source file: mills2.txt Subject: Bill Sethares' Analysis of Detwelvulate! Track 3 From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@CompuServe.COM> Ooops. I meant to send this to the list, not just to Paul. Actually, listening again to the opening chord, I hear something a little different. The opening minor-third chord is about 3 seconds long before the first melody note enters. There is some sort of square, on/off change (no intermediary values) that occurs about once a second during that time. During that first second-long period, I hear something that sounds to me like a classic beat, but it vanishes after that first second-long period. But anyway, check out Bill Sethares' analysis below. By the way, it sounds different depending upon where and at what angle I place my head within the room. That beat during the first second-long period seems almost inaudible when I have my head between the two speakers, but is clearly audible when I have my head turned 90 degrees so that both speakers are toward my left ear. For you folks doing sample looping, that's something I've found to be very valuable: Don't declare a loop to be clean without moving and tilting your head relative to the monitor speakers. Some flaws in some rooms can easily be rendered inaudible when your head is at one angle or another. --------------- Forwarded Message --------------- From: Gary Morrison, 71670,2576 To: PAULE, INTERNET:ACADIAN/ACADIAN/PAULE%Acadian@mcimail.com Date: 10 Jul 1996 , 7:16 PM RE: Darreg Disc Error: track 3 mislabelled > Not only does that minor third sound wide from just, but it also beats just > under 3 times per second. Gary, maybe you should listen to it on a different > stereo system, this beating is not hard to hear. I definitely heard something changing at the low-mid frequency range, at about the rate you mentioned, but it didn't sound like a beat to me. I say "didn't" because of some results Bill Sethares came up with. He did a mathematical analysis of a certain passage, and the frequencies present drew two conclusions I found surprising: 1. Two pitch changes in a chromatic run were 48 cents and 52 cents. It seems likely therefore that it's not in 17, 19, nor 22, but in quartertones. 2. The timbre, despite its brightness, consisted of only of two partials an octave apart. I don't recall what he said were the relative weights. As for the beat, I suppose that that change we both hear could be a beat after all. The tone was bright enough that I expected it would have major wads and wads of high-harmonic content, in which case the beats would sound like typical phaser/flanger effect from a Tomita album. It would be a horrendous comb-filter sweep - FAR less subtle than that fluctuation you pointed out. But knowing that the tone is really just a couple of partials (and apparently low ones), then yes, that probably is exactly what such a waveform's beat would sound like. ------------------------------ Topic No. 4 Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 01:02:04 -0600 From: hyperpoodle@mail.sisna.com (Doren Garcia) To: tuning Subject: 11 tET mudtone bass guitar man Message-ID: Tuners, For some reason I failed to receive issue 774. Would someone be kind enough to send me a copy? Is anyone entering and maintaining this list in a database? >Beethoven and Haydn have played on this piano, which was tuned in 31 tET. >>K"onnicke built it with instructions of the Domkapellmeister of Linz, >Johann >Georg Roser who had ordered a similar instrument in Brussels ten >years earlier >for Mozart. Roser had several meetings in Linz with Mozart, >who allegedly >composed two little pieces for the instrument (according to >the manuscript of >Roser's biography), and which were regrettably lost. Mind-blowing! Thank you Manuel Op de Coul! Doren O'Garcia hyperpoodle@sisna.com O'Garcia Astrophysics Lab and Garage ------------------------------ Topic No. 5 Date: 11 Jul 96 02:55:49 EDT From: Gary Morrison <71670.2576@CompuServe.COM> To: Tuning List Subject: 7HS Tuning Comments Message-ID: <960711065548_71670.2576_HHB35-3@CompuServe.COM> I suggested that a friend at work, Bill Meadows, who does a lot of multimedia try out tuning in 7-tone-per-octave octave-repeating harmonic-series-based tuning. The ratios within each octave for this tuning are 7:7, 8:7, 9:7, 10:7, 11:7, 12:7, 13:7, and 14:7, obvious 7:7 being the unison and 14:7 being the octave. This is a tuning I've played with before, and I thought that Bill would very good at using it in the way that I concluded would be best, after I used it in a way I concluded to be less than ideal. Bill tuned it up on his Kurzweil K2500 last night and found it rather intimidating. He likes to use the phrase "out of tune" because he knows that that's inadequate to characterize a tuning except at a very high level. Anyway, here are some suggestions I made to him that perhaps some of you might want to consider playing with as well: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yesterday afternoon I wanted to expound further on how to use that 7-step octave-repeating harmonic-series-based tuning. You said that you weren't sure how to use it, noting semijokingly that it sounded "pretty out-of-tune". My responses to that are: 1. Hey, no pain no gain! 2. Is that really any more disconcerting than the microtonal scale-step size phenomenon you like to tantalyze your audience with? I'm refering to how you described 19 to Dave E. and me ... oh, probably 9 months back: Tantalyzingly delaying an expected melodic resolution by approaching it in small microtonal steps. Is the out-of-tune nature of this tuning really all that much more disconcerting? And whether it is or not, is that a problem? 3. One thing you're really good at, and I'm not (yet) is music involving long, sustained tones with faster stuff, often repeated figures, dancing on top of the sustained chords. This tuning, I suspect, is well-suited to that sort of thing: a. You can build large chords will little chance of a clash in the minor- second/major seventh sense of the word, because the pitch relationships are very simple. b. There exists a semi-standard mixing engineer/artist's analogy of the sounds they mix to a three-dimensional space: left/right stereo gives you the left-right dimension with high- vs. low-pitch suggests top- bottom and quiet- vs. loud-volume suggests far and close. Combine that with the fact that each tone of the octave has a distinct color to it, and then play a musical, 3D version of ... Pollock was it? - the fellow who first painted with squirt-guns). 4. What it's probably not good for is what I used it for on that tape I gave you early on, with the last three movements of a Symphonietta in that tuning. In that case I tried to build classical structures - traditional instrumentation, forms, melodies - with nontraditional harmony. Well, I concluded that what I did in that regard went reasonably well, but that that style is not what this tuning is built for. 5. Since when have you been concerned with audiences thinking your music weird?!