User:BudjarnLambeth/Bird’s eye view of rank-2 temperaments: Difference between revisions

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 Composers and theorists disagree amongst themselves about what properties are desirable in a temperament, and you might over time find that you lean more towards one camp or another. This list arranges temperaments by their properties, allowing you the reader to seek out temperaments with whichever properties you value.
+== So, which temperaments should I use to make music? ==
+Ask 5 xenharmonicists, and you'll get 10 different answers. There are many different schools of thought within RTT (regular temperament theory).
+Most would agree that a good temperament approximates some subset of [[just intonation]] relatively accurately with a relatively small number of notes.
+What they disagree on is ''how'' accurate is "relatively accurate", ''how'' small is relatively small, and ''which'' JI subsets are interesting enough to be worth approximating.
+For example:
+'''Xenharmonicist A''' might argue that an error less than 15ish cents on most intervals, and less than 5 cents on the really important ones (like the perfect fifth and the octave), is accurate enough.
+And they might argue that 25 notes per [[equave]] is the most that is practical, any more than that is too cumbersome.
+They might argue that nobody can hear the harmonic effect of prime harmonics higher than 11.
+And they might argue that there's no real reason to use subgroups that are missing primes 2 or 3, because those primes are so important to consonance.
+'''Xenharmonicist B''' might argue that the error must be less than 5ish cents on most intervals, anything further out than that sounds out of tune to them.
+They might argue that it's perfectly possible to learn up to 50 notes per [[equave]].
+They might argue that they can hear the subtle, delicate effect of prime harmonics up to 23.
+And they might argue that subgroups like 3.5.7.11 and 2.5.7.11 are the most fertile ground for new and exciting musical exploration.
+Neither xenharmonicist can be objectively shown to be right or wrong. There is an amount of science to this, but there is also a lot of personal subjectivity. Ultimately it's up to you to decide what features you think are important in a temperament.
+It might help to compare these temperaments to [[12edo]], a.k.a. the familiar 12-tone equal temperament which most modern music is tuned to by default. 12edo has, of course, 12 notes per equave, which makes it fairly small by temperament standards (but not abnormally so).
+It can be interpreted as a low-to-medium accuracy 5-limit temperament where the most important intervals (the fifth and octave) have an error less than 3 cents, while other notable intervals (like the thirds and sixths) have an error of about 14 cents.
+Alternatively, it can be interpreted as a high-accuracy 2.3.17.19 subgroup temperament, where all of the intervals have an error less than 5 cents.
+So that should provide a point of comparison to help measure these other temperaments against.
 == Guide to tables ==