On Feb 25, 2009, at 3:58 PM, Ed Sutton wrote: > Yes, but...unfortunately, in the material Tim Farley sent me, he > also refers to his offsets as the Jean Baptiste Romeiu 1/7 Syntonic > comma meantone...presumably that is what he told Serkin. No doubt there is some confusion somewhere. But there is no doubt whatsoever about the facts. 1/7 meantone is a very precise label. Putting Romieu's name next to it is beside the point (he is merely the "historical source" to show that somebody in the 18th century theorized about this particular formula). Mean tone uses the syntonic comma, which is a precise mathematical term. 1/7, 1/6, 1/4, any portion selected is used in precisely the same way in any mean tone tuning system. All 11 5ths are tempered by that precise amount (and there is a wolf 5th to take up the slack at the end). Doing the math, there is absolutely no question that the figures given by Tim Farley are those corresponding to 1/8 comma. And those given by David Miller, and taken from Jason Kanter's RollingBall site are 1/7 comma. The only confusion is how and why Tim Farley said his figures were 1/7 comma, and told Peter Serkin the same. There are any number of possible explanations, including a likely one that he sent out the figures from the wrong chart by accident, and didn't pick up on the mistake. I agree it would be a good idea for Peter Serkin (or his manager or agent) to have a set of offsets to send, rather than just a name of a tuning. Though the name in this case is quite precise. I am not particularly surprised that Serkin would not notice the difference. It is subtle, relatively speaking. If you are already used to one, the other won't sound much different. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20090225/457601ff/attachment.html>
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