)388-7918 email:Fred_Kohler@bc.sympatico.ca --------------------------------------------------------- Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 28 Nov 1996 22:16 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA10725; Thu, 28 Nov 1996 22:18:30 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA11097 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id NAA07246; Thu, 28 Nov 1996 13:18:27 -0800 Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 13:18:27 -0800 Message-Id: <009AC1022A9145A0.5578@vbv40.ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu