[CAUT] ET vs UET

[Fred Sturm]

On Apr 20, 2010, at 4:23 PM, Laurence Libin wrote:

> Fred's qualifiers "reasonable" and "fairly refined" get to the crux.  
> To my thinking ET is a very precise condition, not a spectrum, and  
> any approximation therefore isn't ET. Like, you can't be a little  
> bit pregnant; either you are or you aren't (well, not you, Fred).  
> Referring way back in this discussion, I reiterate my opinion that  
> ET is an ideal (like any other precise system) often compromised  
> unintentionally or deliberately in practice, and I believe this has  
> always been true. Whether or how much the deviations matter in music  
> performance is something else again.


	And that is precisely what I was talking about considerably earlier  
in this thread: at what point do variances become significant? If we  
are talking about UETs with a shape, at what point to the differences  
that make up that shape become significant?
	My own take is that, in fact, ET is simply a practical solution to  
the "tuning problem" that distributes the problems evenly. And that in  
practical application, it doesn't need to be scientifically precise to  
serve its purpose. I believe ET should be seen as a fairly wide  
spectrum. In fact, I am tending to believe "Representative Victorian  
Moore" should be considered a variant of ET, as I have found nobody  
yet who can distinguish it in a blind test from ET (blind test  
listening to recordings of the same music in both tunings).
	Musicians don't agonize over tuning. They are careful, but not  
obsessive. If you ever hear a violinist working and working to get the  
fifths precise within one cent, you know you are watching an amateur.  
Professionals do what is good enough, rapidly and securely. So do  
other musicians. On the piano, we need to obsess on unisons in  
particular, because they affect the tone color and other attributes.  
We don't need to obsess as much over the temperament, but we do  
because we have been told that when we get it perfect, that is  
noticeably better. Experience tends to show that this is not the case,  
that nobody notices (within certain parameters, of course).
	
Regards,
Fred Sturm
fssturm at unm.edu
http://www.youtube.com/fredsturm

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20100420/420871d9/attachment.htm>