On Mar 14, 2008, at 10:49 AM, Don Mannino wrote:
> I was thinking that it would be fun to take a piano recording and
> modify the temperament throughout the recording! It would then be
> possible to listen to the exact same performance, exact same piano,
> but with different temperaments.
That would be quite the editing project! Along those lines, I have
some recorded materials that show differences between "representative
Victorian Moore" and ET. I have written earlier about my stealth
experiment a few years back where I tuned all pianos in my department
to Moore for a year (and heard not one comment one way or another).
During that year I did a good bit of recording (myself on solo piano).
I did one complete new CD in the fall, and in the summer I did a re-
recording of all the material from my first CD ("Brazilian Soul -
music of VIlla-Lobos). After listening to takes, I decided to redo
about half that material, and did so in the fall, after having changed
tuning from Moore to ET. So for that CD I have materials that are done
by the same performer on the same instrument, two different
temperaments. Not quite "exact same performance" but not too far off.
The final CD has a random mix of tracks in Moore and ET. It has been
mastered, but not yet produced and released.
In my own personal effort to get at how significant temperament
differences are, I have given these CDs to various tuners and asked if
they could tell anything about the tuning (asked in various ways,
sometimes saying "this is Moore, can you tell?" sometimes a different
approach). In all cases the answer was that they did not notice, and
were unable to tell the difference. I thought I'd go a step further,
and try to do a blind test, and so far I have managed to get one
fairly prominent tuner, who is a strong advocate of non-ET tuning (not
subscribed to this list) to participate. I sent him the full CD in
Moore, a second CD of mine in ET, and the Brazilian Soul CD with about
half of each. He listened and was quite certain that he could hear the
difference, and very positively identified everything. But he was
wrong. He identified the full CDs wrong, and the tracks he identified
wrong about 60% of the time (IOW, worse than random). This along with
other evidence has reinforced my belief that the range of temperament
"accepted and identified as ET" is pretty large. (Moore is subtle, but
has definite key color, very obvious if you play cadential formulae,
or play ascending M3s or the like. Cents variants from ET reach 3.0
cents.)
It occurs to me that some on this list might be interested in doing
the same experiment, seeing if they could distinguish. And others
might be interested in listening to examples. If anyone is really gung-
ho to do the whole thing, let me know and I'll send you the materials.
If you are just curious and interested in listening to samples, the
two CDs I sent my "guinea pig" are at www.cdbaby.com/fredsturm3 and www.cdbaby.com/fredsturm4
with streaming audio of samples of all tracks (I think 2 minute
samples of each, which often gives you the whole track). I won't say
which is which now, but will be happy to let you know later, privately
(in exchange for you telling me whether you can tell the difference,
and which you think is which. I'd like to keep open the possibility of
more blind testing). And I'll think about the possibility of putting
together side by side takes of both ET and Moore from my Brazilian
Soul recording sessions. I had been thinking of posting material like
this on my own web site, but I will have to create a web site first
<G>. Far too many things to do, and I'm afraid my top priority is
learning new music and polishing old. Not to mention getting the
irrigation ditches cleaned out, and the trees pruned, and, and . . .
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/caut.php/attachments/20080315/4d5e130b/attachment.html
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC