Octo:)er 9, 1962 Dear Chorus: 'Looks Mr'. Hunter was terribly happy with our rehearsal last evening. like the sectionals plus some work at home are beginning to pay off in a big way. 1Don1 t know whether you could get the effect of the Tallis as I did, but you can be sure it is going to be something special. and Some years back Mr. Shaw sent you a letter dealing with intonation, it seemed to me that a repeat appearance of Aspects of Intonation wouldn't be such a bad idea. Here it is: "O.f all the possible disfigurements of beauty in music the most disturbing may be faulty intonation. We say of a person who manages to sing in tune that he has a "true" voice, and quite unthinkingly reflect the strangely moral judgement which most of us excercise with regard to intonation. Somehow, it seems, singing out of tune is a violation of truth, and cotmter to an inherent, intuitive conscience of hearing. This reaction should not surprise us, for it would seem to be the psychological counterpart to natural law in the physics of sotmd itself. We note that the exhaust of the passing truck causes the window to vibrat e. We reflect that one vibrating object sets other independent objects to vibrating "sympathetically." During vocal warm-up sessions of our Monday rehearsals we hear certain well-tuned unison sounds produce "over-tones'• of the octave and a fifth above, vibrations so firm that it sounds as though a full section of our Chorus must be singing these 11sympathetic" sounds. It is no secret to anyone who has passed through high school physics that sympathetic vibrations exist not only in a ratio of 1 to 1, but (with mathematical exactitude and order) in ratios of 2 to 1, 3 to 2, 4 to 3, 5 to h, etc. (For instance, the octave above any specific pitch has always exact l y twice the vibrations per second of that pitch. It's ratio is thus 2:1.) The vibrating object -- be it surface, string, or column of air: be it tympani, violin or voice -- vibrates not only its fundamental frequency, but to lesser and varying degrees, a series of fractional vibrations, identified as partial s , harmonics or over-tones. It is these harmonics which, in variety and distribution, determine what we call tone quality. A violin may play the same fundamental pitch as an oboe, but it will generate in itself and the air around it its own characteri stic set of over-tones, which distinguish it from other instruments capable of sounding the same basic pitch. From any given tone, then, it is theoretically possible to derive a complete scale simply through these fr act io nal relati onship s. For i nst a0c e , th e intervals of the major scale stand in the following propor t ions:
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