[CAUT] ET vs UET

[Jeff Tanner]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Sturm" <fssturm at unm.edu>
> So we run up against the question, once again, of where the limits of 
> significance actually lie. Is it, in fact, significant that some small 
> minority can hear the difference and values it? (Well, it is  significant 
> for those people, assuming they are actually that acute  and sensitive in 
> their hearing and that suggestibility is not a part  of the phenomenon).

I am convinced that suggestibility is a huge part of the phenomenon. 
Consider the question I brought a couple months back about the clarinetist 
and tuning at 441. Part of the reason I questioned the credibility of the 
request, I neglected to share in my question. When the musician requested 
441, I teased that they were just trying to make life difficult for people 
with perfect pitch. And then, as if she felt she had a lesson to teach the 
guy who's been studying tuning longer than she's been alive, her 
matter-of-fact response to that was verbatim, "Actually, perfect pitch is at 
442." I could not help allowing the laugh to escape before I could restrain 
myself. Where do these people get these ridiculous notions? So, is the 
request for non-440 tunings or non-ET tunings founded in the same 
credibility as the misguided belief in a rumor that perfect pitch is at 442?

Do we not call out-of-tune chords "color" just because that is how someone 
else has described them? Where some hear varying degrees of "color", I hear 
varying degrees of out-of-tune because I haven't been brainwashed to hear it 
as "color". In fact, that is the scientific reality of what we are hearing, 
and in some ways the realization of that reality makes me almost feel a 
little more enlightened than if I understood it as "color". I don't mean 
that to sound pompous by any means. That is just how I hear it and 
understand it - not so much art as a scientific reality. Isn't there a group 
that still believes the earth is flat and the rest of us have all been 
duped?

I think because "success" in the music performance world requires the 
musician to have something different to offer, if musicians are told 
something by someone they respect, or someone offering some new idea that 
sounds like they know something no one else knows yet, they accept it, begin 
to believe it and begin to require it, no matter how unfounded and 
preposterous the idea is. This is how musicians carve their little niche. 
They must be different to get noticed.

Jeff