Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup makemicromusic Tuning psychosis, making low-accuracy temperaments "work," and Knowsur's awesome new album

Hi everyone,

Given the recent influx of posts on the tuning list, I thought it
might be nice to talk about some actual music for a change. Knowsur
just released a life-changingly good album of Japanese-inspired
electronic dance microtonal chiptune music here:

http://split-notes.com/spnt004.php
Also not so long ago I posted about his house track, which is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9NlHaWllwU

The album and that piece are both in 14-tet, except for a few
polymicrotonal moments where 12 is thrown on top of it. And it has
totally blown my mind, because it uses to such an intuitive and
natural extent a tuning which I had largely written off as being
useless. That is, 7-tet, and its chromatically contorted multiple
14-tet, are not tunings that spring to mind as having any exceptional
harmonic properties. In fact, with 7-tet as a dicot temperament, it's
actually really low-accuracy. And, generally speaking, I hate it. When
I load up scala (the only way I have to mess around with this stuff),
and put on my trusty harmonic "reed organ" patch and start playing
chords, the beating makes me want to do terrible, unspeakable things.
It really just sounds bad.

But, this guy knowsur clearly hears it completely differently. In
fact, what he's done is so far away from my impression of 7-tet that
it blows my mind. His song "HANERU," for example, has harmonies in it
that I never conceived of as existing. It's like chords that I've
dreamed about or something, and now they're finally real. How much
more xenharmonic can you get than that, really? And, furthermore, all
of this music sounded "good" to me on immediate first listen. I didn't
have to spend tons of hours getting "comfortable" with 7-tet before
appreciating his music, it just clicked.

Most fascinating to me is that his theoretical ideas about it are also
completely different than mine. In his commentary for the "OUCHI"
track, he writes - "In 7-tet, we cannot possibly make any unpleasant
chords. I used this feature to play polyrhythms." So he's taken the
idea that 7-tet smooths major, minor, and diminished triads together
into one "triad" and has viewed the cup as half-full, with every chord
sounding pleasant. This is quite a paradigm shift from what I'm used
to, which is that for harmonies 7-tet is about as out of tune as you
can get, with the fifths being irritatingly flat and so on, and that
the cup is almost fully empty.

So when I hear statements like that 7-tet makes "awful harmonies" and
generally works best if chords of any kind are avoided - which have
reflected my own sentiments as well - somehow they don't seem to apply
here. But they certainly do when I'm screwing around in Scala. So my
question to all of the experienced composers and songwriters on the
list is - how do you guys manage to "get into" these low-accuracy
temperaments? After spending all of this time digging deeper into
ever-higher accuracy temperaments, or middle path temperaments that
are still decently harmonic, I wonder if perhaps the answer to
microtonal enlightenment is to go all the way in the other direction.
Temperaments like father and beep and so on - maybe they're amazing
and I'm missing out. Is it a matter of picking proper timbres or
something, and maybe I'm just using too harsh of a timbre? I'm
clueless.

Does any of the above make sense? How do you guys flip your perception
from a temperament like 7-tet from "almost useless" to "incredible?"
How do you get it so that every chord sounds good instead of sounding
bad? I feel like I've hit some kind of conceptual wall. Or maybe this
is the dreaded "tuning psychosis" I keep hearing about?

Apologies for the long message, and your xenharmonic enlightenment is
much appreciated!

-Mike

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

That turned out to be longer than I expected. Here are the cliffs, in
bullet point form:
- 7-tet chords used to sound bad,
- but on this album they sound ridiculously amazing.
- But, when I play it in scala, it sounds bad, and the beating makes
me want to shoot myself.
- I didn't need to immerse myself in nothing but 7-tet for a week to
appreciate knowsur's album, it just clicked immediately
- Somehow he managed to flip his brain into hearing every 7-tet chord
as equally pleasant instead of as equally unpleasant, just like folks
did when 12-tet was adopted
- And then he managed to communicate his paradigm through his art, and
it worked.

So composers - is anyone familiar with this concept? Does anyone have
any tips for coming to understand and appreciate low-accuracy harmonic
tunings?

I think perhaps it has something to do with timbre - maybe one of the
new elements to wrestle with, for microtonal composition is to not
just assume you can throw any timbre over any tuning like you can with
12. Not that you have to go with Sethares-style detuned timbres or
anything, but perhaps something like an organ just isn't going to work
with 7-tet, and one needs to stick with rounder tones (or not have
brighter timbres sustaining chords).

A larger philosophical discussion of everything can be found in the
preceding post, which was sort of long.

-Mike

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Given the recent influx of posts on the tuning list, I thought it
> might be nice to talk about some actual music for a change. Knowsur
> just released a life-changingly good album of Japanese-inspired
> electronic dance microtonal chiptune music here:
>
> http://split-notes.com/spnt004.php
> Also not so long ago I posted about his house track, which is here:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9NlHaWllwU
>
> The album and that piece are both in 14-tet, except for a few
> polymicrotonal moments where 12 is thrown on top of it. And it has
> totally blown my mind, because it uses to such an intuitive and
> natural extent a tuning which I had largely written off as being
> useless. That is, 7-tet, and its chromatically contorted multiple
> 14-tet, are not tunings that spring to mind as having any exceptional
> harmonic properties. In fact, with 7-tet as a dicot temperament, it's
> actually really low-accuracy. And, generally speaking, I hate it. When
> I load up scala (the only way I have to mess around with this stuff),
> and put on my trusty harmonic "reed organ" patch and start playing
> chords, the beating makes me want to do terrible, unspeakable things.
> It really just sounds bad.
>
> But, this guy knowsur clearly hears it completely differently. In
> fact, what he's done is so far away from my impression of 7-tet that
> it blows my mind. His song "HANERU," for example, has harmonies in it
> that I never conceived of as existing. It's like chords that I've
> dreamed about or something, and now they're finally real. How much
> more xenharmonic can you get than that, really? And, furthermore, all
> of this music sounded "good" to me on immediate first listen. I didn't
> have to spend tons of hours getting "comfortable" with 7-tet before
> appreciating his music, it just clicked.
>
> Most fascinating to me is that his theoretical ideas about it are also
> completely different than mine. In his commentary for the "OUCHI"
> track, he writes - "In 7-tet, we cannot possibly make any unpleasant
> chords. I used this feature to play polyrhythms." So he's taken the
> idea that 7-tet smooths major, minor, and diminished triads together
> into one "triad" and has viewed the cup as half-full, with every chord
> sounding pleasant. This is quite a paradigm shift from what I'm used
> to, which is that for harmonies 7-tet is about as out of tune as you
> can get, with the fifths being irritatingly flat and so on, and that
> the cup is almost fully empty.
>
> So when I hear statements like that 7-tet makes "awful harmonies" and
> generally works best if chords of any kind are avoided - which have
> reflected my own sentiments as well - somehow they don't seem to apply
> here. But they certainly do when I'm screwing around in Scala. So my
> question to all of the experienced composers and songwriters on the
> list is - how do you guys manage to "get into" these low-accuracy
> temperaments? After spending all of this time digging deeper into
> ever-higher accuracy temperaments, or middle path temperaments that
> are still decently harmonic, I wonder if perhaps the answer to
> microtonal enlightenment is to go all the way in the other direction.
> Temperaments like father and beep and so on - maybe they're amazing
> and I'm missing out. Is it a matter of picking proper timbres or
> something, and maybe I'm just using too harsh of a timbre? I'm
> clueless.
>
> Does any of the above make sense? How do you guys flip your perception
> from a temperament like 7-tet from "almost useless" to "incredible?"
> How do you get it so that every chord sounds good instead of sounding
> bad? I feel like I've hit some kind of conceptual wall. Or maybe this
> is the dreaded "tuning psychosis" I keep hearing about?
>
> Apologies for the long message, and your xenharmonic enlightenment is
> much appreciated!
>
> -Mike
>

🔗Kalle Aho <kalleaho@...>

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

MikeB>"His song "HANERU," for example, has harmonies in it that I never
conceived of as existing. It's like chords that I've dreamed about or something"
On the tuning list, I listed it before as one of my favorites in the album.
And it (the song and its use of the tuning) does seem to have a profound sense
of relaxation and lots of diverse harmony (and as you know I'm a huge fan of
tall chords, especially "odd" ones).

