Friday, April 20, 2018

Reclaiming Kathleen Schlesinger and the Undertone PanPipe Midas Gold West Asian alchemy argument




 


 https://archive.org/details/KathleenSchlesingerTheGreekAulos  So

Schlesinger - it turns out her Greek Aulos book arguing for the undertone basis of the scale - got dismissed by academics - as based on some empirical lies or something.

What do we know? The Phrygian scale was used in Western Asia - before the Greek logarithmic tuning of Philolaus and Archytas.... and so this above 12 tone claim for Pythagoras is quite fascinating!

We know that Archytas defined 3/2 as the Geometric Mean Squared so that 5/4 (10/8) and 6/5 (12/10) were the Arithmetic Mean and Harmonic mean.... let's see how this works.

 



However, he [Archytas] noted that the product of the arithmetic mean and the harmonic mean is equal to the square of the geometric mean, so this gave a way of dividing the fifth of 3:2 into the product of 5:4 and 6:5.
A Truman State University review on Scriba, Christoph J. “Mathematics and music.” (Danish)
Normat
38 (1990), no. 1, 3–17, 52.

Arithmetic mean x harmonic mean = 3/2 or 5/4 x 6/5 = 30/20.... or 10/8 x 12/10 = ....

And so the above Phrygian scale - with 12/10 x 10/8 is the Harmonic Mean x Arithmetic Mean = Geometric Mean Squared..... with 11 and 9 canceled out as what? 9/4 is from 3/2 squared - so 9 is the Perfect Fifth....

But Schlesinger's big point then is that the pitch pipes enables changing modes by using undertone and overblowing, etc.



 and Midas played the Phrygian scale on the Aulos:



 And so through the alchemical skill of Midas:



 We can see then a "vanishing mediator" to the equal-tempered logarithmic tuning based on this story of Midas and the Pythian competition circa 580 BCE.


 So this may be her most important sentence in the book - what she is implying is that the equidistant holes were not logarithmic tuning, despite modern scholars assuming this to be the case....



































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