source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 09:35:35 -0800 Subject: LucyTuning From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@compuserve.com> > I am not clear on what you mean by "Lucy Tuning." Is this some special > tuning concept or is it just your word for a flexible JI that hovers > around 440? Lucy tuning is a meantone temperament devised and promoted by Charles Lucy. Lucy periodically appears on the tuning list, by the way. After Lucy devised his tuning, he discovered that a fellow named Harrison had previously devised it. (I think Harrison was British from somewhere around the turn of the century, but I'm not sure of that.) As with any meantone temperament, LucyTuning built upon a circle of fifths. The size of the fifth is such that the major third works out to 1/pi of an octave (352 cents), in the same sense that 12TET is based upon a fifth such that the major third is 1/3 of an octave. That puts the P5 at about 695.5 cents, which means that it's somewhat similar with 88TET (not to be confused with 88CET). A stack of 88 LucyTuned fifths fails to close the circle by only about 3 cents. It turns out that LucyTuning is a very close approximation to Erv Wilson's "metameantone", which is a meantone tuning whose approximation to a 4:5:6 triad (specifically in that voicing only) has equal beat frequencies in its major and minor third intervals. Your guess that LucyTuning might be a form of JI is amusingly ironic (not that I'm criticizing you, of course, since you had no information on it). It's ironic in that Lucy has been critical of the small-whole-number-ratio basis for tuning. He claims in his book that small whole-number ratio pitch relationships are meaningful only because they approximate LucyTuned pitch relationships. Lucy promotes his tuning as a new basis for evaluating tuning as a whole. Not surprisingly, some JI enthusiasts have reacted very negatively to Lucy's book and his ideas in general. They have complained not only from the perspective of meantone being the ultimate basis of tuning, but also based upon how he promotes his ideas. In particular, Lucy apparently sells his book for somewhere around $300, and provides some sort of consulting service. I don't know for sure, but I get the impression that he more or less copyrights the tuning, suggesting that you can't use it without his permission, or something like that anyway. A couple years ago or so, I posted the results of a semiscientific experiment I did comparing LucyTuning to several other tunings. I concluded that it struck me as a decent tuning, but I failed to detect anything fundamental about it that would make it a revolutionary basis for tuning principles. I also concluded that JI was clearly a far more auditorially intuitive basis for tuning. LucyTuning struck me personally as only one of a wide variety of possible alternative tunings. It was interesting, but I doubt if it'll make it to the top of my list of tunings to explore within my lifetime. But I'd encourage others to make up their own minds. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 3 Feb 1997 00:36 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA23053; Mon, 3 Feb 1997 00:36:22 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA22918 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id PAA17768; Sun, 2 Feb 1997 15:33:11 -0800 Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 15:33:11 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu