What is "Key Color?"

[Kent Swafford]

Richard Brekne wrote:

>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.

This is a perfect example of a non-standard ET. I am sure you would find 
this easy to execute with a visual tuning device such as the SAT III or 
RCT.

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

I suspect that the ET you describe above with narrow 2:1 octaves would 
sound quite different from a pure fifths ET, for example. Equal 
temperaments can vary.


Bill Bremmer wrote:
>  Any Meantone temperament could be called ET 
>because each of the 5ths is tempered exactly the same, equally.


:)

No!

A good physical model of equal temperament is a telescoping cupholder; a 
representation of one is below. If you grab any two joints of the 
cupholder and expand the distance between them lengthwise, the distances 
between _all_ the joints are affected in like manner lengthwise; it 
doesn't matter on what joints you pull, all the joints are affected.

In tuning ET, any widening or narrowing of any interval will affect all 
the others, just as you describe in the pure fifths temperament. But this 
is not generally true of meantone temperaments because although "each of 
the 5ths is tempered exactly the same" the other intervals are of course 
not correspondingly "telescoped" to maintain equal temperament.

Kent Swafford


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