source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 20:32:17 -0800 Subject: Re: TUNING digest 984 From: John Starrett It's that Starrett creep again- Neil Haverstick wrote " Forgive me if I didn't get it quite right, but I believe Starrett said that the Harmonic series was more of a mental construct than a physical reality, because nothing in Nature vibrates precisely at the frequencies of the Harmonic series. If this be the case, then what's all the fuss about "just intonation" in the first place?" I suppose I may have been insufficiently clear in my writing. My point is (and perhaps I misunderstood Neil's original statement) that I don't see how one can say that the harmonic series is the "pure" basis for music as opposed to, for instance, the priciple of small number ratios. Certainly people can hear the harmonic partials of a complex tone and infer melody and harmony from that, but they can also hear simple tones in "simple" pitch relationships and infer melody and harmony from this. If we really have some kind of "built in" mechanism for understanding and appreciating constructions of sound, it seems more likely to me that this mechanism is broadly based, and encompasses a wide variety of different pitch realtionships. I love the sound of harmonic series music-I sing "ragas" in my shop to the hum and whine of the machine tools. But I also love the sound of 5/3 and 8/5, and they do not exist as ratios in the harmonic series relative to the fundamental except as a limit of a subsequence of the series (divided into the octave as usual). We have a natural bent to play music, speak language and do mathematics. There are deep beautiful structures in all of these activities, and human beings are complex and flexible creatures. We understand and create from many different points of view. This suggests to me that our appreciation of music is not so simple as to be based on the principle of the harmonic series alone. John Starrett Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 08:29 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA04383; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 08:29:37 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA04384 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id XAA26946; Wed, 12 Feb 1997 23:27:55 -0800 Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 23:27:55 -0800 Message-Id: <199702130725.QAA24916@inetnif.niftyserve.or.jp> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu