source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 12:44:44 -0800 Subject: Re: TUNING digest 984 From: "Jo A. Hainline" On Wed, 12 Feb 1997, John Starrett wrote: > > 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. > Pardon me if I'm missing something here, but I was under the impression that small number ratios were precisely intervals found in the harmonic overtone series, ie. 8/5 being the relationship between the 8th and 5th harmonic of the series. Perhaps I don't understand the terminology properly. Bruce Kanzelmeyer Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 23:12 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA05677; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 23:12:24 +0100 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA05682 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id OAA15730; Thu, 13 Feb 1997 14:10:19 -0800 Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 14:10:19 -0800 Message-Id: <009AFD8B4C94F89F.204A@vbv40.ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu