source file: mills2.txt
Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 12:57:22 -0700

Subject: Re: JI Puns

From: Paul Hahn <Paul-Hahn@library.wustl.edu>

On Tue, 6 May 1997, Daniel Wolf wrote:
> While temperaments can create ''stable'' puns by way of a kind of
> portmanteau construction (e.g. the interval 4 in 12tet can be read as a pun
> on 5/4 and 81/64), just intonations create puns by changing rational
> interpretations in time. For example, a given tone can be approached as the
> 5/4 third of one chord and departed as the subharmonic septimal seventh of
> another.

I don't see this as particularly punny at all.  A tone might be the 8/7
of a 5/4 chord and the 5/4 of an 8/7 chord, but it's still 10/7 of the
tonic either way.  If these are puns, then one is punning every time one
changes chords.  But this essentially drains the meaning from the term.

I would only consider something a pun (in more traditional terminology,
an enharmonic substitution) if a tone were reinterpreted to a different
part of the lattice, e.g. suddenly treating 15/8 as 48/25.

--pH <manynote@library.wustl.edu> http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote <*>
    O
   /\        "Well, so far, every time I break he runs out.
  -\-\-- o    But he's gotta slip up sometime . . . "


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