Tuning systems are just one part of music -- even music narrowly defined.
But tuning is multidimensional, subtle, dependent on many things other than pure mathematics. It's also full of surprises.
Several things that surprised me yesterday:
When I stretched the 3/2 as wide as 704.56 cents to make 109EDO, it still sounded ok. Not pure, but not bizarre.
When I narrowed the 3/2 to 697.674 cents to make 43edo, again, it sounded quite a bit different than pure, but it was still acceptable.
The attraction of practicing a 43-note scale tuned to 43EDO is that -- of course -- the fingerings are completely consistent.
Much depends on how PianoTeq is set up -- how long the strings are set to be, how much the octaves are stretched. To my surprise, 46EDO had a major third (5/4) that sounded more in-tune than the far more accurate 224EDO, given the stretched partials of the piano sound.
Then, there's context. If you get used to a lot of beating from a less accurate tuning like 43EDO, a far more accurate tuning like 171 sounds motionless at first, and therefore a little cold.
There are also effects that are volume-dependent. With more volume, you hear more detail, and more beating or interaction between tones. At higher volumes I tend to prefer more "pure" tunings.
If I were working with bell-sounds mainly, of course I'd be interested in different tunings.
Culture has little effect on how I hear in simple terms. By simple terms I mean the daily testing of chords, consonance and dissonance. But it has everything to do with my values and goals.
There's a thousand and one reasons why there is no "best" tuning -- only viable tunings for certain kinds of results.
I have weak absolute pitch but a very keen ear for beating or harmonicity, for chord qualities. That may be why I prefer larger, more irregular systems that mimic JI. I also tend to hear tonally, with the tonality organized around held notes, or "pedal" tones.
Tuning systems: Subtle, hard to describe. That makes them interesting to study, if you're in it for the long haul.
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