On Tuesday 10 July 2001 00:26, you wrote:
>
> My comment:
> It does turn up in other fiddle traditions.
> The Connecticut and Massachusetts fiddlers cannot be playing,as you say,
> in the tempered scale because that is impossible on the fiddle. That
> would require each ascending note in the chromatic scale to be be
> exactly higher in pitch over the preceeding note by the ratio 1.059 and
> larger intervals to be exact arithmetic multiplies of this ratio. The
> human ear cannot do this. That is why a piano tuner has to achieve
> this objective by listening to the interplay between repeated fifths
> and fourths. Even employing this method and with infinitely more time
> than a fiddler has to play a single note, it has been demonstrated that
> the best piano tuners deviate somewhat from the ratio.
This is obvious if you're going to break the tempered scale down to that
degree, but it doesn't address the context of my original comment, which was
a response to your assertion about fiddlers playing, as you said, "out of
tune". From the perspective of common sense it's clear that in that context
we must necessarily speak of tempered or alternate scales as far as they are
discernible *by the human ear*.
Wendy
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