source file: mills3.txt
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 21:13:21 +0200

Subject: Re: Keys, Emotions, Tempering, etc..

From: DFinnamore@aol.com

Mark Nowitzky writes:

> My own pet theory is that as you listen to music, your ears accept the
>    imperfections in tuning that are presented to them, and knows what was
>    "meant".  So the same idea/emotion/whatever comes across, whether you're
>    using equal temperament/meantone temperament/just intonation/whatever.

Well, it might just be me - I hope not, since I'm basing mood-setting
compositions on it - but I find that the mood of a peice can shift through a
wide range of... call 'em "colors," for lack of a better term, when it is
played back repeatedly using a variety of tunings.  I'm talking about only a
few cents one way or the other on each note of the scale, like using 27/16
instead of 5/3, or even as subtle as 19/16 instead of 6/5.  To me, each of
the prime numbers has a fundamental character that exudes through the feeling
of any interval that uses it, so that, e.g., 11/7 sort of synergizes the
mood-setting characteristics of both 11/8 and 8/7.  It also seems to me that,
in general, the higher the prime number, the stronger its color.  That holds
at least through 13.

I've even found that, when my synth is tuned to a 12-note, octave-repeating
tuning using a single mathematical (integral) device, all of the 84 church
modes that can be played with it tend to have a common thread in the colors
of the moods they convey. "The colors of the moods they convey" is poorly
stated - I wish I could think of a more exact way to say it.

Remember, every time you change the tuning of even one note of a scale, its
relationship to each of the other notes changes.  When you change the tuning
of, say, four of the seven notes of a modal melody, you're changing a whole
bunch of intervalic relationships.  As long as the relationships still make
some kind of mathematical good sense for purposes of tonality, the effect, in
my experience, can be pretty dramatic, on par with the differences that
dynamics can make to tone on an acousitc instrument.



SMTPOriginator:  tuning@eartha.mills.edu
From:  DFinnamore@aol.com
Subject:  Iggy Pop and the One-Footed Bride
PostedDate:  19-09-97 21:15:47
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