>"So he's taken the idea that 7-tet smooths major, minor, and diminished triads
>together into one "triad" and has viewed the cup as half-full, with every chord
>sounding pleasant."
Agreed. 7TET seems to have this advantage in a way as it is full of neutral
versions of tones.

>"So my question to all of the experienced composers and songwriters on the list
>is - how do you guys manage to "get into" these low-accuracy temperaments?"
I got interested in 7TET as it gets pretty close to minimizing root tone
dissonance ala Plomp and Llevelt's curve....a property I still try to capture in
at least one mode of a scale whenever I start writing a scale so as to make more
clustered chords available.

When I actually started playing in 7TET, however, I got somewhat addicted to
the mysterious "neutral" consistency of the chords Knowsur seems to be alluding
to. Even more so holds for Ptolemy's Homalon scales (far as strong neutral
intervals), which take the advantages of which JI accuracy and 7TET and, in
general, put them together (thus making a "high accuracy" version of 7TET with a
similar caveat to 7TET; that there is a terribly wolf-fifth floating around
(actually 7TET repeats it much more than the Homalon scales)).

I've never composed in 14TET, but have had experience with the "odd" 19/10
and 27/20 ratios it forms and would say they are both excellent (both very
resolved and very new sounding). The fair 7/6 and 11/7 approximations, of
course, are also usable as typical 7-limit and 11-limit intervals.

>"After spending all of this time digging deeper into ever-higher accuracy
>temperaments, or middle path temperaments that are still decently harmonic, I
>wonder if perhaps the answer to microtonal enlightenment is to go all the way in
>the other direction."

From my experience so far, I'd say not quite. It seems "weird" scales do
have an advantage of consistency in feel, but not consistency in other
places...and ones I've found often come out when playing progressions but not in
individual chords.
There's physics backing up the critical band root tone separation issue and
Knowsar seems to agree with my subjective opinion that neutral intervals lend to
stability (and perhaps said sense of "consistency" I mentioned before). I have
been playing around with neutral intervals for ages and love it. However I am
betting a (if not the) major reason that work has nothing to do with lack of
accuracy helping it.
Remember back when I messed around with PHI and Silver Section Tunings (and
got quite a lashing for it, most trying to say I was wrong and was really
getting at the idea of Noble Mediants, which are "always" the most dissonant
possible intervals being furthest from consonant intervals)? I'd still say
Silver is a fairly desirable tuning due to its IMVHO solid sense of
consistency. However both have intervals not really stable toward anything,
including neutral ot even 11 or 13-limit! So I strongly suspect the consistency
comes from what I've heard Jacques Dudon call the naturally equal beating nature
of recurrent sequences...a completely different kind of consistency than neutral
tones!

Igs touched on that too in a previous discussion. That too much "dissonance"
can produce situations that bring about "consonance". Furthermore my own
perception is, that the consonance need not always take the form of things like
JI chords (where the period can be calculated by taking the inverse of the
difference of any two tones...yes I even confirmed that with a physicist to make
sure). It seems many other patterns, though not quite as accessible or
convincing to a whole lot of people (at least on the tuning list), do exist.

I can't tell you how happy I am to hear these sort of responses though. It's
yet another thing that makes me want to get back to the "lost art" of trying to
find different types of ways to achieve consonance. Hopefully in the future
people will be able to make progress in such fields without being called
heretics (in a bad way, as if to denote someone who refuses to learn
correctly)...my experience with learning about it has been quite good if not
mind-blowingly fantastic in the past.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗aum <aum@...>

On 09/11/2010 09:07 AM, Mike Battaglia wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Given the recent influx of posts on the tuning list, I thought it
> might be nice to talk about some actual music for a change. Knowsur
> just released a life-changingly good album of Japanese-inspired
> electronic dance microtonal chiptune music here:
>
> http://split-notes.com/spnt004.php
> Also not so long ago I posted about his house track, which is here:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9NlHaWllwU
>
> The album and that piece are both in 14-tet, except for a few
> polymicrotonal moments where 12 is thrown on top of it. And it has
> totally blown my mind, because it uses to such an intuitive and
> natural extent a tuning which I had largely written off as being
> useless. That is, 7-tet, and its chromatically contorted multiple
> 14-tet, are not tunings that spring to mind as having any exceptional
> harmonic properties. In fact, with 7-tet as a dicot temperament, it's
> actually really low-accuracy. And, generally speaking, I hate it. When
> I load up scala (the only way I have to mess around with this stuff),
> and put on my trusty harmonic "reed organ" patch and start playing
> chords, the beating makes me want to do terrible, unspeakable things.
> It really just sounds bad.
>
> But, this guy knowsur clearly hears it completely differently. In
> fact, what he's done is so far away from my impression of 7-tet that
> it blows my mind. His song "HANERU," for example, has harmonies in it
> that I never conceived of as existing. It's like chords that I've
> dreamed about or something, and now they're finally real. How much
> more xenharmonic can you get than that, really? And, furthermore, all
> of this music sounded "good" to me on immediate first listen. I didn't
> have to spend tons of hours getting "comfortable" with 7-tet before
> appreciating his music, it just clicked.
>
> Most fascinating to me is that his theoretical ideas about it are also
> completely different than mine. In his commentary for the "OUCHI"
> track, he writes - "In 7-tet, we cannot possibly make any unpleasant
> chords. I used this feature to play polyrhythms." So he's taken the
> idea that 7-tet smooths major, minor, and diminished triads together
> into one "triad" and has viewed the cup as half-full, with every chord
> sounding pleasant. This is quite a paradigm shift from what I'm used
> to, which is that for harmonies 7-tet is about as out of tune as you
> can get, with the fifths being irritatingly flat and so on, and that
> the cup is almost fully empty.
>
> So when I hear statements like that 7-tet makes "awful harmonies" and
> generally works best if chords of any kind are avoided - which have
> reflected my own sentiments as well - somehow they don't seem to apply
> here. But they certainly do when I'm screwing around in Scala. So my
> question to all of the experienced composers and songwriters on the
> list is - how do you guys manage to "get into" these low-accuracy
> temperaments? After spending all of this time digging deeper into
> ever-higher accuracy temperaments, or middle path temperaments that
> are still decently harmonic, I wonder if perhaps the answer to
> microtonal enlightenment is to go all the way in the other direction.
> Temperaments like father and beep and so on - maybe they're amazing
> and I'm missing out. Is it a matter of picking proper timbres or
> something, and maybe I'm just using too harsh of a timbre? I'm
> clueless.
>
> Does any of the above make sense? How do you guys flip your perception
> from a temperament like 7-tet from "almost useless" to "incredible?"
> How do you get it so that every chord sounds good instead of sounding
> bad? I feel like I've hit some kind of conceptual wall. Or maybe this
> is the dreaded "tuning psychosis" I keep hearing about?
>
> Apologies for the long message, and your xenharmonic enlightenment is
> much appreciated!
>
> -Mike
> Hi,
for me the 7edo is the xenharmonic scale I begun work with many years ago, in fact one of my first xenharmonic scales at all. I think about it as of 'tempered' or 'equidistant' diatonics - the scale combining the familiar structure of 7-tone diaconic scale with the symmetry of edos.
From the beginning it sounds good melodically as well as harmonically to me. I like its ambivalent character with neutral thirds and its overall harmonic simplicity. I agree with Knowsur's 'we cannot possibly make any unpleasant chords' but I would rather say 'there is no big difference between consonant and dissonant chords'. There are no strict consonances nor dissonances which is pleasant and useful feature of this scale.
In many of my 7edo works I use simple harmonic progressions which I feel functional and satisfactory. Few examples can be found here: http://www.uvnitr.cz/flaoyg/flao_yg/kelt.html, http://www.uvnitr.cz/flaoyg/flao_yg/pavouci.html or here: http://www.last.fm/music/Flao+YG (Kelt and Pavouci).
Best
Milan

