On Newton and Temperament

[Horace Greeley]

Swami -

Obviously, historians have overlooked Newton's later research on lint,
which, as we all know, is the fastest thing in the universe.  Why, it's in
your clothes the moment you pull them out of the drier.

P.S. - I wish I had a nickle for every Steinway pinblock I'd ever seen with
a tuning pin running through a dowel...

Best.

Horace



At 08:20 AM 2/26/97 -0500, you wrote:
>On Newton and Temperament
>
>Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
>God said, "Let Newton be!"
>And all was light.  (Pope's epitaph)
>
>Some rather interesting research on acoustics by Newton has only recently
>come to the attention of historians.  In 1702, after using a prism to break
>white light into it's component colors, Newton tried to correlate the seven
>colors with the seven notes in the diatonic scale.  However, he discovered
>that light travels much faster than sound, which gave him the idea
>accelerating sound to produce an "equal velocity" tuning, the first known
>super-sonic temperament.  Although certainly colorful, this new tuning failed
>to attain "warp one." Further research revealed that nothing travels faster
>than light, with the exception of bad news (which obeys only its own laws).
> Undaunted, Newton constructed a temperament based on bad news.  Although
>word spread rapdily, it was not very popular in the early 18th century (such
>a tuning would have to wait until the 20th century to find wide acceptance).
> A temperament based on bad news intervals had the distinct disadvantage of
> when the music arrived, nobody wanted to hear it.
>
>
>
Horace Greeley

"When you choke a smurf, what color does it turn?"

		-	anon

Stanford University
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