Hunting the Natural Beat

[Yardarm103669107@AOL.COM]

John, list:
I have been thinking about Virgil's approach for several years, and with him 
here in Chicago, we get a lot of his thoughts more directly!

While I have a lot of disagreements with the language and the logic of 
Virgil's arguments, one thing is certainly incontrovertible--his octaves are 
pretty nice. But what I see being avoided in the attempt by him and everyone 
to define "natural beat" or the lack of beats is the fact that an octave with 
no beats is physically impossible. This does not mean that the aural effect 
can be near to beatless, but that if you really know what is going on in that 
interval, there are still going to be beats between coincident partials at 
some point in the spectrum of harmonics.

The direction my thinking has gone in to attempt to understand what Virgil is 
saying (since he can't make me understand) is to draw from the psychoacoustic 
theory of speech recognition where, to be brief, we recognize voices by way 
of what are called formant sound, which may be only the first two or three 
major structures in the voice pattern which are used for recognition 
purposes. As Juan Roederer says in Intro to Physics and Psychoacoustics of 
Music, "A broad resonance region that enhances the upper harmonics lying in a 
fixed frequency range is called a formant. A musical instrument (its 
resonator) may have several formants. It is believed that formants, i.e. the 
enhancments of harmonics in certain fixed, characteristic, frequency 
intervals are used by the auditory system as a most important signature of a 
complex tone in the  process of identification of a musical instrument". What 
this means is that Virgil is selecting out the most characteristic 
(strongest) harmonic structures to listen to in each note of the interval of 
the octave and then matching them as closely as possible. The resulting 
interval will sound out with slightly more amplitude than an interval tuned 
wider or narrower; but the fact remains that, although the ear can elect to 
hear to these sounds as ONE, they are in fact not, but groupings of selected 
(voiced) partials acting as a "single" formant tone. While they may appear to 
be perfectly tuned, they are not, and while just they are appearing to be 
tuned, the rest of the partial spectrum is beating at coincident partial 
levels above that.

Does this make any sense to anybody? So far, it's the only conjecture that 
makes sense to me. Thoughts, any and all. 
Paul Revenko-Jones