Re: The Psychology of Music

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 





On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 6:51 AM, Neil <djdualcore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Paul Davis <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/
>
> specifically: http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/scalesdir.txt
>
> You will find that there are over 4000 diferent scales there.

Very cool!

Another good book on the subject.  Don't let the title put you off.
The author isn't actually all that anti-ET.

http://www.amazon.com/Equal-Temperament-Ruined-Harmony-Should/dp/0393334201

Neil

I find 4000 a big put-off. Are there that many scales in use worldwide?? If it were a few hundred one could at least make some headway.  My guess is that most of them are some kind of mathematical experiments.

The problem as I see it is like this:
Mathematically: The number of scales is worse than uncountably infinite (powerset of R). So for mathematical tractability one needs to work with genera, eg
- Equal tempered scales (not necessarily only 12 notes)
- Well tempered scales (all/notes usable, all subtly different aka Bach's WTC)
- Meantones
- Justs with various cut-off rules

And then criteria for 'badness' http://x31eq.com/badness.pdf for comparing these

Musician-ly: This is a pain. I just want better sound than ET. And a few rules of thumb to make sensible choices.

Personally I can say that after I got my keyboards with a handful of tunings a new world has opened to me.  If only I could have done some of that with timidity/fluidsynth...

Rusi
--
http://www.the-magus.in
http://blog.languager.org

_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user

[Index of Archives]     [Linux Sound]     [ALSA Users]     [Pulse Audio]     [ALSA Devel]     [Sox Users]     [Linux Media]     [Kernel]     [Photo Sharing]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]     [Linux Media]

  Powered by Linux