source file: m1415.txt Date: Thu, 14 May 1998 08:40:14 -0400 Subject: threeness and more From: Daniel Wolf Carl Lumma wrote, >But if I'm breathing, I'm = >not at a loss to hear the "3-ness" in the 81/64 or the "5-ness" in the 5/4. Paul Erlich responded: >I don't know what you're breathing. Consider the following intervals: (etc.) Erlich is right that you are not going to pick the 'threeness' out of .1 cents stops between a moving and a fixed sine wave. 'Threeness' is going = to have to be heard contextually, that is, an 81/64 will be heard as a 3/2 above a pitch understood, again contextually, to be 27/16 above a known tonic. I happen to find it easier to hear the 'nineness' in an 81/64. Against a drone, I sing up a 9/8 major second and then singing either a 10/9 or 9/8= above this tone is quite easy. Following the long duration work of La Monte Young and my own installatio= ns with massive clusters of pitches related in frequency as pries, I am increasingly convinced that perception of higher-prime relationships is possible but that (a) the conditions of presentation must differ qualitatively and quantitatively from conventional concert music situations, and (b) the physiologically means of perception is either a radical extension of the standard listening mechanism or an altogether alternative mechanism, perhaps spatial. One example. An installation that I made for the Kunsthalle Zug, in Switzerland, used ratios involving prime numbers below 1024 in clusters o= f up to 20 tones. As insurance against a failure by my Rayna synthesizer, I= made several DAT recordings at different sampling rates, all of which had= increased beating when compared with the original. To get around this, I retuned the original to the 'key' of the DAT sampling rate, and the excessive beating disappeared. Although the sampling rate of the DAT was = - according to all standard theory - adequate to perception, all of the sta= ff members of the Kunsthalle could immediately discriminate between the original Rayna version and the DAT sampling. Clearly, although we were no= t dealing with a traditional music-functional distinction - as found betwee= n ratios of 3 and 5 - the distinctions between these higher prime identitie= s were articulated in the installation. = =