User:Domin/Failures of RTT

The twice failed: regular temperament theory

I spent pretty much a whole saturday writing a free pitch midi sequencer. While having a short break I pondered some compositional possibilities it had, given some mentions of free ji on the xa discord server perhaps a day or two earlier.

Then it clicked. The free ji was talked about some people who I believe never finished a single piece in any sort of ji tuning and even on the surface things they said were pretty bizarre. Well, people saying inane things on the internet are a pretty quotidian occurence, and these were definitely members of the rtt cult, as aptly named by Mr Gann.

But why would someone speak about some seemingly made up problems with free ji they never experienced? They don't even seem to know what working with free ji would entail.

It all kinda makes sense, if you assume that the goal was to compose a piece in free ji, and then cramming it into a smaller set of notes. Abstract infinite temperament object is more reasonable if we're dealing with a arbitrary free movement through a lattice. Tempering can deal with the practical problem of having too many pitches, which was a much larger issue decades ago, and list of commas tells something about how the machinery converts ji to tempered.

The elephant in the room is that I'm pretty sure that this method was never meaningfully used in practice, because if it were, the cultists would eagerly mention their foundational masterpiece. It's a solution to a problem that never existed in reality, born out of someone geeking out on a rainy afternoon. My guess would be that whoever that was, didn't have much experience with ji either and the solution they made was overwrought and unpractical.

RTT has failed for the first time.

The problem got lost in history, all that remained was some scraps that probably missed the main part, or it was just so spread among many posts somewhere that nobody had put it together. But somehow the matematical apparatus got preserved and gained some adherents.

The holy writings had only a solution so they started to look for a new problem for it. In the meantime edos got popular, and they offered some obovious temperament targets Sadly the solution was convoluted and unpractical for the intended use case, when applied to edos it got pretty ludicrously overwrought. All one ever needs for dealing with ji approximattions of edos is a few dozen rather unsophisticated lines of code. And there's orders of magnitude more people who can deal with fairly simple code than the badly written math. And it's not a speculation, on multiple ocasions I've seen people making spreadsheets or writing their code because it's way easier than parsing the fabled guide to rtt.

I've asked many times what is a musical application of that theory and all I've got was solemn assurances that they totally use, simple use cases that just don't need any convoluted math or vague and evasive non answers. Let me tell you, I know these people. If there was an actually a musically meaningful method, they would regale me with a wall of detailed explanations at any remotely appropriate occassion.

RTT has failed for the second time.

It's now a zombie. In it's unlife what made it bad in life makes it good. The convoluted, unpractical and obscure theory is what makes it a good esoteric knowledge for a esoteric cult.