Psycho Killer

> Now when John tuned up those Bernard Hermann film themes from
> Psycho and North by Northwest for me, they sounded wonderful.
> To my ears they sounded infinitely better than the original
> midis. Went from 2-D to multi-D.

Wow! I'd love to hear these! Now that I have heard
Chris' cool example of how this adaptive retuning stuff
can be done to -my- satisfaction :), I'd like to hear
more!

If they are posted, I promise that I will give you and
John a full Psycho Evaluation. :-) <= attention!

- Jeff

John truly I would like to use your adaptive tuning as a midi plugin
to play with negative matrix values and "springiness" on fresh
tunes. I think there is a psychoacoustic effect of the constant
retuning that can keep the ear from fatiguing and somehow increases
the sense of spaciousness. A wild theory is that it might be
annoying when listening to known tunes because it forces the brain to
readjust something it thought it knew. Anyway the whole idea seems
to have a lot of commercial potential as a creative plugin as well as
an "accurate" retuner.

Mary

--- In crazy_music@y..., nanom3@h... wrote:
> John truly I would like to use your adaptive tuning as a midi plugin
> to play with negative matrix values and "springiness" on fresh
> tunes. I think there is a psychoacoustic effect of the constant
> retuning that can keep the ear from fatiguing and somehow increases
> the sense of spaciousness.

I agree. It also colors the mood in various, sometimes surprising
ways. I tend to feel the differences in mood more so than hear the
differences in tuning.

I think that's part of what a capella groups and string groups tend to
do intuitively. My hope was that John's algorithm might head off in
that direction but instead it seems to do something similar but
different. Which can be a very good thing, a fresh sounding thing, as
seen with his retuning of Chris Bailey's wonderful sonata.

His program may end up helping to demonstrate by negative example that
humans singing or playing flexible pitch instruments do *not*
typically tend toward JI. Exceptions, of course, would be in styles
that grew out of Celtic roots, such as Bluegrass and Southern Gospel.
But typically, I would guess that musicians in flexible pitch
environments intuitively intone not always so much to gain consonance
as to achieve or enhance the appropriate mood; or perhaps some
compromise between the two in some cases. All guess work based on
listening, I admit; no hard data.

> A wild theory is that it might be
> annoying when listening to known tunes because it forces the brain
to
> readjust something it thought it knew.

Agree with that, too. In general, the better I know a piano piece,
the more it bothers me to hear it adaptively retuned. Also, within
the confines of the Common Practice Era, the later in time the piece
comes from, the more it bothers me to hear it retuned. I like his
retuning of ensembles better than of piano, probably at least partly
because I expect a piano to have a stable tuning. Chris' piece is the
"exception that proves the rule."

Talk about crazy music: the piano that wouldn't sit still. :-)

David