source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 10:43:10 +0200 Subject: Comments on the importance of tuning in New Scientist. From: Charles Lucy The following letter was published in the British science publication "New Scientist" 31st May 1997. http://www.newscientist.com I thought that tuning list subscribers might be interested, and have some pertinent comments. Some may even wish to defend the importance of musical tuning in this widely read and respected scientific journal. (Hint ;-) Nudge, nudge!. . . . . ) Unnatural Tunes I hope that Charles Lucy succeeds in his attempt to reconstruct John Harrison's experiments in tuning (letters, 19 April, p55). However two different questions are involved. An alternative basis for deriving musical intervals may be of great acoustical and mathematical interest in itself. But its musical significance may be slight. Music as it has developed over the last five centuries has become an entirely artificial system with an elaborate logic of its own. This depends upon a hierarchy among pairs of related keys in which each key is regarded as all the others as a starting point, it being only the direction from it that matters. To make this equality physically possible, all intervals other than the octave are very slightly "cooked". For most of us, the difference between the "cooked" and the natural version is so slight that it becomes lost in the idiosyncracies of performance. I rather suspect that, whether one considers Harrison's or any other alternative basis for tuning, the same may prove to be true. James Iliff, Llandovery, Carmarthenshire. lucy http://www.wonderlandinorbit.com/projects/lullaby Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 9 Jun 1997 11:03 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02454; Mon, 9 Jun 1997 11:03:13 +0200 Date: Mon, 9 Jun 1997 11:03:13 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA02699 Received: (qmail 943 invoked from network); 9 Jun 1997 09:02:50 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 9 Jun 1997 09:02:50 -0000 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu