source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 05:24:48 -0800 Subject: what's real? From: Gary Morrison Personally, I disagree with Danielou that music is a hard science. I don't think of it as a science really, much less a hard science with universally invariable laws. Certainly some basic premises of Music Theory are more universally observable and agreed-upon than others. It's difficult, although not impossible, to prevent an authentic cadence from producing a sense of finality. But the effects of various variants on sonata form are a bit more difficult characterize in a manner that everybody of every culture would agree with. Many people won't even notice the variants at all, consciously at least. Invariable musical laws a lot closer to realistic when it comes to psychoacoustics though, and perhaps that's more specifically what Danielou was commenting on. They can be statistically quantified with much more universal applicability. But even in psychoacoustics, it's easy to show, as Bill Sethares has investigated, that how we perceive harmony is heavily dependent upon the timbres of the tones involved. I believe that when you really get down to it, the various theories regarding cent-level tuning are best viewed as models. That in the sense that they are based upon at least reasonably solid evidence, and allow us to use mathematics to draw conclusions that would not otherwise be apparent. But also, and I think that this is very critical, in the sense that those conclusions must be experimentally verified. Does a tuning that has lots of nontraditional thirds present an eerie sound? Try it; that's the only way to know. But unlike psychoacoustic aspects, there are some structural aspects of the theory of tuning and scales that are pretty much impossible to deny. For example, it's easy to show that it's next to impossible to build a scale of two identical tetrachords in most scales of less than 12 steps/octave. That has important effects upon the sorts of melodies you can realize in that tuning. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 14:33 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA05058; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 14:33:13 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA05054 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id FAA14982; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 05:31:00 -0800 Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 05:31:00 -0800 Message-Id: <199702130822_MC2-1131-DC04@compuserve.com> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu