source file: m1403.txt Date: Sun, 3 May 1998 02:28:22 EDT Subject: Re: Open letter to Ken Wauchope and Dave Hill From: Ascend11 I've thought about the matter of prime integers vs odd integers re the contribution of successively higher ones to musical harmony, and it seems to me that intervals based on the successively higher odd integers each contribute something unique in the way of a musical sound effect on a listener, so that the effect of a 9/8 musical interval, say, is, from a psychological listening point of view essentially different than a 3/2 musical interval. While there is the octave equivalence effect for intervals differing by a factor of 2 or 2 to the nth power, so that a 10/4 interval is psychologically harmonically more or less the same as a 5/4 interval, there isn't such an equivalence effect for intervals related by factors other than 2. I can see that from the point of view of building up a musical system, once one included 3-ratio intervals in the system, one would want to use combined intervals, adding one such interval to another - e.g. creating a ninth by adding two fifths, etc. But from the psychological perspective, I believe the ninth really has a different character than the fifths from which it is constructed by addition.