Equal temperament vs. meantone

Just a short little video I made to show off some of the differences between 12-tone equal temperament and meantone ("mesotonic") temperament on Pianoteq 3. I used CamStudio to record but sorry there are some pops and clicks in the audio nonetheless.

Maybe not the best demonstration, but I tried to play chords or short passages in each temperament, for quick comparison. Note how meantone sounds nice and pure in certain keys (C, G, F) but in distant keys (B, F#) it's absolutely horrible. Equal temperament, on the other hand, doesn't have the purity, especially in its thirds (eww). But even if I play in different keys it all sounds equally fine.

My sustain pedal failed about halfway through the video, so sorry about that. And I didn't really have a "plan" so sorry about my mistakes......

The "Quarter-comma meantone temperament" wikipedia article lists some values for the chromatic notes in C meantone. I'm guessing that's what meantone Pianoteq uses but I could be wrong. If that's true, note how Ab is 27 cents FLAT and Eb is 10 cents SHARP: now talk about a major wolf!!!!!

Note: Please keep annotations on if you want to know what I'm doing.

Some websites that go over it in more detail:
http://home.earthlink.net/~kgann/histune.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter-comma_meantone

Category:

Music

Tags:

• equal
• temperament
• quarter
• comma
• meantone
• mesotonic
• comparison
• wolf
• intervals
• syntonic
• modartt
• pianoteq

[JonMoyerSC]

Thank you so much for posting this. You are right; equal temperament sounds sounds so wrong after you hear the same passage in Meantone.

[HarmonicaFag]

Thanks for the video, now I can hear the differences : )