Equal Temperament

[Hereward]

Just got the Duffin book from Guardian Books, , my head's hurting but I will persevere and survive and report back!

 

Mike

 

I have it too. Hard going for someone like me who didn't know a concertina from an onion a few weeks ago and not much about music in general either. Blame it on the UK school system. Terrible now and limited in my days.

 

Ian

forget about mean temperament unless you want to play early music on a violin,or other stringed non fretted instrument.

 

Thanks and I certainly had no idea of getting my concertina retuned. However, this book does contain a lot of useful information on music theory, and that is helpful to someone like me who always drove his parents mad by asking 'Why?' long after any other kid would have given up.

 

Ian

[michael sam wild]

I'm still driving my friends and family mad asking 'why?'

[michael sam wild]

Just got the Duffin book from Guardian Books, , my head's hurting but I will persevere and survive and report back!

 

Mike

 

JUST HURLED IT INTO THE CORNER OF THE BEDROOM! another pretentious book that can't put things into normal language!

 

What is it with these people?. You should be able to explain anything to anyone in simple language if you really understand it yourself. I asked if anyone could do that and the challenge is still open.

 

 

Mike confused. com/ fed up

[michael sam wild]

This is about all I'm clear on!

Please add anything constructive that continues the story

STARTS

 

Music and singing is natural, our voices can make notes that go up or down in a melodious fashion. Open your throat, make any noise and then tighten the vocal chords and increase the pressure . For some reason if you start with any note and call it Doh and continue upwards it will come back to the same note only higher. Doh -doh. This is commonly called an octave because in western music we divide it into 8 intervals (Latin =8 )

 

 

You can start with any note as Doh and it gives a scale

 

This could actually be divided into any number of intervals. On a non fretted instrument or a single string, swanee whistle type instrument or electronic oscillator there are an infinite number of spaces in between .

 

A guitarist can bend notes between the frets to get 'quarter notes'. This can also be achieved on stringed instruments, whistles, flutes, mouth organs. Ineastern music there are mnay intervals and even these have notes in between. It is the acuity of the ear that limits the number of notes that are useful and even then in song or tunes we glide between notes

 

Concertinas cannot do this as free reeds have a fixed note.

 

Western music seems to have come down to 12 notes between Doh and doh. As this seems to be what most people can distinguish

 

Any additions welcome please

Edited February 24, 2009 by michael sam wild

[John Pearse]

I found this site very helpful.

 

http://www.j2b.co.uk/tuning/

 

It seems to me to illustrate why close chords on concertinas sound rough using equal temperament tuning. You get beats all the time, which is common to all instuments, but in addition the harmonic content of a vibrating reed makes a concertina sound worse than other instruments.

 

JP

[Greg Jowaisas]

I found this site very helpful.

 

http://www.j2b.co.uk/tuning/

 

It seems to me to illustrate why close chords on concertinas sound rough using equal temperament tuning. You get beats all the time, which is common to all instuments, but in addition the harmonic content of a vibrating reed makes a concertina sound worse than other instruments.

 

JP

 

John,

Great stuff!! Thanks for the link.

 

Greg

[John Pearse]

And for the real masochists among you, try the 'why is temperament necessary' link (or the foot of the page ) at

 

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/temper.html

 

 

I also like the video demos at

http://www.larips.com/

and wish the concertina was as (apparently) easy to retune.

 

JP

[michael sam wild]

Thanks John

That's a really useful link I may be able to get my head round that material.

 

Unfortunately I couldn't get the sounds on my computer- any advice?

 

 

I liked the Bradley Lehman 'Informal Talk' and agree with his quote from Richard Feynman

'If one can't explain something in a basic level lecture, it's probably not worth knowing!'

 

Mike

Edited February 24, 2009 by michael sam wild

[John Pearse]

If you double click on the speaker icon in the bottom right hand corner of your screen you should get several slider controls.

Check that 'Wave' (and 'Volume'!!) is not tuned down or muted.

[Steve Mansfield]

This is about all I'm clear on!

 

Sorry the Duffin book didn't work out, it was an honest recommendation but, well, different folks get different things from different books in the same way we don't all like Seth Lakeman or Sigur Ros or Stravinsky.

 

Michael, your summary is fine - and let's face it you don't need to know how we arrived at the messy compromise that is the equal temperament system to use it playing music, whether that be on fixed-tuning instruments like the concertina or on unfixed pitch instruments like the violin (and even then, habit and constant exposure since childhood to Equal Temperament [ET] trains us to hear the ET scale as correct and other tunings as incorrect).

 

But here's my attempt at ET in a nut-shell:

 

There are two central 'natural' harmonies, which are the octave, and the fifth: the fifth is the interval C >> G in C major, D >> A in D major etc. Those two intervals sound so 'right' because the speed of the different vibrations that make up the two notes fit together perfectly, and that is because they are perfect ratios to each other: the octave is 2:1, the fifth is 3:2.

 

The problem is that if you use perfect fifths to tune something like a piano, the octaves eventually end up out of tune! If you tune by fifths you go

C >> G >> D >> A >> E >> B >> F# >> C# >> G# >> D# >> A# >> E# >> B#.

 

But there isn't a B# - that's C. And if you've tuned by perfect fifths, the C at the start and the B# a.k.a. C at the end are out of tune with each other. But out-of-tune octaves are horrible and very obvious - so a whole raft of compromises and carefully calculated fudges were devised down the years, whereby the octaves were pulled back in tune with each other, and the 'gap' was, instead, split up and added to various other notes in the scale instead.

 

So we end up with the notes we have today: many of them are subtly out-of-tune from where they 'should' be, to the greater goal of being roughly in tune no matter where you start on the scale and whatever key you play in.

 

And this still affects you no matter what instrument you play, because if my concertina was tuned to a different set of compromises to your concertina, or my flute was tuned to a different tuning system than my mate Ian's melodeon, they'd be out of tune with each other.

 

Result - pretty much what actually did happen in the Renaissance: where instruments were made in matched consorts, played together, and woe betide anyone who tried to use a shawm made in York in a pub session with a bunch of waits from Winchester because they were very out of tune with each other (and also probably didn't even agree on what note A was, but that's whole other kettle of worms and can of fish).

 

I'm sure there are musicologists who know far more than me who are wincing at my omissions and grave errors in the above - but that's how I understand it anyway. Hope that makes sense.

 

Here endeth the lecture! Please don't throw me across the room ...

[Hereward]

Sorry the Duffin book didn't work out, it was an honest recommendation but, well, different folks get different things from different books in the same way we don't all like Seth Lakeman or Sigur Ros or Stravinsky.

 

I'm still working through this book. It does say in 100 words what even a garrulous person would usually say in 5. Other than that, it does the job I suppose.

 

Shame I didn't have these summaries first though because they suffice for my use.

 

Ian

[michael sam wild]

Steve

Thanks for your summary that and the stuff from John have cleared my aching head!

 

Unless I take up harpsichord i can live with it all.

 

Besides I can't do much about my concertina so I'll just get on with it.

 

When I play fiddle and flute I do find myself sliding into notes like Gsharp/sharp so I suppose I'm going where my ear tells me it wants to go

 

 

I liked the fact that Bach didn't use maths but decoratve pictures to explain his tuning systems and was a good teacher

 

Can anyone interpret in simple terms that 'squiggle', by JS Bach that was shown on the Lehman link?.

Edited February 25, 2009 by michael sam wild