18 Apr
2010
18 Apr
'10
4:42 a.m.
On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 9:38 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody(a)gmail.com> wrote:
How easy is it to understand (hear and sing) the
difference between an
equal-tempered major triad, and a just or a Werckmeister-III etc?
Think timbre. For any given chord, we can tolerate small amounts of
mistuning without being able to distinguish between them, but there
are different ways the sound varies proportionally with mistuning.
Complex harmonies are much like template-matching, but a chord can
have small differences in rates of beating of pairs of partials or
dissonances. Generally, for short enough chord durations, tunings
are irrelevant--only the approximation of just tempered tuning is
important, and the chord is judged more as being 'in-tune' or
'out-of-tune'.
A just-temperament tuned chord with a harmonic spectrum instrument
will have minimal amounts of beating and dissonance among other
tunings with the same instrument.
I've played with micro-tuning a little bit and I never miss a chance
to say I'm a fan of William Sethares' book, "Tuning timbre spectrum
sound".