These sorts of conflicts in tuning arise, as Urs pointed out, from using
one note to designate two different harmonic contexts. The whole field of
temperament is largely an effort to reconcile them, with varying solutions
in various time periods, depending on what kind of sound was preferred (for
example, in some meantone temperaments you hear much purer thirds, at the
expense of fifths being too low. In others, you have exactly the opposite).
In just intonation, I would describe the two kinds of D -- a fifth over G
and a major third over Bb -- in the key of F as 27/16 and 5/3, respectively
(and they have, as you note, a difference between them of about 20 cents).

There's reasonable benefit to giving cents values, beyond educational: one
of the conventions in just intonation -- one which a colleague of mine
really wants to see -- is to approximate the accidentals to 12th-tones (so,
12 steps to the whole tone), and then give a markup above indicating the
nearest semitone with cents deviation. In the case of our 5/4 third, that
would show "D -13.7" above, but the accidental would be a D 2/12th
flattened. Other instruments, which maybe can't use 12th-tones, might use
other kinds of accidentals, which behave according to different rules (for
example, there are common fingering charts for flute and oboe that give
8th-tones, but clarinet just has quartertones). Being able to specify an
exact harmonic ratio, and then have Lily output different accidentals, each
behaving according to different rules as needed, would be a big advantage
over other software (and would open it up to systems like mine, which
behave according to totally different rules which can nevertheless be
extracted from the information given).

Cheers,

A

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 1:50 PM, Stephan Neuhaus <s...@artdecode.de> wrote:

> On 2015-12-01 11:27, David Kastrup wrote:
>
>> [...]
>>
>> Which explains why my default manner of tuning a guitar, namely just
>> tuning each string to sound as I think it should in relation to the
>> sequence of previous strings, has a good chance to end up more playable
>> than the followup work of a "serious" guitar player believing in tuning
>> by using harmonics.
>>
>
> This may be off-topic, but this is *exactly* how I do it. For a while I
> was worried that this might be too slapdash, but then I thought, "if it
> sounds good, who am I to argue?" :-)
>
> Fun,
>
> Stephan
>
>
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