[r-t] Little Bell Music

[Ben Willetts]

Ian Partridge:
> That would have been me, on ringing-chat.

Apologies for not remembering the attribution.

> I proposed that a good way to measure the
> "musicality" of a row was to take the mean of the intervals
> between adjacent blows.

I'm less sure of this part of the idea, although I can see what you mean.
Use of a mean effectively says that the lower the mean interval, the more
musical the row.  While to some extent this is true - as we've agreed, the
more of the same interval there is, the better the change; and the smaller
the interval, the more occurances you can cram in with a given range of bell
notes - is it the whole picture?

What about Tittums music, especially on the higher numbers where it's more
common?  Here, the whole point is that there are constant intervals not
between adjacent bells, but between every other bell.  On twelve,
18297304E65T is an excellent row, but with a mean interval of 6.4, it
doesn't score highly in your system.  675849302E1T (exploding tittums) also
sounds great but scores even higher: 7.0.

In short, I think a mean interval score is a good indication of runs-type
music, but may not give the full picture.

(As an aside, what's the highest mean interval score a row can have?  Does
Tittums always score the highest possible mean?)

Ben