Same MIDI file with three diferent temperaments

One thing I criticized in my review of How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) was that it didn't give enough information about where to go to hear what the different temperaments sounded like.

Now one answer for the computer literate is that any good MIDI player can be convinced to play in any temperament you can think of. But it takes both an understanding of how to think of temperaments and an understanding of how to read MIDI documentation, and in some cases an understanding of how the people who wrote MIDI documentation think of temperaments (which they don't tell you), so I thought I'd do some of this for you and produce some MP3 files to listen to.

The MIDI file I picked was the Arcadelt Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno from the lilypond transcription on this website.

Here's the MP3 file from just playing in timidity without telling it anything special about tuning, so it's equal temperament.

Here it is, telling timidity to play pure intonation in G major, i.e., the timidity command was "timidity -Ow -Zpure1 score.midi". There's some evidence that what MIDI calls "pure" may be the same as what early music people call "just", but I can't find any explanatio of where the MIDI people get their idea of pure.

And for this one, I told timidity to use the tuning table, meanquar that scala had produced from the meanquar.scl it supplies in the scala archive of about 3700 different scales. The timidity command was "timidity -Ow -Z ~lconrad/src/scala*/meanquar.tbl score.midi".

In all cases, the timidity command produced a .wav file, which I converted to an MP3 file with lame.

Let me know if this helps at all.

Related posts:

1. New Tuner
2. Why pianos are out of tune
3. MIDI to MusicXML