🔗Herman Miller <hmiller@...>

Mike Battaglia wrote:

> So when I hear statements like that 7-tet makes "awful harmonies" and
> generally works best if chords of any kind are avoided - which have
> reflected my own sentiments as well - somehow they don't seem to apply
> here. But they certainly do when I'm screwing around in Scala. So my
> question to all of the experienced composers and songwriters on the
> list is - how do you guys manage to "get into" these low-accuracy
> temperaments? After spending all of this time digging deeper into
> ever-higher accuracy temperaments, or middle path temperaments that
> are still decently harmonic, I wonder if perhaps the answer to
> microtonal enlightenment is to go all the way in the other direction.
> Temperaments like father and beep and so on - maybe they're amazing
> and I'm missing out. Is it a matter of picking proper timbres or
> something, and maybe I'm just using too harsh of a timbre? I'm
> clueless.

Temperaments like father and beep take some getting used to. One thing to keep in mind with father is that the same interval can sound like a fourth or a third depending on the context, but if you're not careful it just sounds like something between a fourth and a third. It really stretches the limit of what you can perceive as 5-limit harmony, and it barely works as 7-limit. Beep really doesn't function well as a 7-limit temperament, but the 5-limit version "bug" has a nice pelog scale. Timbre does make a difference, but even with regular harmonic timbres you've still got contrasts between "more harsh" and "less harsh".

Although you can get these extreme temperaments to work, I think they're right on the edge of barely useful. The "neutral third" kinds of temperament (e.g., dicot, decimal, sharp, or the unnamed 3&7 temperament, which divide the fifth into equal thirds that double as both major and minor thirds) have some potential. But another approach is to forget about regular mapping, and look into tunings like Wilson's golden horograms. While some of these can be mapped to conventional harmony, or regular temperaments (e.g., Kornerup, Hanson), others may have more than one interval close to the same JI interval.

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Kalle Aho <kalleaho@...> wrote:
>
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>
> wrote:
>
> > I think perhaps it has something to do with timbre - maybe one of the
> > new elements to wrestle with, for microtonal composition is to not
> > just assume you can throw any timbre over any tuning like you can with
> > 12.
>
> Actually I don't think any (harmonic) timbre sounds good with 12. We
> are just so automatically used to make the usual adjustments to the
> parameters when programming synths for example. Like detuning
> oscillators or adding some vibrato. I think it has everything to
> do with timbre.

Hi Kalle, good to hear from you again!

What timbres do you think don't sound good with 12 that require higher
accuracy tunings? I certainly enjoy all of the acoustic instruments I
can think of... Piano, guitar, organ, etc all sound find to me. I have
never minded something like sawtooth with 12 either, although it's
obviously more pleasant with a tuning closer to JI. But I have never
heard of it as sounding "bad," perhaps because my brain is set for 12
to ignore the noise and focus more on what does work. Which is a trick
that I have not yet mastered yet with other low-accuracy temperaments.

And as I listen to it again, perhaps it's just that this guy is a
master of hiding timbral roughness... he uses delay and such a lot,
and is very selective about the timbres he uses to play chords,
preferring to use timbres like rhodes and such.

As an aside, another reason I made that point thought was just as a
reaction to the notion that 12 is an "awful" tuning because the 5/4 is
so sharp. In reality, the more I delve into tuning theory, the more I
find that 12 is an excellent tuning. It's just not interesting to us,
because the whole point of these lists is to get away from it. But I
sometimes think that if we had all started working with 17-equal or
19-equal or something, we would all find 12 to be this enormously
expressive gem that we had missed and be reveling in its discovery
today.

At some point in the future I'd like to do an ET survey and write a
piece in every tuning from 7 to 22 or something, and if I do, I'm not
going to skip 12, just for symbolic reasons (and also because I think
there's a lot of xenharmonic material to squeeze out of it too). But
even this is besides the point, which is that even if you really HATE
12... 7-tet is way further out of tune with JI than 12, and on this
album, it still sounds great.

A pleasure to talk to you as always.

-Mike

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Michael <djtrancendance@...> wrote:
>
> MikeB>"His song "HANERU," for example, has harmonies in it that I never
>
> conceived of as existing. It's like chords that I've dreamed about or something"
> On the tuning list, I listed it before as one of my favorites in the album.
> And it (the song and its use of the tuning) does seem to have a profound sense
> of relaxation and lots of diverse harmony (and as you know I'm a huge fan of
> tall chords, especially "odd" ones).

Yeah. It's awesome. Probably my favorite track on the album. SUNERU is
more awesome from a musical standpoint, but less xenharmonically
enlightening since he has the 12-tet riff on top of everything. Which,
incidentally, makes it a killer opening track for people who aren't
into microtonality.

> I got interested in 7TET as it gets pretty close to minimizing root tone
> dissonance ala Plomp and Llevelt's curve....a property I still try to capture in
> at least one mode of a scale whenever I start writing a scale so as to make more
> clustered chords available.

What do you mean by "root tone dissonance?" Can you link me to Plomp
and Llevelt's curve, also?

> I've never composed in 14TET, but have had experience with the "odd" 19/10
> and 27/20 ratios it forms and would say they are both excellent (both very
> resolved and very new sounding). The fair 7/6 and 11/7 approximations, of
> course, are also usable as typical 7-limit and 11-limit intervals.

27/20 is... a little bit out there. I don't like it much. But again, I
feel like that's something I need to get away from. After all, I hated
7-tet, and now it's awesome.

I think it has to do with musical context more than anything. If you
start playing a piece of music that is filled with near-just
harmonies, and then start introducing ridiculous wolf fifths, it's
going to sound absolutely terrible. On the other hand, if you hammer
someone with ridiculously flat 7-tet fifths right from the beginning,
they sound totally fine. Perhaps this reflects adaptations taking
place in the auditory system as a piece of music plays from beginning
to end, I don't really know.

> From my experience so far, I'd say not quite. It seems "weird" scales do
> have an advantage of consistency in feel, but not consistency in other
> places...and ones I've found often come out when playing progressions but not in
> individual chords.

What do you mean?

> There's physics backing up the critical band root tone separation issue and
> Knowsar seems to agree with my subjective opinion that neutral intervals lend to
> stability (and perhaps said sense of "consistency" I mentioned before). I have
> been playing around with neutral intervals for ages and love it. However I am
> betting a (if not the) major reason that work has nothing to do with lack of
> accuracy helping it.

I still don't really get this. Are you trying to say that chords sound
bad if notes fall within a critical band of one another? Because all
of the neutral seconds on this album are well within the critical
bandwidth of one another.

But I agree, neutral seconds have a very, very pleasant sound. Very
pleasant indeed. Intervals like 10:11:12 even more so. I'm going to
make a post on the tuning list about why I think this is shortly, as I
have just discovered some research in the medical literature that ties
a lot of things together about this. It has to do with combination
tones, but not the kind most people usually assume. You will probably
enjoy it.

> So I strongly suspect the consistency
> comes from what I've heard Jacques Dudon call the naturally equal beating nature
> of recurrent sequences...a completely different kind of consistency than neutral
> tones!

I always liked your PHI tunings. But in this case, I can't really find
much beating on this album at all, and I doubt that it's because 7-tet
has equal beating qualities. One thing I think is also a neat sound is
to shoot for having chords stretched or compressed in proportion
similar to how they naturally fit in the harmonic series. I.E. if
you're using mavila, get it so that the major triad ends up being an
evenly compressed version of 4:5:6. (I think this works out to be the
same thing as woolhouse-optimal but haven't worked it out precisely,
if you want to talk more about it let's take it offlist).

