>shakuhachi Thu, 20 Oct 2005 Volume 1 : Number 969
>
>In this issue:
>
>
>I wonder if Joel forgot to put quotation marks around "randomly."
>
>Karl
Yes. I meant this to be taken as tongue-in-cheek.
>------------------------------
>
>Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:38:40 -0500
>From: Nicholas Pierotti <eurydice@cruzio.com>
>
>The pitch never wavers. It's your mind that wavers...
exactly the point. pitch is context dependent and musical context is
a (complex) construct of mind.
>
>------------------------------
>
>Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 10:57:06 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Karl Young <kyoung@itsa.ucsf.edu>
>...
> > I use laptop that listens to whatever comes into it's microphone
>port (my shakuhachi, but also just whatever is in the air) via a
>pitch and envelope detector that uses a moveable Do version of
>Partch's 43-tone per octave tuning system. Many electronic
>musicians use complex tuning systems that are not 12-TET.
>
>As a Parch fan (though not one that claims to have the ability to
>pick out pitches at will from the 43 tone scale) I'd love to hear
>that
I can send you some recordings of that system in action
if you'd like to hear it. I'd be glad to.
Just send me a snail mail address off list.
> > The studies that have been done of classical musicians in various
>traditions (european, and carnatic classic musicians) that show a
>low-frequency (1 over F) based randomness to the microtonal
>fluctuations in tuning that professional players make during
>performance
>
>Interesting; I hadn't heard about those studies (wonder if it's
>somehow related to the result that analysis of the works of
>accomplished composers apparently yields a 1/f spectrum re. pitch
>distribution
Karl, i should probably backpedal here. i was thinking about the
distribution of the errors from an odd pov. and I may very well have
been remembering /mixing up a study about pitch production with the
above mentioned result about composers...
>) and it sounds sort of counterintuitive unless I'm misunderstanding
>something (usually the case !). Is that study really saying that
>pitch fluctuations for professional players increase with decreasing
>frequency (as a power law even) !? Somehow it would seem that
>fluctuations at lower frequency would be more audible and hence
>players would struggle more to "correct" them but maybe that's
>wrong. Perhaps there's some funny uncertainty principle going on
>saying that the product of frequency fluctuation bandwidth and
>duration are bounded below and given that it's harder to pin down
>low frequencies with shorter playing duration...
>
Interesting! This is absolutely not what I meant to imply!
Whew...My apologies for being so unclear about my thinking, Karl!
And sending you down such a convoluted trail of attempted
rationalisations for my non-idea.
I will have to see if I can reconstruct the point I was trying to
make and hope you and others will bear with me and understand that
I'm just pushing some ideas around about why pitch production and
perception is such a holy cow to so many musicians, despite music
cognition and psychoacoustic results...
A good player adjusts her moment to moment pitch production in
performance in response to a variety of stimulations of various
types: some adjustments in response to pitch and timbre of other
players or instrument groups (if playing in a group), some
adjustments due to acoustics of the room and/or amplification system,
some adjustments due to a formal musical demands of the score or some
taught aspect of performance practice , some adjustments due to
non-formal or intuitive needs. As you mention, sounds with smaller
durations have less pitch resolution than sounds that linger. So,
we have many influences pushing this one aspect of sound
production/perception (that is, percieved Pitch )around. (In
Honkyoku performance there seem to be additional subtleties to pitch
and amplitude and spectral contouring that are taught at a formal
level, to make it even more complicated). Even if the adjustment
made in response to a particular stimulus is very deterministic and
simple, because there are multiple simultaneous adjustments the final
executed pitch contour deviation that is the sum of all of these
influences will have a fractal nature. At least, it seems to me that
is what I'd expect...
Does that make sense or just muddy the waters?
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