> On Jan 8, 2017, at 12:55 PM, Rob MacKillop <[email protected]> wrote: > > So what are we to make of this? The movement in the last decade has been to > minimise the sustain as long as possible. I'm completely on board with this. > But if we are to take Mersenne at face value, we have been moving in the > wrong direction - we should be at least doubling the sustain time.
Could it be that you and Mersenne are talking about different things? You wrote about “useable sustain,” which I take to mean “how long the note is musically significant or can interfere with new notes,” or something similar. Mersenne sounds more like he’s reporting results of an experiment like the one I just did: pluck the string in a quiet room and time how long you can hear it at all, which yields a very different number. Indeed, my total sustain time just now was more than double what I would call “useable sustain.” Mersenne was primarily a scientist/mathematician (do a web search on him and you’ll turn up all sorts of things about prime numbers), so we need to be alert to the possibility that he’s giving us scientific data rather than practical musical information. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
