Xenharmonic Bulletin No. 2
And today they do! www.hermode.comIt is possible to have automatically tempered temperaments. The author's specially-constructed electronic organ could retune itself while chords were sounding, thus improving justifying whatever temperament it might be tuned to. This effect is specially noticeable in the fifths. They often refuse to beat at all! A given note sounded by itself will have a different pitch than when sounded with others. This pitch-adjustment is mutual, and takes noticeable time to complete. It thus resembles the mutual pitch-adjustments made by members of a live ensemble. In the design of a new instrument, the amount of such adjustment could be controlled and even made variable at will.
Obviously enough a computer could be programmed to do this also.
"just constructions erected on tempered degrees" - I like that!Allied to the subject of tempered temperaments is another phenomenon which occurs in practice, that we might as well call just constructions erected on tempered degrees. The classical example of this, of course, is the mixture stop on pipe organs, which is supposed to be tuned to just chords based on the twelve tempered pitches of the fundamental of said chords. A far more important case at the present time, since most electronic organs do not have mixture stops for crass financial reasons, is the steel guitar, which is tuned usually to a just chord but is normally stopped with the steel over one of the twelve-tone-system fret-lines painted on its non-fingerboard.
When such a Hawaiian guitar is played with other instruments, just chords will clash with tempered chords played by such instruments, unless, and this is but seldom, the steel guitar is deliberately tuned to a 12-tone-tempered chord in the first place, and if it so tuned, it is going to sound harsh and grating by itself. Most amplifiers have enough intermodulation distortion to generate loud combination tones, which will be terribly out-of-tune when the chord is tempered, providing a false bass and often false middle voices. With just chords, these combination tones will be in tune.
