Virgil's naturaL beats

[Richard Brekne]

"Jim Coleman, Sr." wrote:

> Hi to all:
>
> Paul Revenko-Jones' post on Virgil's phenomena has stimulated me to
> thinking that maybe Virgil really has something here. Virgil and I are
> good friends and for over 20 years he has been trying to help me
> understand his view of what he hears. I continue to trip over his use of
> the word beatless, but now I'm thinking that there may be a sense in
> which he does hear something beatless. I would like to get the HT people
> involved in this discussion at this point, because there seems to be
> something akin to this in the equal-beating scheme of historical tunings
> which gives the impression of no beats when actually there are beats.
>
> I have heard the HT people say that when there are proportional beatings
> in a temperament chord, the beatings counteract one another.

I was thinking along similiar lines last night Jim... Bill Bremmer is often
on about a "canceling out" effect when tuning unisions. Perhaps we are
dealing with something along those lines. We are dealing with a lot of
partials intereracting when playing the two notes in an octave. Even if we
consider only the most predominant coicidents there is an awfull lot going
on. I liked Keiths comment about including (or at least not discounting) the
contribution of non-coincidents to the "whole" in this regard.

I cant help but think that there must be something measureable about all
this. Its like if you can hear it and utilize it as consistantly as it would
seem our colleague Virgil does... then some how or another it should be able
to pick up via our ETD's... or perhaps some not yet thought of variant of
todays ETDs. Yet another reason for moving towards multipartial displays in
todays ETD's.


> What say
> you, Ed Foote, Bill Bremmer, Paul Bailey, Owen Jorgensen? Could Virgil be
> saying something which you all recognize as one of the benefits of equal
> beating HT's? Let's try to pursue this without the personalities issues
> coming up.
>
> Jim Coleman, Sr.

I am curioius to how Virgil deals with rouge partials... ie really bad
sounding para inharmonicities.



--
Richard Brekne
RPT, N.P.T.F.
Bergen, Norway
mailto:Richard.Brekne@grieg.uib.no