> I can't tell you how happy I am to hear these sort of responses though. It's
> yet another thing that makes me want to get back to the "lost art" of trying to
> find different types of ways to achieve consonance.

Please let's not take this thread into that direction... Nobody on the
tuning list thinks that consonance is entirely about HE. Nobody.

-Mike

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

MikeB>"But I sometimes think that if we had all started working with 17-equal or
19-equal or something, we would all find 12 to be this enormously
expressive gem that we had missed and be reveling in its discovery
today."

Far as possibilities per-tone and assuming you have a need for perfect
transposition, 12TET is about as good as it gets far as I can see. 31TET (and
not 17 or 19) is the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that seems
truly competitive (almost for 3 and 5 limit), and that, of course, requires a
lot more notes thus making instruments designed for it trickier to play for
many. And, although some people seem to get really angry at me for saying this,
I'd say that, yes, the far-off 12TET third and sixth that somehow often work
pretty well may very well be explained by something other than, say, Harmonic
Entropy that has yet to be discovered (and, yes, that include why the human mind
seem to take the 15/8 7th so well and often not think it sound much worse than
(if not so good as) compared to, say, a minor seventh.

The only thing I see as seriously "plagued" about 12TET (not that "should be
replaced" but "that could be improved at the cost of being worse at something
else where the swap may well be worth it to several people") is the following:

The ability to stacking close interval like semit-tones in 12TET almost always
seems to result in something unusably dissonant to my ears (and, indirectly, a
whole lot of music theory seems devoted to avoiding such "tonal clusters"). And
it's in that same area things like Ptolemy's Homalon scales seem to excel. The
one type of interval present that seems to allow this is the same type 7TET has:
neutral intervals.
I've seen the Ptolemy Homalon scale in the Scala library in a nifty
12-tone, well-but=not-perfectly-modulation-capable Homalon scale...it begs the
question can it work as a good alternative for 12TET for those willing to give
up a wolf fifth (think 40/27-ish) or two for the ability to make better "cluster
chords".

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

>"What do you mean by "root tone dissonance?" Can you link me to Plomp and
>Llevelt's curve, also?"
The idea is to find and graph what's the roughness between two sine waves
(IE how annoying their beating is to people, on average)...where each sine wave
represents the lowest tone of each instrument across multiple dyads. The graph
is on:
http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/%7Esethares/images/image3.gif
All Sethares' larger theory really seems to doe is expand this by applying
it multiple times...to compare each partial/"sine wave" of a timbre to every
other one, summing the roughness value for each partial, and then adds it
together and graphs it. So it's a series of two "loops" in code, one
representing the "fixed" partial you are on and the other representing the
"changing" partial you are comparing it to.

>"27/20 is... a little bit out there. I don't like it much. But again, I feel
>like that's something I need to get away from. After all, I hated 7-tet, and now
>it's awesome."
Hmm...let me see if I can think of as a good chord example.
1
27/20 (1.35)
18/11 (1.64)
20/11 (1.818) (approximate 7/6 gap from 25/16 and 27/20 gap from 27/20)

This uses a whole lot of 14TET-exclusive tones. You might want to take out
the 25/16 to relax it a bit.

>"Nobody on the tuning list thinks that consonance is entirely about HE.
Nobody."
Maybe I'm being overly defensive. I'm just trying to say, overall, this is a
case where psychoacoustics (and not just HE but also other theories) seem to say
an interval should act like one thing, but for whatever reason in odd cases like
this, mood says it acts like another. To put it in a more positive
light...maybe we can find some pretty cool musical possibilities by looking for
good combinations of tone such theories (including JI and temperament) may not
point out to us directly as possibilities.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Marcel de Velde <m.develde@...>

On 12 September 2010 15:36, Michael <djtrancendance@...> wrote:

> Far as possibilities per-tone and assuming you have a need for perfect
> transposition, 12TET is about as good as it gets far as I can see. 31TET
> (and
> not 17 or 19) is the only thing I can think of off the top of my head that
> seems
> truly competitive (almost for 3 and 5 limit), and that, of course, requires
> a
> lot more notes thus making instruments designed for it trickier to play for
>
> many. And, although some people seem to get really angry at me for saying
> this,
> I'd say that, yes, the far-off 12TET third and sixth that somehow often
> work
> pretty well may very well be explained by something other than, say,
> Harmonic
> Entropy that has yet to be discovered (and, yes, that include why the human
> mind
> seem to take the 15/8 7th so well and often not think it sound much worse
> than
> (if not so good as) compared to, say, a minor seventh.
>
>
I agree with 12TET beeing as good as it gets.
It aproximates JI the best of all equal temperaments.

24TET is just as good I think, only it allows more "errors" to be made by
the player.
24TET is in my opinion (based on my JI research) best seen as 12TET with
extra notes (so one should follow 12tet structure as the basis and not
transpose things by a quarter tone or things like that)
I once said on this list that 24TET was useless and not an improvement on
12TET precisely because one shouldn't tranpose 12tet music in quarter tones
within a piece. While this thinking was correct, 24TET doesn't improve the
tuning accuracy of common practice music at all, it IS the next logical
expansion of common practice music and allow completely new things.
In my opinion, 24TET is the best thing for "easy" (compared to JI)
microtonal music, and I think sooner or later it will be really picked up.

Marcel

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

🔗Marcel de Velde <m.develde@...>

> >"What do you mean by "root tone dissonance?" Can you link me to Plomp and
> >Llevelt's curve, also?"
> The idea is to find and graph what's the roughness between two sine waves
> (IE how annoying their beating is to people, on average)...where each sine
> wave
> represents the lowest tone of each instrument across multiple dyads. The
> graph
> is on:
> http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/%7Esethares/images/image3.gif
> All Sethares' larger theory really seems to doe is expand this by applying
> it multiple times...to compare each partial/"sine wave" of a timbre to
> every
> other one, summing the roughness value for each partial, and then adds it
> together and graphs it. So it's a series of two "loops" in code, one
> representing the "fixed" partial you are on and the other representing the
> "changing" partial you are comparing it to.
>
>
I think this approach is completely flawed.
The thing is, we don't just rate a chord by how it beats within itself.
We also very much rate a chord IN RELATION to which chords came before (and
after).
The tuning of chords is totally linked to it's musical context.
A chord tuned in a particular way can sound ok on it's own, or in a certain
musical context, while that same tuning for that same chord can sound
extremely out of tune and bad to all ears in another musical context.

Marcel

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Marcel de Velde <m.develde@...>

On 12 September 2010 16:15, Marcel de Velde <m.develde@...> wrote:

> I think this approach is completely flawed.
> The thing is, we don't just rate a chord by how it beats within itself.
> We also very much rate a chord IN RELATION to which chords came before (and
> after).
> The tuning of chords is totally linked to it's musical context.
> A chord tuned in a particular way can sound ok on it's own, or in a certain
> musical context, while that same tuning for that same chord can sound
> extremely out of tune and bad to all ears in another musical context.
>
> Marcel
>

To add to this.

12TET and 24TET (when properly used) temper out in the best way possible for
a fixed scale, the different chords in different musical contexts.
When one wishes to improve upon 12TET / 24TET the scale can't be fixed
anymore and one is either limited in what one can play improved in it (for
instance a 12tone non equal temperament that will improve some music in a
certain key), or one must go to potentially extremely large scales and a
thorough music theory on how to use such a tuning (for instance JI).

