Charles 𝄢 HutchinsJun 22, 2017
https://algonoise.social/attachment/2969 I'm reading _How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) _. I'm only 35 pages in. It's readable and does a fair job explaining how tuning systems work. Oddly, it seems to be aimed at non-musicians. It's also, like all books on tuning, slightly reactionary. Although it's much less ranty than Harry Partch.

Here's an experiment you can try at home: Use MIDI to send a major third to your sine tone generator. The first time I tried this, I thought my synthesiser was broken.

Computer/electronic music is not actually limited by the constraints of trying to get a keyboard to sound right, and yet we often use #12TET (keyboard tuning) without thinking about it.  What's your preferred approach to #tuning?

#JI #ET #JustIntonation #EqualTemprerament #Meantone #xenharmonic #microtone
Show threadCharles 𝄢 HutchinsJul 26, 2017
I'm still reading _How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and why you should care)_. It's got that weird leap, so common in texts from absolute beginner level to expert level over the course of a chapter, so I'm not following it 100%. The author doesn't introduce the term 'cents' until he gets to the historical part of the narrative where somebody invented the term. Before that, he talks about commas, a term he does define, but as commas are variable sizes, I don't always follow.
(It would be a nice companion for this book to have some pieces and scales in all the temperaments he mentions and maybe this exists? Doing a MIDI realisation is not 100% straight ahead as A♯ and B♭ were not the same note prior to equal temperament, except on keyboard instruments.)
Despite my confusion regarding terminology I find unclear, it is interesting to learn different methods of scale division.
Show threadCharles 𝄢 Hutchins
As far as utility to electronic composers, MIDI-influenced systems still imagine notes as #12TET (the chromatic scale in equal temperament), where each of the 12 notes has a whole number identifier. If C is 1, C♯ and D♭ are 2, an D is 3. This won't work.

If I've understood correctly, there was a popular #temperament of 31TET, where not every division is used, but C♯ and D♭ are adjacent steps, rather than the same step. (I'd heard rumours there was a 31TET #organ in Holland somewhere and I wonder if this is what was meant.) It might be really groovy to use this for some pieces, but doing this in #SuperCollider might be a bit fiddly - I can't think of any digital platform that differentiates between sharps and flats.
Jul 26, 2017 at 9:32pmWeb