Xenharmonic Wiki:Cross-platform dialogue

Due to the prevailing winds of social media platforms, the Xen Wiki editor community has found ourselves divided into two mostly autonomous sub-communities: one on the #wiki channel in the Xenharmonic Alliance Discord, and the other in the Xenwiki Work Group on Facebook. When a change is proposed in one of these groups, and everyone in that group is on board, it can create the illusion of a consensus, even if the other group might not agree.

This page is intended as a place where everyone, from both Facebook and Discord, can share their views without having to subscribe to the other media platform. If there are any changes you are planning to make to the wiki's conventions (e.g. what types of information to list on temperament family pages, or what naming conventions should be used like ed3 vs edt), then it is a probably a good idea to discuss it here, so that neither Discord- nor Facebook-based editors are left out.

You can use this page like a talk page. Add subheadings for any topics you would like to discuss.

Please remember the Xenharmonic Wiki:Five pillars, especially 4. The Xenharmonic Wiki's editors should treat each other with respect and civility.

TE vs POTE vs CTE

I took some time to look through the changes from POTE to CTE. There are a hundred or so pages in which POTE has been removed, including main temperament pages like Porcupine, Mavila, etc. These tunings can be very different: Blackwood POTE has 4:5:6 around 0-400-720, but CTE 0-386-720, so that the 5/4 is pure but the major triad sucks. We spent a lot of time putting the POTE tunings up there. They are useful. It is frustrating that they have been removed. Can you please put them all back, Flora Canou? I'm pretty tuned out of this these days. Does anybody have the time or energy to moderate the Wiki more actively, to prevent this from happening? Carl Lumma Scott Dakota anyone? Or at this point, should we just fork the Wiki and make a copy of the way things were before, so at least these things are preserved somewhere? -- Mike Battaglia, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

What's CTE? -- Carl Lumma, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

"CTE" is "constrained Tenney Euclidean" where, instead of starting with the TE tuning and stretching so that octaves are pure, you do the optimization with the 2/1 kept at 1200 cents the entire time. It sounds like a good idea, but there's a subtlety in which it ends up weighting 8/7, 11/8, 13/8 etc so much more strongly than e.g. 6/5 that it can give strange results. Also for things like Blackwood, Mavila, etc. I would guess that whoever's pushed this change has decided these strange results are "philosophically correct" and so has removed POTE from everything and put CTE instead. -- Mike Battaglia, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

Is it possible to make editing something that needs approval? I know it is a bit against the idea of a wiki, but that this point there is a body of work that needs to be preserved - perhaps forking a copy that can't be changed is a good solution. -- Chris Vaisvil, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

Agree with Chris Vaisvil, to an even farther extent: only approved users should be able to edit. All in all, wiki software should be meant as a mean, not a goal 🙂 -- Claudi Meneghin, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

We've done that with a lot of pages but not every single one. They clearly just don't care though - whatever we leave open they just change anyway - so it may just makes more sense to let them have their space to do stuff and fork the old version. -- Mike Battaglia, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

We should fork it from like 2 years ago. I have xenharmonic.info if that's helpful. -- Carl Lumma, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

I was thinking something similar and talking to Tyler Henthorn about this. It'd be a big project but probably worth doing. I'll look into it -- Mike Batteglia, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

Are there something like yearly backups, or does undoing changes have to be done manually? -- Janne Karimäki, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

I don’t particularly care about either of these two tunings, but if there’s one thing we should all agree on, it’s that different folks have different tuning preferences… this decision to *remove* a tuning broadly across the wiki certainly bothers me. -- Cmloegcmluin, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

Just took a new job, moving to LA, cannot possible help at all right now, sorry!! -- Carl Lumma, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

Are people aware of this complaint Mike made on the Facebook Xen Wiki Workgroup page, about the recent replacing of POTE tunings with CTE tunings? He's considering locking even more pages on the wiki in response: https://www.facebook.com/groups/xenwiki/permalink/3585115431754435 I am very against locking pages, but I'm also against deleting information across the wiki like this (though I don't particularly care about either of these tunings). -- Cmloegcmluin, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

To some extent i feel this is exactly the kind of thing i was pointing out before

Why remove information

I get when you have some new thing you think is better, but why not include both

Length be damned

Also im very much against locking things its supposed to be editable its a wiki -- Wad Wizard, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

is mike aware of the reasoning? (that POTE just compresses all the gens to make the octave pure while CTE optimises with the pure octave in mind)

iirc i havent usually done any replacements like this but im not against them. rather, when i am adding new temps i prefer CTE by default not only for this reason but cuz sintel's temp finder supports more subgroups than x31eq does, and sintel's temp finder uses CTE and TE but not POTE. -- pinkanberry, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

Correcting how

Arent they two different approaches -- Wad Wizard, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

TE is a mathematical way of optimising a temperament. it assumes you can temper all the generators however you like, and optimises with that in mind. POTE is literally, "take the TE tuning, then stretch or compress all the generators by some ratio r such that the octave becomes pure". if you look at its definition here https://en.xen.wiki/w/POTE_tuning

it gives the steps to find the TE tuning, then the last step is very simple and is (from what i understand) a mathematical way of saying exactly the procedure i described

Find the POTE generators G' = G/T1; in other words G scalar divided by the first entry of T.

in other words, it seems like a hackish solution to the problem of "i want TE but with pure octaves"

i am not opposed to documenting TE and i wouldnt suggest "correcting" TE to CTE, as that's not a correction -- pinkanberry, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

POTE basically just scales the generator with the same scaling factor it does the octave from TE; it doesn't do what it claims to do.

The POTE tuning sometimes has all the errors for the primes in the same direction, which is definitely not optimal. -- inthar, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

Now i feel like it should be documented in some way simply for the historical matter -- Wad Wizard, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

having prime errors all in the same direction isnt always bad (although keep in mind im of the opinion that p/q is more important to optimise than pq), but it does leave the question of whether you could tune the gens differently so that at least one of those primes becomes pure or flat instead. im not sure if that sort reasoning can feasibly apply to every (multidimensional) temperament; itd have to be proved i think; but certainly a lot/most -- pinkanberry, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

Its unfortunate that the community is split so the conversation isnt actually being had with them -- Wad Wizard, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

im allergic to facebook -- pinkanberry, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

Real -- Wad Wizard, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

Yeah, maybe it's a good idea to display both CTE and POTE tunings?

I'm willing to make that compromise if it's needed to ensure pages won't be locked. -- inthar, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

im not if it means that whoever is just gonna revert the work put into a bunch of pages -- pinkanberry, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

I'll tell him it's consensus here that cte is superior to pote, okay? -- Magica Fumica, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

it's important to explain why and see if hes on the same page about it

and maybe stress that we have nothing against also logging TE?

certainly TE should never be removed -- pinkanberry, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

To tell the truth i experimented with putting both cte and ctwe before in the meantone family. Then i thought it was a readability hell so i didn't went on -- Magica Fumica, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

Actually, maybe osmium's right. POTE is certainly trivially obtainable from TE. -- inthar, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

that didnt cross my mind (hence my upvote) but yeah it would be very easy to derive if we listed the TE by default alongside the CTE

just divide all the cent values of the gens by the ratio between the tempered octave and the pure octave

maybe it would be good generally to log both TE and CTE? it shouldnt be an issue as the TE tuning is given by sintel's temp finder

(also because i dont imagine two optimal tunings is excessive, if slightly less readable) -- pinkanberry, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

There's also something unnatural about POTE, right? It depends on the choice of generators we choose to scale. If you scale a different choice of generators that way, you'll get a different tuning. -- inthar, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

it makes some sense for prime generators and harmonic generators as it's proportional to the (logarithmic) size of the integer, but certainly not for subgroup generators in general -- pinkanberry, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

Then the discussion should be had with them

And/or the change should be proposed -- Wad Wizard, 16 Mar 2024 (imported from Discord)

Sure. We should be careful, lest they try to exact what they'd view as POTE-ic justice on us. -- inthar, 16 Mar, 2024 (imported from Discord)

Hi! I'm the one who currently has the nickname "pinkanberry" on the XA Discord. I think this page is a good idea. I hope this page will be good for getting on the same page of things for the wiki. --Godtone (talk) 22:30, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Cases of suboptimal optimization

I was intrigued by this comment from above:

"CTE" is "constrained Tenney Euclidean" where, instead of starting with the TE tuning and stretching so that octaves are pure, you do the optimization with the 2/1 kept at 1200 cents the entire time. It sounds like a good idea, but there's a subtlety in which it ends up weighting 8/7, 11/8, 13/8 etc so much more strongly than e.g. 6/5 that it can give strange results. Also for things like Blackwood, Mavila, etc. I would guess that whoever's pushed this change has decided these strange results are "philosophically correct" and so has removed POTE from everything and put CTE instead. -- Mike Battaglia, 13 Mar 2024 (imported from Facebook)

6/5 is an interval that, due to its extreme simplicity, has a lot of give when tempering (at least 6 ¢), so on principle I don't buy the argument that it is being underprioritised without seeing an example. Hence, a few examples of POTE having better tuning than CTE would be appreciated so we can go through what we think is going on. Kind regards, --Godtone (talk) 22:46, 15 March 2024 (UTC)