Marcel

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

>"The thing is, we don't just rate a chord by how it beats within itself."
Right, "we don't just"/"we don't only" so it doesn't solve the entire issue
of composition, only a part of it. :-)

>"We also very much rate a chord IN RELATION to which chords came before (and
after). The tuning of chords is totally linked to it's musical context."
However, I figure, if you have a bizarrely dissonant chord you will need to
find your way toward an incredibly consonant chord to resolve it unless, say,
you want the entire piece to carry that incredibly tense mood. If you have a
song with diminished and major chords resolving to and focused most on
diminished chords...true, it's probably going to sound more sour than a song
with diminished chords resolving to and focused on mostly major ones. But if
the beating in both type of chords is higher (for both cases) often it makes the
whole mood more tense regardless. The diminished-resolving song becomes "even"
more sad-sounding and the major-resolving one begins to become sad.

So I figure...if you don't know how my beating a chord has or, on a higher
level, how tense it feels...you may well be shifting the entire focus of your
song toward more or less tense...and probably want to add or decrease beating
according to what mood you want even if you're already being careful to have
chord progression usage echo your mood.

>"A chord tuned in a particular way can sound ok on it's own, or in a certain
>musical context, while that same tuning for that same chord can sound extremely
>out of tune and bad to all ears in another musical context."
The idea is to limit the cases where a chord will sound off by making the
moods of the chords more predictable and confident sounding. IE going from
extremely high to low beating at the drop of the hat, I figure, will likely
confused the listener a lot more than it will aid to expression of a
mood...unless the desired mood is "chaotic".

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 8:05 AM, aum <aum@...> wrote:
>
> Hi,
> for me the 7edo is the xenharmonic scale I begun work with many years
> ago, in fact one of my first xenharmonic scales at all. I think about it
> as of 'tempered' or 'equidistant' diatonics - the scale combining the
> familiar structure of 7-tone diaconic scale with the symmetry of edos.
> From the beginning it sounds good melodically as well as harmonically
> to me. I like its ambivalent character with neutral thirds and its
> overall harmonic simplicity. I agree with Knowsur's 'we cannot possibly
> make any unpleasant chords' but I would rather say 'there is no big
> difference between consonant and dissonant chords'. There are no strict
> consonances nor dissonances which is pleasant and useful feature of this
> scale.
> In many of my 7edo works I use simple harmonic progressions which I feel
> functional and satisfactory. Few examples can be found here:
> http://www.uvnitr.cz/flaoyg/flao_yg/kelt.html,
> http://www.uvnitr.cz/flaoyg/flao_yg/pavouci.html or here:
> http://www.last.fm/music/Flao+YG (Kelt and Pavouci).
> Best
> Milan

Hi Milan,

I really liked your pieces. Was that an actual guitar you were using
in kelt? Or a synth?

What amazes me is that I hear such clear shades of "major" and
"minorness" in the 7-tet modes. I wonder if this really is a
"bastardization" of the actual music from my familiarity with diatonic
scales all of these years, or if this is actually a feature of the
music.

Equivalent to this question is, I wonder if someone who was raised on
mavila would hear the pieces I hear as being in major as being in
minor, and so on.

-Mike

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 11:41 PM, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
> Temperaments like father and beep take some getting used to. One thing
> to keep in mind with father is that the same interval can sound like a
> fourth or a third depending on the context, but if you're not careful it
> just sounds like something between a fourth and a third. It really
> stretches the limit of what you can perceive as 5-limit harmony, and it
> barely works as 7-limit. Beep really doesn't function well as a 7-limit
> temperament, but the 5-limit version "bug" has a nice pelog scale.
> Timbre does make a difference, but even with regular harmonic timbres
> you've still got contrasts between "more harsh" and "less harsh".

Herman, with something like father, do you ever find that you adjust
so that the whole concept of a "third" and a "fourth" gets redefined?
That is, it's so far away from the diatonic structure that the
diatonic structure doesn't even work at all anymore?

I find myself fitting everything to the diatonic map I have for
hearing... 7-tet, mavila, 5-limit JI, etc. The furthest I've gotten
away from that is porcupine, where you have a type of minor second and
major second equated with 27/25 and 10/9, but I still tend to assign
whole step and half step values to what's going on subconsciously
anyway, unless I'm doing something like C-D-Eb-F in where it's just
consecutive 163 cent intervals.

> Although you can get these extreme temperaments to work, I think they're
> right on the edge of barely useful. The "neutral third" kinds of
> temperament (e.g., dicot, decimal, sharp, or the unnamed 3&7
> temperament, which divide the fifth into equal thirds that double as
> both major and minor thirds) have some potential. But another approach
> is to forget about regular mapping, and look into tunings like Wilson's
> golden horograms. While some of these can be mapped to conventional
> harmony, or regular temperaments (e.g., Kornerup, Hanson), others may
> have more than one interval close to the same JI interval.

I will check those out, thanks. I've been meaning to do some kind of
systematic exploration of the scale tree for a while now, so this will
tie into that. I think the question that this all raises though, is -
how relevant is using x-limit JI as a starting point at all, really,
to the end result of the music produced? If you pick timbres in which
clashing partials aren't really prominent, or disguise them with delay
and chorus and stuff, as knowsur did - it seems even more xenharmonic
to get away from JI a bit, since now you're exploring all sorts of
ambiguous intervals which can still have their own scale structures
and hence still make musical "sense."

But to more strongly elucidate my position, what I'm really saying is
- my paradigm until recently was:

- JI is the musical reality
- Tempering is a convenient way to lower the number of notes needed,
and also creates new musical phenomena like puns and comma pumps
- Puns create "ambiguous intervals" that can be perceived as more than
one JI ratio; i.e. dicot thirds can be perceived as either 5/4 or 6/5.
- This implies that the perception of the underlying ratio is what
gives the interval its "meaning" to us
- And this is presumably related to the virtual fundamental phenomenon.

But after exploring superpyth aeolian tunings where the minor triads
are 6:7:9, and seeing how they function almost entirely identical to
meantone aeolian tunings where the minor triads are 10:12:15 - and now
hearing Knowsur's album which is about as maximally far from accuracy
in the 5-axis as you can get - and also reading Rothenberg - I feel as
though the above paradigm, which I have basically believed in for the
last 2-3 years or so, is entirely wrong.

Sincerely,
Mike "A broken empty shell of the theory expert I once thought I was" Battaglia

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

Mike wrote:

>But after exploring superpyth aeolian tunings where the minor triads
>are 6:7:9, and seeing how they function almost entirely identical to
>meantone aeolian tunings where the minor triads are 10:12:15

Minor triads aren't very picky about their tuning. And while
superpyth major triads may "function" like the major triads in
meantone, they sure do sound different.

>and now hearing Knowsur's album which is about as maximally far
>from accuracy in the 5-axis as you can get

7-ET is actually a very good 5-limit temperament.

>- JI is the musical reality
>- Tempering is a convenient way to lower the number of notes needed,
>and also creates new musical phenomena like puns and comma pumps
>- Puns create "ambiguous intervals" that can be perceived as more than
>one JI ratio; i.e. dicot thirds can be perceived as either 5/4 or 6/5.
>- This implies that the perception of the underlying ratio is what
>gives the interval its "meaning" to us
>- And this is presumably related to the virtual fundamental phenomenon.
[snip]
>and also reading Rothenberg - I feel as though the above paradigm,
>which I have basically believed in for the last 2-3 years or so,
>is entirely wrong.

It may be. JI is only the concordance reality (and even then only
mostly -- you know about "magic" chords). Puns may be audible as
departures from JI when they involve a single chord change, but I'm
not so sure about longer comma pumps. Tempering not only increases
concordances/note, it increases melodic regularity, which Rothenberg
says is also good (efficiency and propriety are both fancy ways of
measuring melodic regularity).

-Carl

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 3:15 AM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>
> Mike wrote:
>
> >Equivalent to this question is, I wonder if someone who was raised on
> >mavila would hear the pieces I hear as being in major as being in
> >minor, and so on.
>
> While usually my answer is that psychoacoustics is irrelevant and
> the droids you're looking for are due to the melodic map or cultural
> context or... the quality of major/minor is one of the few droids
> I think does come more or less directly from psychoacoustics. So no,
> I don't think being raised on mavila would change that. -Carl

I do think that the major triad sonority can come directly from
psychoacoustics, but there are times in mavila (mostly mavila[5]) that
I can sort of flip my perception around to hear the minor third as
having some of the qualities of a "major third" (this is easiest if I
play a stack of fifths, so as to hear that the 6/5 is reachable by 4
fifths). Perhaps it's that my usual perception of a "major third"
lumps quite a few things together, and some of those get stolen for
the 6/5 in this case. It's quite a fragile trick to pull and I can't
do it all the time.

For the minor triad I'm even less sure that 10:12:15 serves an
archetypical function. I did a test on this the other day and heard
the 10:12:15 as having a fundamental of "5", and the 6:7:9 as having a
fundamental of "1" (or maybe it was 2 or 4, either way it was
definitely a chroma a fourth off from the other one). Despite this,
minor chords in superpyth vs meantone still sound like alternate
points of intonational stability for "the same" underlying thing, and
don't sound to me like some disconnect in categorical perception as
with major and minor triads. I could presumably develop a disconnect
over time, though...

However, the major/supermajor parallel doesn't work nearly as well,
even if you're playing with a no-5's timbre. Perhaps this points to
the major chord drawing more heavily from psychoacoustics than does
the minor chord.

-Mike

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

Mike:

>> While usually my answer is that psychoacoustics is irrelevant and
>> the droids you're looking for are due to the melodic map or cultural
>> context or... the quality of major/minor is one of the few droids
>> I think does come more or less directly from psychoacoustics. So no,
>> I don't think being raised on mavila would change that. -Carl
>
>I do think that the major triad sonority can come directly from
>psychoacoustics, but there are times in mavila (mostly mavila[5]) that
>I can sort of flip my perception around to hear the minor third as
>having some of the qualities of a "major third" (this is easiest if I
>play a stack of fifths, so as to hear that the 6/5 is reachable by 4
>fifths). Perhaps it's that my usual perception of a "major third"
>lumps quite a few things together, and some of those get stolen for
>the 6/5 in this case. It's quite a fragile trick to pull and I can't
>do it all the time.

What do you make of the 7-limit otonal/utonal tetrads... especially
the inversions of the latter, which sound a bit like different
chords...? Do they have a major/minor quality? Maybe reply offlist
or on tuning.

>For the minor triad I'm even less sure that 10:12:15 serves an
>archetypical function. I did a test on this the other day and heard
>the 10:12:15 as having a fundamental of "5", and the 6:7:9 as having a
>fundamental of "1" (or maybe it was 2 or 4, either way it was
>definitely a chroma a fourth off from the other one).

Were 10: and 6: the same pitch or...? For me, the lowest note
in both chords can clearly be the fundamental, due to the outside
fifth (2:3). Unless, in the case of 6:7:9, I'm primed with
4:6:7:9 (or similar) beforehand.

>However, the major/supermajor parallel doesn't work nearly as well,
>even if you're playing with a no-5's timbre. Perhaps this points to
>the major chord drawing more heavily from psychoacoustics than does
>the minor chord.

4:5:6 seems to have a wider field of attraction than either 6:7:9
or 10:12:15.

-Carl

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

🔗aum <aum@...>

> Hi Milan,
>
> I really liked your pieces. Was that an actual guitar you were using
> in kelt? Or a synth?
> The sound in Kelt is the modified guitar patch from some old Korg or E-Mu synth inspired by a celtic harp.
> What amazes me is that I hear such clear shades of "major" and
> "minorness" in the 7-tet modes. I wonder if this really is a
> "bastardization" of the actual music from my familiarity with diatonic
> scales all of these years, or if this is actually a feature of the
> music.
> I think it is our "bastardization" of the music we hear based on our cultural contexts (expectations, familiar harmonic/melodic progressions, etc.). But I have no proof for it, I have not performed any experiments in this field, nor even with the mavila scale.

Actualy, this is what I like in microtonality. When the listener is adapted to an unusual tuning after some time of listening, familiar and unfamiliar aspects in the music start to interact and changing their roles - e.g. the seemingly familiar melodic progression results in strange interval, the dissonant chord has the function of the consonant one, etc.

Milan

> Equivalent to this question is, I wonder if someone who was raised on
> mavila would hear the pieces I hear as being in major as being in
> minor, and so on.
>
> -Mike
>

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

🔗Kalle Aho <kalleaho@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Kalle Aho <kalleaho@...> wrote:
> >
> > --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > I think perhaps it has something to do with timbre - maybe one of the
> > > new elements to wrestle with, for microtonal composition is to not
> > > just assume you can throw any timbre over any tuning like you can with
> > > 12.
> >
> > Actually I don't think any (harmonic) timbre sounds good with 12. We
> > are just so automatically used to make the usual adjustments to the
> > parameters when programming synths for example. Like detuning
> > oscillators or adding some vibrato. I think it has everything to
> > do with timbre.
>
> Hi Kalle, good to hear from you again!

Thanks, I'm still reading the lists but I've been in lurking mode for
a while.

> What timbres do you think don't sound good with 12 that require higher
> accuracy tunings?

Generally brighter (more harmonics), thinner (less detuned oscillators, players,
pipes, strings etc.), more stable (less vibrato, tremolo or other modulations)
and longer sustained or slowly decaying sounds.

Actually I don't think the accuracy of tuning necessarily increases
the number of useful timbres. The same conventions of synth programming
that make 12-equal sound better might completely obscure the point of using
more accurate tunings.

I certainly enjoy all of the acoustic instruments I
> can think of... Piano, guitar, organ, etc all sound find to me.

Our acoustic instruments co-evolved with our tuning systems so it's
no surprise contemporary (fixed-pitch) instruments sound good with
12. Harpsichords already sound kind of "hairy" with 12-equal.

> I have never minded something like sawtooth with 12 either, although
> it's obviously more pleasant with a tuning closer to JI. But I have
> never heard of it as sounding "bad," perhaps because my brain is set
> for 12 to ignore the noise and focus more on what does work. Which is
> a trick that I have not yet mastered yet with other low-accuracy
> temperaments.

It's not unbearable but unfiltered one-oscillator saw is not a
particularly popular sound.

> And as I listen to it again, perhaps it's just that this guy is a
> master of hiding timbral roughness... he uses delay and such a lot,
> and is very selective about the timbres he uses to play chords,
> preferring to use timbres like rhodes and such.

Yes. Another thing we shouldn't underestimate is the power of
association. A piano in 7-equal might sound wrong because the
intervals and chords don't sound the way intervals and chords
played with piano are supposed to sound like. Maybe that's why
I don't like sampled (=equal-tempered) sitars.

> As an aside, another reason I made that point thought was just as a
> reaction to the notion that 12 is an "awful" tuning because the 5/4 is
> so sharp.

Sometimes I wonder who invented the notion that 14 cents is a huge
mistuning, I mean what do you compare it with? I don't think a typical
musician would think that one seventh of a semitone is much. Yes, it is
7 times the error of the fifth but that's only in relative terms. So
it must be sharp because it is "awful". :D

> In reality, the more I delve into tuning theory, the more I
> find that 12 is an excellent tuning. It's just not interesting to us,
> because the whole point of these lists is to get away from it. But I
> sometimes think that if we had all started working with 17-equal or
> 19-equal or something, we would all find 12 to be this enormously
> expressive gem that we had missed and be reveling in its discovery
> today.

At one point I tried to hate 12 but I couldn't. :) Now I take the
approach "what else is there?" but I always compare how 12 fits in.

