source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 09:39:27 +0200 Subject: Lucy comments on x/y/z scale coding system used by Bill Alves From: Daniel Wolf Lucy has apparently failed to understand that Bill Alves' notation is a specific and obvious notation for a modest amount of useful and valuable information for purposes of comparison with no design on making some ''code to end all codes''. To do so would neccessarily lead to a degree of specificity that would undermine the entire project, which succinctly identifies one sent of scalar properties observable in real musics. Whatever Lucy's own newer notation may do, it does not immediately present the (systemic collection/scalar collection/alternative membership) pitch information in a succinct form. And Alves', may I add, does not attempt to impose, with imperialist certainty, an external analysis upon systems belonging to persons or cultures with whom the analyst is insufficiently familiar. That Lucy's 1989 code is similar to Alves' demonstrates only the obviousness of the procedure; the tenor of Lucy's recent letter to Alves suggests that the notational similarity is, however, deceptive, in that the two gentlemen are listening to very different aspects of scales, that Lucy does not understand this, and thus the resemblance is ultimately superficial. I also beg to differ with Lucy's claim to priority for this code. It is implicit in the work of Bosanquet and Yasser, and Erv Wilson taught me (and perhaps Bill as well) in the mid seventies to design scales by using a MOS notation which was vitually identical, including auxillary tones via substitutions in the chain of generating intervals. Although I have dateddocuments from this study, Wilson was clear-headed enough to always insist that such methods were obvious consequences of existing music theory and a modest bit of set theory and I believe he would find expending much effort into such a priority claim to be silly. In addition, a close look at pitch class theory will reveal work that is largely homologous with this, if notated differently and towards different ends. And that brings us to the crux of the matter: a code like this is nothingspecial in itself and certainly not worth arguing over priority claims. There are an infinite number of alternative codings for the same information, but the conceptual basis for the particular assemblage of information chosen to be encoded is the critical point. On this basis, I would assign priority here to Yasser. A similar discussion took place earlier on the list regarding lattice notations for tuning systems, with several enthusiasts promoting Ben Johnston - although lattices were used already in the nineteenth century music acoustical literature: Ellis and - already triangulated! - Tanaka, come immediately to mind. The fact is, however, from an elementary mathematical viewpoint, the lattice was already described in complete form by alternative but non-graphic means elsewhere in the music theoretical literature. As Vogel and his students have amply demonstrated, it is a trivial exercise to translate a given functional harmonic theory into a tuning lattice! Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 17 Jun 1997 09:52 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA01002; Tue, 17 Jun 1997 09:52:28 +0200 Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 09:52:28 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA00999 Received: (qmail 11392 invoked from network); 16 Jun 1997 02:31:58 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 16 Jun 1997 02:31:58 -0000 Message-Id: <199706160229.VAA17217@riptide.wavetech.net> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu