Objective EBVT History

[Jason Kanter]

I have been disappointed in you for some time, Bill. You  may have a streak of genius but it is intertwined with bitter indignation that twists your soul into peculiar knots. I hope you are able to achieve peace sometime in this life.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: <SidewaysWell1713@aol.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 16, 2002 9:48 AM
Subject: Re: Objective EBVT History


| In a message dated 10/16/02 1:06:56 AM Central Daylight Time, 
| jkanter@rollingball.com writes:
| 
| 
| > You can see for yourself to what extent the EBVT has been consistent, and 
| > how well it matches Bill Bremmer's descriptions of what he has been trying 
| > to achieve, culminating with high praise from Owen Jorgensen for the 
| > improved EBVT. I have added dates and sources for every one of the 20 
| > charts and related quotes, and have created it so it runs like a slide show 
| > -- click on the first thumbnail to start, then click on each chart to 
| > advance to the next in the series. Revealing. Instructive. Enjoy.
| > 
| 
| Fascinating indeed.  I think you should try those Quasi Equal and Modified 
| Meantone examples and see for yourself that wacky looking graphs often make 
| for truly good sounding temperaments.
| 
| I stick by what I've always said, the basic idea never changed substantially. 
|  The range of M3 sizes always remained within a narrow band.  I still use 
| some of the custom programs I created many years ago, some as long as 9 years 
| ago because they create beautiful, harmonious and musical sounding tunings.  
| 
| The problem with not only yours but some other people's mathematical analyses 
| of some of the aural descriptions and/or electronic data that I sometimes 
| provide (maybe with some transcription errors thrown in just for fun 
| sometimes too, who knows?) is that in order to really compensate for 
| inharmonicity, you never really can hold true to theoretic values, never.  
| Yet, the only way you can calculate anything is on that basis.  Moreover, I 
| never use the same partial selection as I think most calculated electronic 
| tuning programs use.  In a lot of cases, you're looking at an apple and 
| wondering how it could be orange.
| 
| I certainly do know what an imbalance is yet I still use programs which you 
| theorists and mathematicians have shown to have theoretical imbalances.  In 
| the real outcome of the tuning, they do not.  In the end, the desire is for a 
| musically pleasing outcome, not for a nice looking curve on a graph.  The 
| desire is for it all to fit together and that is what any good aural tuner 
| does, regardless of which temperament is being used.
| 
| I do appreciate your hard work in this, it shows a great deal of talent, 
| perception and analytical ability.  But it seems to me like the smart kid who 
| took Daddy's shiny new sports car out just to lay rubber and do "donuts" in 
| the parking lot.  The graphs do show trends but when *consistency* is being 
| scrutinized, anyone could look at them and say that nothing appears 
| consistent at all.
| 
| Now, just consider one good source of data for a moment:  the "Master" tuning 
| records from the PTG Exams.  If the ideal model of ET were always able to be 
| *consistently* tuned, there wouldn't be any need for these "Master" tunings 
| to be set up on a custom basis each time an exam is given.  But the truth is 
| that each piano is a little different and each Exam Committee's perception of 
| an ideal ET is a little different, thus the results of each "Master" tuning 
| are a little different but fall within a fairly narrow range.
| 
| Finally, I dispute the claim that Ed Foote had anything to do with this 
| except to be the jealous kid from the slum neighborhood who wished he could 
| drive that sports car but couldn't.  Not only would the owner never permit 
| it, he couldn't anyway because he never learned to drive a manual 
| transmission.  So, in hatred and jealousy of something he envied so much but 
| could never have, he chose to throw eggs at it instead.  All of Ed Foote's 
| comments from the very beginning and throughout the history of the EBVT have 
| been destructive and malicious and have been so intentionally.
| 
| While he has the right to express his opinion that way in this free and open 
| forum for discussion, doing so in such a destructive and malicious manner 
| only opens his own practices up to the same kind of scrutiny.
| 
| "Sideways Well":  the pit Ed Foote dug for himself to wallow in the day he 
| knowingly published false data for the EBVT on Pianotech. 
| 
| Bill Bremmer RPT
| Madison, Wisconsin
| <A HREF="http://www.billbremmer.com/">Click here: -=w w w . b i l l b r e m m e r . c o m =-</A> 
| 
| 
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