Equal temperament tuning made organ mutation stops sound beaty and unfashionable

Evidence

Equal tempered tuning thus colors with beats the desired effect of adding mutation stops, and therefore the inclusion of mutation stops tended to go out of fashion with the introduction of equal temperament tuning (Padgham, 1986). Recent movements to revive the performance of authentic early music have extended to the pipe organ, and the resulting use of nonequal tempered tuning systems and inclusion of more mutation stops is giving new life, particularly to contrapuntal music. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 1562

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how historical tuning systems create audible beating — a concrete example of tempering tradeoffs discussed elsewhere. — connects to: A440 tuning and equal temperament dominate modern keyboards but not historical or organ practice
• CANDY: Fun trivia: equal temperament tuning directly caused pipe organ stop combinations to fall out of fashion.

Related

• A440 tuning and equal temperament dominate modern keyboards but not historical or organ practice (similarity 0.93)
• Mutation stops reinforce harmonics not aligned with the octave series (similarity 0.84)
• The pipe organ is history’s first additive synthesizer for timbre (similarity 0.81)
• Organists shape timbre by selectively reinforcing harmonics of one series (similarity 0.81)
• Pipe organ stops can reinforce non-octave harmonics to reshape timbre (similarity 0.80)
• Untuned organ mutation stops generate audible beats when chords are played (similarity 0.79)
• Adding a harmonic-reinforcing organ stop boosts all multiples of that harmonic (similarity 0.79)