Regular temperament: Difference between revisions

Regular temperaments are of most use to musicians who want their music to sound as much as possible like stacking-based [[just intonation]], but without the difficulties normally associated with it, such as [[wolf interval]]s, [[comma]]s, and [[comma pump]]s. Specifically, if your chord progression [[pump]]s a comma, and you want to avoid pitch shifts, wolf intervals, and/or tonic drift, that comma must be tempered out. Temperaments are also of interest to musicians wishing to exploit the unique possibilities that arise when ratios that are distinct in JI become equated. For instance, 10/9 and 9/8 are equated in meantone. Equating distinct ratios through temperament allows for the construction of musical "puns", which are melodies or chord progressions that exploit the multiplicity of "meanings" of tempered intervals. Finally, some use temperaments solely for their sound. For example, one might like the sound of neutral thirds, without caring much what ratio they are tuned to. Thus one might use rastmic even though no commas are pumped.

The skill of music composition is acquired by studying the disciplines such as {{w|harmony}}, {{w|musical form|form}}, {{w|orchestration}}, in addition to extensive listening. One common misconception is that learning regular temperament theory can be a substitute for any of those. Regular temperament theory does indeed present you with numerous tuning systems, and provide the tools to help you compare and choose between them based on some common goals. It also tells you how harmonic resources are available in each tuning system, though the question of putting them together to a piece of work is really up to you to experiment with. In other words, one may think of the relationship between regular temperament theory and composition as this: regular temperament theory tells you how to ''choose'' a tuning, while composition regards how to ''use'' a chosen tuning.