3 Comments.
I have heard that musicians for a long time would distinguish between F-sharps and G-flats. My eartraining teacher once said that the interval from Do to Re is not the same as that from Re to Mi, although both are whole steps.
RadRob 12/18/2002
I have heard that "purists" (those with perfect pitch) dislike the averaged-interval equal tempered scale because it sounds "wrong" in different musical keys. The equal tempered intervals may be compared with Just and Pythagorean temperaments which maintain the exact-integer-ratio rule for the main intervals
- Factoid
- In the notation that 100 "cents" is the distance between each of the 12 tones in that scale, the accepted "just perceptable" difference in tuning is around 5 cents, i.e. a twentieth of the step. Some people have better discrimination; the 5 cent threshold is just a practical definition for "in tune". Many professional string instruments can drift significantly further than that in the course of a single performance (which explains the constant retuning in the string section between parts). Playing a synth has less charm in that respect.... (although we can artificially introduce such vagarities if we wish). It is the subtle differences in tune between the different instruments that, up to a point, provides the richness of the sound.
Anyway, back to the subject of scale. One of the advantages of the equal tempered scale is that it is the same in any musical key, so that compositions may be freely transposed up or down without changing the musical intervals. This major advantage is the reason that it's been the standard scale in western music for the past 200 years, and is likely to remain so for the forseeable future.
It's interesting however to study the history of music scales and compare the ones in current use today in different parts of the world. Even in the modern western scale, for a long time Europe and America used a slightly different frequency base for A4. Most people assume A440 was always the single standard, but 440 Hz was adopted as recently as 1939 as the international standard (and subsequently sent over radio broadcasts as normative). By contrast, Handel's tuning fork frequency is reported to have been 422.5 Hz for A4, and the eras of Hayden, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven all had pitch standards around that frequency. This means that their compositions are now played about 70 cents sharper than the originals – a considerable difference. Some instrumental groups attempt to recreate the original sound with "original" instruments, arrangement and tuning, and the compositions do sound markedly different. If you have midi files of some of these compositions, you can retune the synth accordingly and gain some idea of that qualitative difference.
Dear Webb,
Hi there, my name is Casey Danielson and I'm a musician in Washington, DC just getting into harpsichord music. For the past 8 years with different portable recording studio setups I have been recording everything from rock bands to gospel choirs, street musicians to thunderstorms. Last year, I was fortunate enough to work with Angel Gil-Ordóñez, director and conductor of The Post-Classical Ensemble (www.post-classicalensemble.org), in recording their debut concert at GWU's Lisner Auditorium. I learned a lot about large room acoustics and I've been hooked on large rooms and halls ever since.
This Winter, I have been studying acoustics and visiting large, acoustically-appealing spaces in DC while drawing up plans for a study in musical acoustics this Spring. I am working with and looking for classical and jazz musicians interested in having their ensemble or solo performance recorded. There is no money involved here—it's a free collaboration. At the end I give the musician(s) with a CD of the performance. While Angel used the CD of the Lisner concert to (successfully!) apply for grants, and some students have even used it as extra credit projects. So that's it in a nutshell. I hope you're still in the DC area!
Here's a link: http://www.geocities.com/digitizenature/unplug
Best,
Casey
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