Conchords, dischords and taste.

I hear intervals such as 16/15 and 25/24 as pleasing conchords. Before I got into non 12 edo music I heard a 12 edo semitone interval as a pleasing conchord (and still do). I also find a major chord with an augmented fourth added a pleasing conchord aswell as singing a major seventh on top of a minor chord. Possibly because of this, I sometimes compose love songs that sound menacing to some people. I have noticed that some chords I hear as harmonic on a guitar can sound dischordant when played with some synth sounds (I noticed this with a clarinet like sound). I think there was supposed to be some kind of question in this post.

Not sure of your question but you've inspired me to revisit these
harmonies and see what I now think of them and for that I tank you for
bringing the subject up.

Chris

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 8:02 PM, markallanbarnes
<mark.barnes3@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> I hear intervals such as 16/15 and 25/24 as pleasing conchords. Before I got into non 12 edo music I heard a 12 edo semitone interval as a pleasing conchord (and still do). I also find a major chord with an augmented fourth added a pleasing conchord aswell as singing a major seventh on top of a minor chord. Possibly because of this, I sometimes compose love songs that sound menacing to some people. I have noticed that some chords I hear as harmonic on a guitar can sound dischordant when played with some synth sounds (I noticed this with a clarinet like sound). I think there was supposed to be some kind of question in this post.

>"I hear intervals such as 16/15 and 25/24 as pleasing concords. Before
I got into non 12 edo music I heard a 12 edo semitone interval as a
pleasing concord (and still do). I also find a major chord with an
augmented fourth added a pleasing concord aswell as singing a major
seventh on top of a minor chord. Possibly because of this, I sometimes
compose love songs that sound menacing to some people."
I'm interested to know if others on here agree with the above statements...do any of the rest of you agree with "Mark"?

I find all of the above quite discordant "even" with a very pure guitar instrument as the timbre. I also hear the major 7th on top of a minor chord arrangement as "even" more discordant than a fairly clustered 10:11:12 chord. Note I'm not using "standard practice theory" nor critical band dissonance or JI to analyze the chords, just my ears.
I also wonder how many of you "used" to think of chords like the above as discordant, but have somehow trained your brains via micro-tonal listening to think of them as otherwise.

Personally I used to think 22TET, BP, and 7TET sounded very odd...now they sound nearly as natural to me as 12TET and, if I temper certain intervals slightly, sometimes more concordant. Correct me if you think I'm wrong...but do many of you think ease of micro-tonal listening is a gradual learned process that starts as requiring focus but becomes fairly automatic...much like the sub-conscious counter-steering you use to balance a bicycle?

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I'm fairly sure my tastes change over time and this is a form of learning. I was interested when someone described narrow interval chords such as 25/24 as "sour" because when I was a child I loved sour flavours and would eat slices of lemon and eat tartaric acid crystals straight from the bag. I only stopped because I thought it would destroy my teeth. In those days I had a taste for natural minor scales, which I found more beautiful than major scales. Encountering minor seconds and diminished and augmented triads (in 12 edo), I at first found them ugly, though I now find them beautiful. For some reason I think of scales inwhich the steps are of similar sizes as being "flat" or "rounded" and think of scales inwhich there are steps of very different sizes as being "spiky" or "sharp". This is obviously confusing since flat and sharp usually have very different meanings in music. To me, something like thata bhairaw (1, 16/15, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 8/5, 15/8, 2) is very spiky, ascending harmonic minor is less spiky, natural major is rounded, and 7 edo is more rounded still. I think 5 edo somehow manages to sound rounder than 7 edo, but a chromatic scale in 12 edo somehow manages to sound a bit spiky to me. I particularly noticed 16/15 sounding like a harmony in an Imrat Khan performance of Raga Madhuvanti which begins with repeated alternation between the chikari (1 and 2/1) and ni shudha on the main melody string (15/16). This was not the first time I heard the interval as a harmony, but it is a recording of an established musician using what might be classed as a dischord in a way that I find hard to imagine sounding dischordant.

I am curious, Michael (djtrancendance), as to why you put my name in inverted commas. I wasn't sure if this was just to show that it is my user name for yahoo groups, or if you were suggesting that it is not my real name, or if it was for some other reason.

>"I am curious, Michael (djtrancendance) , as to why you put my name in inverted commas. "
Trying to keep this short...I did it to express unsureness as I don't know what you'd like to be called: your alias says Markallan, your e-mail says Mark. Note..if you reply to this, please reply to me in private though...I do not want to end up posting more messages on-list about this off-topic subject.

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On 9 May 2010 02:09, markallanbarnes <mark.barnes3@...> wrote:

> To me, something like thata bhairaw (1, 16/15, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 8/5, 15/8, 2)
> is very spiky

I was experimenting with this a while ago and came to a different tuning for
this scale.

3/2 8/5 15/8 2/1 9/4 12/5 14/5 3/1
Or seen from 3/2: 1/1 16/15 5/4 4/3 3/2 8/5 28/15 2/1

Like the spanish gypsy scale of 3/2 8/5 15/8 2/1 9/4 12/5 8/3 3/1, which is
a mode of harmonic minor.
But the with 7/5 instead of 4/3.
Gives a nice 1/1 5/4 3/2 7/4 German sixth chord on 8/5 too.

Other tunings possible, but this one seemed most likely to me.

Marcel

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