source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 12:55:34 +0200 Subject: Octaves (Paul E) From: Daniel Wolf I have great difficulty with statements about a supposed preference for stretched octaves. Once you get out of the ''piano zones'', the evidence starts to collapse. My recent posting on Javanese gamelan was one examplethat showed a statistically equal preference for larger, just or smaller octaves, and my experiences with other musics are similar - when the tuner wants the octave to beat, it doesn't matter if it is because the octaves are smaller or larger than a 2:1. I asked the maker of my gamelan what he thought about the ''pleng'' tuning for the octaves I had chosen. His reply was that, in effect, I had made aconsumer choice against a particular shimmering quality caused by beatingand that singers and rebab players would have to be more careful in the upper register because of the unisons, but that the tuning was not an unacceptable one. He added that the tuning was more restfull, more ''Javanese'' than ''Balinese''. So, the rationale he gave for the non-just octaves was related to timbre and difficulty in performance due to a lackof fuzziness around the pitches, to some cultural referents, and not at all to a intervallic preference for stretching. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 24 Jun 1997 23:26 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA28029; Tue, 24 Jun 1997 23:26:29 +0200 Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 23:26:29 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA28037 Received: (qmail 9104 invoked from network); 24 Jun 1997 21:26:01 -0000 Received: from localhost (HELO ella.mills.edu) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 24 Jun 1997 21:26:01 -0000 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu