Petr,

This brings up an interesting issue--tempo, tuning and dissonance with regards
to acoustic environments.

Gregorian chant heard in a small room is awfully bland and dull, but in a vast
cathedral, mystical and awe-inspiring.

Imagine, however a quick Beethoven Symphonic scherzo in the same space; the
details would get lost, the music would be muddy and un-transparent. The best
Symphonic halls are a little wet, not too much though. For clarity, tempo
adjustments might have to be made...which means that if you can have clarity and
the correct speed at the same time, you're in the wrong performance space!

Chamber music ought to be in a chamber---dry and crisp. I lament recordings of
String Quartets, for instance, in vast concert theatre spaces--chamber music
ought to be really a semi-private affair, in homes, not concert halls...it's
supposed to be intimate.

Anyway, re:tuning---the small interval music we hear in various cultures
probably wouldn't have evolved as it did if it were in vast cavernous
spaces---dry outdoor or home environments or small temples seem the likely
locales for Greek enharmonic genera, and even their ampitheatres might have a
little echo, but not washes of reverb with long tails.

OTOH, a lot of static JI with glacial harmonic motion becomes divine in a nice
large reverb, just as Gregorian chant does!

Ambient space is of enormous importance to music, we don't often realize just
how important.

-A.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Petr Pařízek <p.parizek@...> wrote:
>
> Hi tuners,
>
> I know I promised to let you know on Wednesday but it took longer than I
> expected.
> I'm feeling a bit like Herman when he posted his Alpha/Beta/Gamma examples.
> It's nothing big at the moment but maybe something more will come out later.
> I tried to play in various tunings with an awful lot of reverb added. And I
> realized I really didn't like small intervals reverberated whenever they
> occurred -- that's why I was doing the small "quest" for scales without
> small intervals.
> Because many of us know how meantone sounds with lots of reverb, I ommitted
> this one. I've made three examples and I'm still planning to play around
> with it later because I managed to "octave-invert" the small step in negri
> (the one which would normally be less than 100 cents) and I'm going to try
> something similar at a later time.
> Here they are encoded in Rar:
> www.sendspace.com/file/pagafy
>
> Petr
>