On Apr 20, 2010, at 9:41 PM, Laurence Libin wrote: > So, if I were commissioning an encyclopedia article on ET (not the > space alien), who would I ask to write it? It's not a simple > definition; you can appreciate the problem by comparing the > discussions in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music and the 1955 > Oxford Companion to Music. If authoritative sources conflict, who's > right? Can they be reconciled? Tune in next week. Interesting question. Obviously one has to start with the precise scientific definition, but to be useful, one needs to add at least a couple other aspects. Which would require studies that probably haven't been done yet. First, psychoacoustic: what do people hear, and what do they distinguish. This is a very complex study, and would need to include acute, professional musicians to be really useful. The question being to establish the parameters of what is actually distinguishable as either ET or "other than ET." Second, practice. What do musicians do and what do tuners do? What are the parameters within which professional tuners are capable of achieving ET when they are aiming for it? (Aural and ETD should probably be separate studies). Some historical background would be wonderful - Al Sanderson measured a lot of piano tunings in developing his ETDs and the PTG tuning test. I doubt they were thrown away. There are also records within PTG of master tunings for the tuning test, and perhaps test tunings as well (I'm not sure those are archived for long). With respect to musicians, one would want to measure what they do. Have an oboist, clarinetist, violinist etc play scales (trying to achieve ET) and measure the notes. Enough of them to make it statistically significant. Measure pitches in recorded music to find out what people do in practice as opposed to what they say they do. Pitches of a violinist playing with piano, for instance, as opposed to playing with string quartet. Without this kind of study, it is mostly speculation and anecdote. BTW, for a good summary of the psychoacoustic study of "just noticeable difference" in pitch, see http://www.h-pi.com/theory/huntsystem2.html#2 (I met the author, Aaron Hunt, at the Wright State colloquium. He has developed some interesting electronic tools for varying tuning, including a "box" that goes between a midi keyboard and whatever to vary the pitch of each note at will, programmable. Very impressive. http://www.h-pi.com/TBX1buy.html ) Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Twain -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100421/e34fac98/attachment.htm>
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