Keenan Pepper's explanation of vals: Difference between revisions

<ul><li>A piece written in 12edo (assuming the patent val because it's the only one that makes musical sense), that actually takes advantage of more than one comma vanishing, cannot be played in any significantly different temperament without arbitrarily modifying the music. The octave stretch can be changed, for example, but it has to be a 12-note circulating temperament, with 12 roughly equal steps, or else some of the puns / comma pumps will not work.</li><li>On the other hand, a piece written in meantone temperament (for example a piece written in conventional notation with everything "spelled" properly and no enharmonic puns) can not only be played in 12edo, but also in 19edo or 26edo or 31edo, or an infinite number of other equal temperaments in which 81/80 vanishes. It could even be performed in 17edo using the 17c val - it will sound quite different, but everything will still work out in a logical way. The same goes for 7edo - major and minor triads both become neutral triads, but that applies in a uniform way to all chord progressions and everything still "works".</li><li>However, a piece written in meantone temperament cannot be performed in a non-meantone temperament like 22edo (using the patent val), or for that matter JI, without serious comma issues arising. It's possible to do it, but you'd basically be writing a new version of the piece from scratch rather than mechanically and faithfully translating it. You could play it in 22edo using a much worse val (&lt;22 35 52| rather than &lt;22 35 51|), but the chords would be far from the most accurate approximations that 22edo offers and would sound unnecessarily out-of-tune.</li><li>A piece written in strict JI can be played in any regular temperament whatsoever. The more accurate, the better, of course...</li></ul>      [[Category:definition]]

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