PHI-th of an octave---dat-sa-nice-ah!

Hey all,

There's been lots and lots of PHI talk around here lately.

Sorry if this has been mentioned, I haven't dug too deeply into some of
these threads...but:

I am interested in an alternative interpretation of PHI--instead of the
acoustic factor of ~1.618 as a generator, we could look at intervals which
are derived from 0.618/oct (i.e. 2^phi....). This way, the octave becomes
our natural period, and when pitches are viewed as on a circle, we are
seeing a literal analog to the way leaves on many plants grow to maximize
their exposure to sunlight...via the Fibonacci sequence. IOW, many plant
leaves grow at angles which relate to each other by 2*3.1415/phi radians,
maximizing their potential NOT to be blocked by higher layers as the plant
grows. It's called the 'golden angle' relationship.

http://library.thinkquest.org/27890/applications5.html

One can derive scales from 'Fibonacci EDOs' : 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55...
I like 34. Interestingly, MOS scales occur when the subset is also a
fibonacci number.

My current favorite is '8of34 MOS':
5 5 3 5 5 3 5 3 or L L s L L s L s

You can of course play around with the various rotations (modes) and get
different moods and effects.

Having 8 notes in the scale is nice: more possibilities than 5, but less
tension and information than 13 and up....it seems to be a sweet spot, just
slightly more information than a typical diatonic scale. Try it!

Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.akjmusic.com
http://www.untwelve.org

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