[r-t] What people think they have rung

[Matthew Frye]

On 20 Oct 2014, at 19:40, Joe Norton <strainsteamford0123456789+ringingtheory at gmail.com> wrote:
> Although, the thought springs to mind... For example, one may be standing outside apparently listening to a touch of Plain Bob Minor but actually listening to Original with appropriately placed 12, 14 and 1234 calls. So I suppose what is "understood to be rung by the band" depends on what the conductor said it was when he or she called it. So I would say that the name the conductor called it and the rows produced would uniquely define it as "the same thing", even if the same rows could be correctly defined as some configuration of some other method.

This is obviously an "issue" with touches - that there are many ways to produce the same rows - and that is fine and not in any way a problem (in my opinion). However for plain courses I think it probably is (under current rules) possible to uniquely determine what method is being rung by listening outside, whatever rotation it is rung in.

I would propose (and we might have a vote?) that this be adopted as a guiding principle: that two methods that could not be distinguished by the rows in any of their plain courses should be linked as being somehow the same in our decisions and records. That does not necessarily mean that there could be no way to distinguish certain special versions - such as Grandsire/New Grandsire, Magenta and it's associated differential version, and many other examples both existing and unimagined - but they at least would be grouped together with their sibling methods and the groups could be uniquely identified.

MF