In article ,
pamela wrote:
Similarly, I've never heard an Islamic muezzin calling worshippers
to prayer who wasn't totally out of tune.

Surely this is what you would expect as Arabic musical tuning is different
to modern western equal temperament tuning. As we are indoctrinated by
familiarity into the latter system any other sounds strange but is not
wrong.

Similarly if Mozart or Haydn or Beethoven heard a piano or harpsichord
with modern equal temperament tuning, they would consider it to be bland
and to an extent out of tune. Many years ago I went to a meeting of the
Association for Science Education at the London College of Furniture which
taught restoration and tuning of pianos and harpsichords. By the end of
the tuning course the sudents were expected to be proficient in at least 9
tuning systems and aware of about half a dozen others. The evening ended
with illustrations of various piano pieces by Mozart and Beethoven played
on 4 pianos with different tuning systems. The differences were quite
marked when heard like that.

Alan

--


Using an ARMX6