From: mclaren
Subject: errors real & imagined
--
In digest 763 Paul Erlich mentions:
"As for factual errors, [mclaren's] post on meantone tuning was full of
'em. One Tuning Digest consisted entirely of my slam of that post.
Care to reply?" -- Paul Erlich
My reply is:
Paul Erlich is exactly correct. Thanks for pointing this out, Paul.
In retrospect it's clear that my post on meantone tuning was not
only full of errors, but unclear and confusing.
Mea culpa.
Erlich goes on to say:
"If I am expected to get your CPS/SCALA joke, surely it is not unreasonable
for me to expect you to take my critical comments with a sense of humor, or
for someone else to compare you with their antisemitic uncle without
fearing a libel charge." (No one need fear a libel charge from li'l ole
me. Libel threats are for dweebs and lusers.)
Presumably Paul is referring to gtaylor's hilariously amusing stories
about anti-Semitic uncles.
Pardon the hell out of me, but I don't see a damn thing funny
about anti-Semitism. If you visit the Holocaust
museum in Washington D.C. you'll see one entire room with nothing
but the photographs and the shoes of a whole shetl full of men,
women and children murdered in a Nazi concentration camp.
When you leave that room, you'll be shaking.
I don't find that hilariously amusing. I guess I have to "lighten
up." Maybe then I'll be able to snicker and giggle when studying
the boxcars in which families were transported to the gas
chambers at Auschwitz.
--
In post 757, however, Paul Erlich with great acumen
made several excellent points about the theory of
consonance according to small integer ratios.
What's particularly fascinating is the fact that both Paul
Erlich and William Alves hear the neutral third as
discordant, while to me it clearly sounds consonant.
One of the most valuable services a forum like this one
can perform is to allow us to compare notes. The idea
that someone might find the neutral third discordant
would never have occurred to me: and the idea that the
7/5 might be heard as *more* concordant is extremely
surprising.
Ivor Darreg used to point out that people tended to prefer
either 19 or 22 tone equal temperament, and their
preferences were generally strong. If you liked 22, you
rejected 19 violently--or vice versa.
At least one tuning forum member has decried 22-TET
as "slimy," which presumably indicates a negative
reaction to 22-TET. For my part, I prefer 22 to 19.
Ivor pointed out that such consistently binary and strong
preferences (hardly anyone likes both tunings equally, or
is indifferent to both) might indicate personality traits.
Ivor suggested that something like the Minnesota Multiphasic
might be done with tunings, rather than written cues.
Expanding on that idea, it occurs to me that personality
types might be distinguished by, say, preference for 7/5
as opposed to the geometric mean neutral third.
This is highly speculative. Anyone care to test a group
of students with both Minnesota Multiphasic *and*
tuning preference and see if there's a correlation twixt
various personality traits and various tuning preferences?
In correspondence, I recently ventured the hypothesis
that folks who like primarily near-just equal
temperaments like 31-TET, 19-TET, 22-TET, 41-TET,
53-TET, etc., might fall toward the left-brain purist
control-freak end of the personality spectrum, while
folks who mainly enjoy wildly non-twelvular equal
temepraments like 13-TET, 11-TET, 9-TET, 23-TET, etc.
might fall toward the right-brain intuitive New Age
hippy-dippy end of the personality spectrum.
Again, this is mere persiflage and wild speculation.
However, the fact remains that people do tend to
fall in distinct groups as regards their response to
different classes of tunings. So perhaps there's
a personality component involved.
It'd be fascinating to play real microtonal music,
tally preferences, and compare the results to
personality test scores.
--mclaren