> At some point in the future I'd like to do an ET survey and write a
> piece in every tuning from 7 to 22 or something, and if I do, I'm not
> going to skip 12, just for symbolic reasons (and also because I think
> there's a lot of xenharmonic material to squeeze out of it too). But
> even this is besides the point, which is that even if you really HATE
> 12... 7-tet is way further out of tune with JI than 12, and on this
> album, it still sounds great.
>
> A pleasure to talk to you as always.

I return the compliment! :)

Kalle

🔗cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...>

Hi Mike,
I can't believe I didn't see this post! I need to check MMM more often.

This is pretty much my area of expertise, so I have a lot to say.

I'm guessing by this point (I haven't read all the replies yet) that someone has brought up the point that there's no such thing as a "low-accuracy temperament", because all temperaments approximate at least one or two ratios very well (i.e., look at harmonics 32-64, and you'll find a surprising number of intervals that are practically nailed by many low-numbered EDOs...and while they may not be "concordant", they're at least "rooted", because they're harmonics). But I digress: this is supposed to be about how to make them work in music, not explain what's under the hood.

First and foremost, playing around in Scala tells you nothing. General MIDI sounds are the worst in the world for telling you how a tuning sounds. They don't sound "good" for 12-tET, why should we expect them to sound good with tunings of lower accuracy? Get yourself a decent soft synth that can be retuned, even if only to 12 notes at a time. This is my experience talking.

Second: octave doubling is your friend! The octave is so strongly concordant that it can make up for any lower-concordance intervals. Why do you think barre chords sound good in 12-tET? Lots of root-fifth octave doubles!

Third: extended-voice chords are your friend! More unique or more clustered notes in a chord always means that you are approximating a higher-order chunk of the harmonic series, meaning even the best approximation will involve larger ratios than in traditional triads. Some temperaments that look terrible in the 5-limit can really shine here!

Four: one concord makes up for a thousand discords. Sure, a thousand concords might be even better, but people don't realize how much mileage you can really get out of *one* concordant interval in a tuning. Even if that concord is not so concordant! For instance, the near-10/9 and near-7/6 in 13-EDO work GREAT. In all honesty, I've actually found 13-EDO to be more consonant that 14-EDO (at least on piano)!

Fifth: know the *mood* inherent to the temperament! One thing I absolutely LOVE about low-accuracy temperaments is that they seem to have much more obvious "character" to them than high-accuracy ones. It takes some playing around to really understand the mood, but they will reveal themselves with careful listening. Almost ALL my work with low-numbered EDOs revolves around exploiting their unique moods. From a concordance stand-point, 11-EDO and 13-EDO are pretty similar, but their moods are like night and day. The difference between these two is much greater than the difference between 12-EDO and 19-EDO, or 22-EDO and 31-EDO, and to me, this makes the former tunings more musically valuable.

I'll add more if it occurs to me, but in the meantime, I hope this helps!

-Igs

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

Igs>"More unique or more clustered notes in a chord always means that you are
approximating a higher-order chunk of the harmonic series"
Meaning, for example, three 12TET semi-tones stacked can make a decent
19:20:21 chord? My personal limit for clusters is more like 9:10:11:12 in
closeness...but I agree with the general concept (if I read you correctly). And
I use that sort of thing all the time to make jazzy-sounding chords that sound
more organized than you'd think they would.

>"Second: octave doubling is your friend! The octave is so strongly concordant
>that it can make up for any lower-concordance intervals. Why do you think barre
>chords sound good in 12-tET? Lots of root-fifth octave doubles!"
True. I've also experienced in composing that, in general, very strong
intervals will push weaker ones into place...and if you put a weak one into a
bunch of stronger ones it seems to just make it sound more intense rather than
changing to underlying mood (kind of like adding vibrato).

>"One thing I absolutely LOVE about low-accuracy temperaments is that they seem
>to have much more obvious "character" to them than high-accuracy ones. "
Same here. The lower-accuracy ones seem to let you "flip" the meaning of a
chord to different moods/colors more often since they are not so closely bound
to any single mood/color. Also near-5-limit temperament often means exactly the
same low limit chords spread out in different ways...while higher limit
temperament have so many different chords possible the chance of two chords from
each one being the same is much lower, even mathematically. Sethares "Blue Dabo
Girl" and "Ten Strings" song I think are a great example of this: in 10TET and
11TET respectively but the moods and chords sound insanely different to me.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

Kalle>"Sometimes I wonder who invented the notion that 14 cents is a huge
mistuning, I mean what do you compare it with?"
It's a weird issue. For a ratio like 5/4 or 5/3 or 9/5...I would say 14
cents is huge. For 9/5 vs. 20/11, for example...they are around that close but
IMVHO have completely different moods. And then between 20/11 and 11/6...it
seems to be the same deal...with the 11/6 and 9/5 being the less tense sounding
alternatives.
On the other hand, you get things like 33/25, 4/3...which are over 14 cents
apart and you'd think would sound a lot different...but try them and I'm pretty
confident you'll agree the mood is very similar.

What would be really nice...is if we could find a pattern in such thing that
doesn't assume, for example, that lower-numbered fractions always make
everything around them that approximates them sound weak. Perhaps one involving
compositional usage or that marks sensitive areas based on large listener
surveys and not just "what they should be mathematically".

Personally I'll say things like "8 cents is a good maximum margin of error"
to avoid looking dumb enough to think that, say, something 9 cents away from a
perfect 5th sound "ok". IE I say it because I figure even in a worst case
scenario that margin of error still seems to work. In reality...the good
maximum error seems to vary for interval to interval and not even on a gently
sloping continous curve (the way critical band roughness between sine waves
does). I really hope perhaps some of us can agree to sit down and "blind-test"
some intervals, on various instruments and in use/in out of chords, get a whole
lot of data, and then look for actual "listeners' patterns' that may or may not
fit into a nice simple formula.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗cameron <misterbobro@...>

🔗Herman Miller <hmiller@...>

Mike Battaglia wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 11:41 PM, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>> Temperaments like father and beep take some getting used to. One thing
>> to keep in mind with father is that the same interval can sound like a
>> fourth or a third depending on the context, but if you're not careful it
>> just sounds like something between a fourth and a third. It really
>> stretches the limit of what you can perceive as 5-limit harmony, and it
>> barely works as 7-limit. Beep really doesn't function well as a 7-limit
>> temperament, but the 5-limit version "bug" has a nice pelog scale.
>> Timbre does make a difference, but even with regular harmonic timbres
>> you've still got contrasts between "more harsh" and "less harsh".
> > Herman, with something like father, do you ever find that you adjust
> so that the whole concept of a "third" and a "fourth" gets redefined?
> That is, it's so far away from the diatonic structure that the
> diatonic structure doesn't even work at all anymore?

The diatonic structure certainly doesn't work with father, which instead has a kind of "negative" pentatonic as a basic scale (3 large and 2 small intervals, L-s-L-L-s). The octatonic scale (which is close to 8-EDO) works as an equivalent of a "chromatic" scale. But if you're using it as a temperament, you're treating the intervals as (very rough) approximations of some particular JI intervals. While the "major triad" is dissonant and doesn't sound much like a 4:5:6, you can get by with something that sounds like a 4:5:7. That same "4:5" might sound like a "3:4" in another context (say a melody where you're approximating 1/1 - 6/5 - 4/3). It also works as a 9/7 interval in a 4:5:7:9 chord.

> I find myself fitting everything to the diatonic map I have for
> hearing... 7-tet, mavila, 5-limit JI, etc. The furthest I've gotten
> away from that is porcupine, where you have a type of minor second and
> major second equated with 27/25 and 10/9, but I still tend to assign
> whole step and half step values to what's going on subconsciously
> anyway, unless I'm doing something like C-D-Eb-F in where it's just
> consecutive 163 cent intervals.

One thing about father and bug is that they do tend to take you away from diatonic interpretations. Anything with an uneven division of the major third (like the lemba decatonic), or an equal division of the minor third (like the 7- or 8-note porcupine scales), can do that to some extent.

