Good point, Howard. But still, twenty seconds is a long time. I am
certainly only interested in the time before clashing with the next
note or notes takes place, and that of course depends on the passage of
music. But generally speaking, even if we halve Mersenne's twenty
seconds, that is still much longer than even the Savarez string.
On 8 January 2017 at 22:26, howard posner <[1]howardpos...@ca.rr.com>
wrote:
> On Jan 8, 2017, at 12:55 PM, Rob MacKillop
<[2]robmackil...@gmail.com> 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.
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References
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