Sanderson Temperament

Kent Swafford kswafford@earthlink.net
Wed, 4 May 2005 22:53:24 -0500


On May 3, 2005, at 12:36 PM, David Love wrote:

> While this may work well in practice, it might be a tad zippy for the
> RPT test.  Maybe that's one problem with the set up of the test.  It
> doesn't tolerate different tuning styles that well.  The tolerances in
> the temperament octave are fairly small and a 2bps fourth may be 
> pushing
> the envelope.

Not if it's within a uniformly wide test tuning. It is true that most 
master tunings are conservatively narrow, but aural verification is 
real. The scoring of the examinee's tuning against the master tuning is 
just a raw score, nothing more. No points are actually deducted until 
the examiners have heard the tuning error with their own ears. This 
means if an examinee comes in and tunes wide, he may do fine on the 
exam if his chromatic intervals progress smoothly, thanks to aural 
verification. Indeed, I know of a tuning exam where the examinee 
thought that the examiners _wanted_ a wide tuning, so that is what he 
tuned. The raw score showed him failing, but after aural verification, 
he had actually passed at the CTE level.


Kent


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