Appropriate Historical Temperaments

[Geoffrey Pollard]

Avery,

As mentioned, these figures come from a book on organ tuning. I guess 
that inharmonicity is not as relevant when dealing with the harmonics 
of columns of air as it is with music wire. These figures are 
published in the book in a table showing that the A-Bb semitone is 
107 cents wide; the A-B major second is 194 cents wide, A-C minor 
third is 309 cents and so forth.

I have a setting on my machine which will give me 100 cent semitones 
, without any stretch  ie.  the A's are 110, 220, 440 cps. etc. I 
tune the centre octave, adding or subtracting the figures below and 
then tune the rest of the piano by ear. I would say that it would 
work just about the same over the top of your harpsichord tuning. Of 
course, if you tune the whole piano with a SAT, then I suppose you 
would have to 'layer' these offsets over a stretch pattern 
appropriate to the instrument.

Geoffrey Pollard

>Geoffrey, Lawrence and list,
>
>By "unstretched", does that mean these deviations should not be used
>over a regular FAC tuning when using a SAT III?
>
>I have an unstretched tuning saved in memory that I usually use for my
>harpsichord tunings and then just use the offsets for whatever temperament
>I'm using.
>
>>>If you have some kind of ETD  here are the cent deviations from
>>>unstretched, equal temperament ie.100 cents/semitone:
>>>A,  Bb, B,  C,  C#, D,  Eb, E,  F,   F#,  G,  G#,  A
>>>0, +7, -6, +9, -2, +3, +2, -3, +12, -4,  +6, -1,   0
>>>
>>>Geoffrey Pollard
>>>Sydney Conservatorium of Music
>  >>Sydney, Australia