Octaves Testimonial

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 yardbird  writes:

>But octave widths are a matter of taste, as is garlic and blue cheese.
>So once you agreed to octaves which beat twice as fast as you would
>normally allow a 4th to, you got to enjoy pure 5th and 4ths throughout.
>Of course how this played out on any given piano with its particular
>inharmonicity was another matter. But given that we were already
>swallowing rollicking and roiling octaves, this other stuff went down
>pretty easily. The stretch at the ends of the keyboard was near
>psychedelic.
 
>I seem to remember Ed Foote (or was it Jim Bryant) trying it in
>household with classical string players with an immediate and
>overwhelmingly positive response.

     I believe that was Jim B,  and it stands to reason that string players 
would go for this, they seem to play on the edge of sharpness no matter what! 
 Vocalists may be another matter.   
   It may well be worth remembering that the wider the octave, the faster the 
thirds, (thirds and fifths work in acoustical opposition).  When the fifths 
are slowed, the thirds are speeded up and this has its costs in the 
smoothness of the sound. Jim Coleman once wondered why my Young temperament, 
as recorded, sounded smoother than his.  It may have been because we were 
using different widths of octaves.  
    While more octave width creates an particular effect in equal 
temperament, I think there is more expressive contrast in the harmony found 
in well-temperaments with less. This may be because there are heavily 
tempered intervals available, (depending on the key) and the musical nature 
of the tuning comes from the contrasts between various colors.  In ET, these 
particular contrasts are not there, so the correspondingly faster 3rds,  
10ths, and 17ths, of wider octaves are not noticed as much, being lost in the 
ever-present haze of beating that ET creates.  
   In well-temperament, some fifths don't depend on an octave to be stretched 
to be pure. That is one beauty of the "expressive" keys, they juxtapose a 
pure fifth with an active harmony in the thirds,(keys with slower thirds 
usually have more highly tempered fifths, and vice versa) and there is no 
reason to heavily stretch the octave to  obtain them.  
    I also suspect that in ET, the ear is not as acutely aware of the 
tempering, since beating is ubiquitous and we don't really notice it without 
an alternative.  This tips the balance of favor to the wider octave, 
improving the fifths and double octaves with no real cost incurred because 
all the thirds are already busy.     

Ed Foote RPT 
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/
www.uk-piano.org/edfoote/well_tempered_piano.html
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