What is "Key Color?"

[Richard Brekne]

Billbrpt@AOL.COM wrote:

> In a message dated 9/14/99 4:16:29 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
> kswafford@earthlink.net writes:
>
> << Bill Bremmer wrote:
>
>  >The beating of the intervals and chords produces a vibrato-like effect
>  >that is essentially the same as what a performing musician does when using
>  >vibrato.
>
>  Actually, there is a rather basic difference between vibrato and beating.
>  Vibrato is an oscillation of the frequency around a center pitch.
>  Beating, on the other hand, is an oscillation of the amplitude (volume)
>  of a note, often referred to as tremolo. At least, this is the way I was
>  taught.
>

This is true enough, however I think Bills point is that to the ear, the effect
is quite similiar. I had a pianist recently who was very concerned about having
his piano tempered such that the major thirds in the middle / lower temperement
area were as slow as possible (grin and as even as possible). In his reasoning,
he used the words "slow vibrato".  In a sense I got the feeling that he was
looking for a kind of coloring Bill seems to think cant really exist in ET. Thing
was he wanted the "color" of his ET tuning to be slow and rolling as compared to
the tension in an stretched tuning. He was happy with slightly narrow 2:1 octaves
from around F5 up over. It was a bit difficult to get the higher double octaves
to work out ok, and octaves and a 5th were a problem, but in the end a nice
enough balance was acheived. He then demonstrated what he liked about the real
slow thirds. It was kinda like he used the timeing of the beat rate as part of
his expression. Dont really know how else to explain this. It was a unique tuning
experience to be sure.


>
>  >There is only one ET but there are many, many possibilities that are fairly
>  >close that will be accepted by the contemporary performer and listener.
>
>  There is not just one ET. There are many different theoretical tunings
>  based on equal interval divisions, such as 12 tone to the octave ET and
>  seven tone to the just fifth ET, not to mention 19 tone to the octave ET
>  and other non-twelve-tone ET tunings.

Holding to 12 tone, perhaps this is, to some degree, a matter of sematics  ??

Richard Brekne
I.C.P.T.G.  N.P.T.F.
Bergen, Norway