What principles did Jesus advocate when it came to interpreting the Torah and giving rulings based on it?

On one hand, he seems to suggest that the quality of actions and of the mind, regardless of commandments in the Torah, are the measure: e.g. But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.

He never says how far this can be extended - could, e.g. sexual morals be interpreted by this method? (It's not the kind of sex or the kind of partner, it's to what purpose or whatever?) Where's the demarcation line for how far this method can be extended?

Whence does the principle in Matthew 19, "Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." Can this be extended to What God has made X, let not man make un-X? Can it be extended to what God has forbidden, man cannot permit? What God has permitted, man cannot forbid?

I should reread the entire gospels, I am kind of certain there's one more principle there, but it wasn't present in matthew. So, rereading them before the next post.

I have recently been trying out some non-octave scales, and I think they contain a lot of potential that is yet untapped.

Some ideas however:

How about having a nonoctave repeat interval, but add all the inverses of all the intervals less wide than an octave - thus, basically, having a limited selection of octaves available.

Take for instance, the 3/2 in 8 scale, with a smallest step of ~87.75 cents.

We get

87.75
175.50
263.25
351.00
438.75
526.50
614.25
702.00

What we need to get an octave is adding these:
498.00
585.75
...
which amounts to having every other step be 27.25 cents and every other be 60.50. Ok, that gets a bit unwieldy, and I have no idea what new intervals pop in except octaves and octave inversions.

This might work better with some other scale - maybe Bohlen-Pierce or somesuch would be well suited.

The more I look at Bohlen-Pierce theory, the absence of any discussion of utonal stuff strikes me as more and more peculiar. Even more so, very many of the 'major' scales include the utonal chord from the same root, and the 'minor' scales don't necessarily exclude the otonalities either.

Some have complained about modulation and such not being very clear in Bohlen-Pierce, and I wonder if this inclusion of both utonal and otonal structures for the tonic might be part of that? OTOH, borrowed chords in 12tet don't tend to cause big problems so ...?

The Bohlen-Pierce temperament is an interesting sort of odd option to try out, which has a very good approximation of 3:5:7 and 5:7:9-chords, but I've never seen anyone talk about the utonal 7/7:7/5:7/3 or 9/9:9/7:9/5 chords - in fact, it's like the assumption is that 5:7:9 in fact is the bohlen-pierce analogy of a minor chord despite being a tritave inversion (if that's *perceivable* as an inversion at all). This is a bit weird, imho, and I'd be interesting in seeing whether there's any relevant reason for this.

Alas, Elaine Walker doesn't elaborate enough on the chords she used in her research paper - she only really mentiosn the 3:5:7 wide triad and 5:7:9 narrow triad, but the piano roll transcription sort of suggests some other things going on there - but they're hard to read.

I think, considering the nature of the intervals being well approximated by Bohlen-Pierce, it might be possible to transcribe compositions from it to 31-tet without many problems - will have to try this idea out at some point. That'd be pretty neat. Non-octave scales in equally divided octave temperaments are quite underused!

(Also, I should try out 3/2 in 4 or 5 and somesuch, might be interesting)

I am happy to've started playing around with 31-tet again. The timbre I'm working on right now is a sort of organ-like thing in one way, and sort of clarinety in another (that one's attributable to only having odd harmonics). I should also prolly make some more varying timbres, and I should absolutely figure out some way of getting a sensibly pretty, yet distinctive and individual kind of attack to the sounds.

Gonna try out some approximations of 5:6:7 (and the utonal 7/7, 7/6, 7/5 subdim chord), 5:7:9 chords, maybe some 9/9:9/7:9/5-ish stuff, and of course just living up the septimal bliss that 7/4 and 7/6 provide. (7/5 sounds less nice, but meh, can't have everything).

After expending some effort on finding a document I don't think I've read since 2005, I found http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/modename.html again. It's apparently moved around a bit since back in the day. I remember trying a few of those scales last time rather haphazardly. I hope my increased knowledge of counterpoint, harmony, etc will give me better chances of composing something worthwhile.

I haven't composed anything microtonal since 2003ish!

I wonder how well adaptive timbre could work? Could we have timbres that coincide perfectly for fifths, thirds, sevenths(ish) without having to do adaptive tuning? Just, you know, FFTing the input signal, picking out the odd-numbered overtones, raising the third harmonic by 2c, the fifth by 14, the seventh by something like 30c, etc. (With a synthesized signal it would be easier, of course, since no adjustment of input after FFTing it is needed)

Would different tones of a chord need them differently adjusted? Is there a way to uniformly adjust harmonics for all tones so that 12tet basically would have the benefits of JI when it comes to harmonics coinciding? Or is this a pipe dream? Would the timbres sound way too weird?

Could there be a non-equal adjustment that wouldn't be adaptive, such that e.g. Dmaj and Gmaj, despite having the identical 1:2^(4/12):2^(7/12) frequency patterns have different enough out-of-tune harmonics to, despite both sounding good and major still sounding interestingly distinct, a bit like a timbral equivalent to the non-equal temperaments that were in vogue before 12tet?

A reason I don't much like the kind of linguistic prescriptivism based in armchair-linguistic musings of people into a sort of logician/engineering/whatever mindset is basically to do with how language and our minds and our social situations have evolved.

Basically, what happens when you let evolution run on some system that can be designed evolutionarily, it will often take into account features of the underlying systems that the human designer is not aware of.

Secondarily, language as a system is sort of distributed. No one knows every word of their language (with some trivial exceptions, but these are 'degenerate' cases, especially languages on the brink of extinction), no one knows every construction, etc. Constructions spread when people pick up that they are constructions, which means that for a construction to gain ground, there must be something that gives away that it is a construction in the first place, it needs to fill a purpose, it needs to be easy enough to apply by analogy, etc. So, we have a system where there's a lot of evolutionary algorithms going on all over the place, and the best thing is - the protocol by which these innovations spreads is itself affected by these changes. We're having evolutionary algorithms within evolutionary algorithms. This, in turn, in a really distributed system, which also has interfaces with other similar systems (== other languages, by means of bilingual speakers or anyone in a language contact situation!) ...

The number of fields one should understand to grasp why languages are like they are probably exceeds what anyone can learn in a lifetime. Probably, any number of the weirder things in language - quirky case, irregular forms, discongruence (e.g. the Semitic system where numbers over four or somesuch are marked for the opposite gender of the nouns they govern), congruence, differential object marking, aspect marked on the object instead of on the verb (making aspect unmarkable on intransitives and quirky case verbs) are results of optimizations that have made sense for the distributed memetic(ish) algorithm that designs language all the time. The reanalyzis of how to use the non-nominative pronouns in English probably also fit in with this - in lack of other supporting structures, lots of minds have converged on using them in a way that marks some kind of distinction that is more relevant for them to mark than whatever was marked earlier, hence expressions like "my brother and me went to town yesterday".

For a human to optimize this is doomed to failure. He's unlikely to have an idea of the uses of most of the stuff in the language, and will cut out stuff that it is based on, and add in parts that seem logical or easily processable, but haven't gone through centuries of optimization.

I'm also considering calling 'evolution' an intelligent process, since it solves problems.

I guess this kind of subverts the Intelligent Design people's position. At least I hope so.