>> Although you can get these extreme temperaments to work, I think they're
>> right on the edge of barely useful. The "neutral third" kinds of
>> temperament (e.g., dicot, decimal, sharp, or the unnamed 3&7
>> temperament, which divide the fifth into equal thirds that double as
>> both major and minor thirds) have some potential. But another approach
>> is to forget about regular mapping, and look into tunings like Wilson's
>> golden horograms. While some of these can be mapped to conventional
>> harmony, or regular temperaments (e.g., Kornerup, Hanson), others may
>> have more than one interval close to the same JI interval.
> > I will check those out, thanks. I've been meaning to do some kind of
> systematic exploration of the scale tree for a while now, so this will
> tie into that. I think the question that this all raises though, is -
> how relevant is using x-limit JI as a starting point at all, really,
> to the end result of the music produced? If you pick timbres in which
> clashing partials aren't really prominent, or disguise them with delay
> and chorus and stuff, as knowsur did - it seems even more xenharmonic
> to get away from JI a bit, since now you're exploring all sorts of
> ambiguous intervals which can still have their own scale structures
> and hence still make musical "sense."

With something like father, it's got such a tenuous connection to JI that it might make more sense musically to think of it as just a basic 5-note scale with an unusual structure, and 3 more "chromatic" notes to fill the gaps. Or you could start with something having a generator in the same general range, e.g. Wilson's #22 with a generator of (1 phi + 0) / (2 phi + 1) or 458.359 cents, and ignore any resemblance to familiar intervals.

> But to more strongly elucidate my position, what I'm really saying is
> - my paradigm until recently was:
> > - JI is the musical reality
> - Tempering is a convenient way to lower the number of notes needed,
> and also creates new musical phenomena like puns and comma pumps
> - Puns create "ambiguous intervals" that can be perceived as more than
> one JI ratio; i.e. dicot thirds can be perceived as either 5/4 or 6/5.
> - This implies that the perception of the underlying ratio is what
> gives the interval its "meaning" to us
> - And this is presumably related to the virtual fundamental phenomenon.
> > But after exploring superpyth aeolian tunings where the minor triads
> are 6:7:9, and seeing how they function almost entirely identical to
> meantone aeolian tunings where the minor triads are 10:12:15 - and now
> hearing Knowsur's album which is about as maximally far from accuracy
> in the 5-axis as you can get - and also reading Rothenberg - I feel as
> though the above paradigm, which I have basically believed in for the
> last 2-3 years or so, is entirely wrong.
> > Sincerely,
> Mike "A broken empty shell of the theory expert I once thought I was" Battaglia

Well, the idea of a harmonic series approximation does nicely fit with a good range of useful scales, and can even be stretched to extreme cases like "father" temperament. But it has its limitations, and there are other useful features of scales and tunings (e.g. whether a scale is strictly proper or distributionally even).

I'm thinking of it as "harmonic series approximation" rather than "JI approximation" since that seems to be a better description of what's going on, especially in extreme temperaments like father where individual intervals might be far from just, but certain chords have the "flavor" of a portion of the harmonic series like 4:5:7:9.

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 12:37 AM, cameron <misterbobro@...> wrote:
>
> > --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@> >wrote:
>
> > > As an aside, another reason I made that point thought was just as >a
> > > reaction to the notion that 12 is an "awful" tuning because the >5/4 >is
> > > so sharp.
> >
>
> For those making music in which a pure 5/4 is an essential element (powdered wigs and gilt fresco, various acappela groups, etc.), the sharpness of the major third is legitimate and sufficient reason to call 12-tET awful.

By that same vein, tunings like porcupine and mavila are awful.

> Many other tunings which we could concieve of as possible alternatives on a large scale would be even more awful- 17-edo for example doesn't even have an approximation to 5/4.

Ha, funny you say that, because 17-edo is one of my favorite tunings
ever, and I have no problems using the diatonic pythagorean major
triad as a major chord - provided you treat it a little bit
differently. I really like 17-edo quite a bit.

> Others find it awful that all kinds of intervals are missing from 12-tET, neutral intervals, intervals based on the seventh partial, and so on. But I think the main thing is considered awful is not the tuning itself, but the massive and heavy-handed implementation of a single limited tuning- any single limited tuning- as the tonal material of "music". That is awful.

In that same vein, I hate the attitude that I get from my friends when
I try to get them into this stuff: they approach it like a 3 year old
getting a shot. They are doubtful that it won't just sound "out of
tune," and they're convinced that the theory is going to be so
entirely over their heads that it will be impossible to do anything.
How you reach people like that is beyond me - if you give them a
19-tone instrument they hear it as regular diatonic music that sounds
flat and with bad melodic properties; if you give them a 31-tone
instrument they hear it as diatonic music that sounds more resonant
but with almost 3 times the notes; if you give them a 17 tone
instrument they hear that its melodic properties are amazing but that
the major triads are too sharp; if you give them a 16 tone instrument
they hear that it's a whole new sound but get freaked out and leave.
Give them an instrument with some rank-2 setup and they hate that you
can't go to "any key."

Maybe 14-tet really is a good alternate EDO to get people involved
with xenharmonic stuff quickly. That is, if they can get over the 5ths
being so far out.

-Mike

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Kalle Aho <kalleaho@...> wrote:
>
>
> > What timbres do you think don't sound good with 12 that require higher
> > accuracy tunings?
>
> Generally brighter (more harmonics), thinner (less detuned oscillators, players,
> pipes, strings etc.), more stable (less vibrato, tremolo or other modulations)
> and longer sustained or slowly decaying sounds.
>
> Actually I don't think the accuracy of tuning necessarily increases
> the number of useful timbres. The same conventions of synth programming
> that make 12-equal sound better might completely obscure the point of using
> more accurate tunings.

I would agree with this, although I think that synths don't just have
chorus on them for the sake of obscuring beating... chorus is a neat
sound besides that :)

> Our acoustic instruments co-evolved with our tuning systems so it's
> no surprise contemporary (fixed-pitch) instruments sound good with
> 12. Harpsichords already sound kind of "hairy" with 12-equal.

Agreed that harpsichords are kind of out.

> It's not unbearable but unfiltered one-oscillator saw is not a
> particularly popular sound.

It was more at one point though, back in the 70s or so.

> > As an aside, another reason I made that point thought was just as a
> > reaction to the notion that 12 is an "awful" tuning because the 5/4 is
> > so sharp.
>
> Sometimes I wonder who invented the notion that 14 cents is a huge
> mistuning, I mean what do you compare it with? I don't think a typical
> musician would think that one seventh of a semitone is much. Yes, it is
> 7 times the error of the fifth but that's only in relative terms. So
> it must be sharp because it is "awful". :D

I think it has more to do with beating than anything. The 7-tet fifth
is just as out there as the 12-tet major third, but the 7-tet fifth
bothers us way more. I would imagine that some of that is due to
cultural preferences, but even when you get used to the 7-tet fifth
with less harsh timbres, as soon as you put an organ patch on it falls
apart. 5/1 is lower than 3/1, so it beats less with the same amount of
tempering. Perhaps it also has to do with our preferences to hear
beatless fifths just from years of getting used to 12-tet.

-Mike

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 1:17 AM, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
> > Herman, with something like father, do you ever find that you adjust
> > so that the whole concept of a "third" and a "fourth" gets redefined?
> > That is, it's so far away from the diatonic structure that the
> > diatonic structure doesn't even work at all anymore?
>
> The diatonic structure certainly doesn't work with father, which instead
> has a kind of "negative" pentatonic as a basic scale (3 large and 2
> small intervals, L-s-L-L-s). The octatonic scale (which is close to
> 8-EDO) works as an equivalent of a "chromatic" scale. But if you're
> using it as a temperament, you're treating the intervals as (very rough)
> approximations of some particular JI intervals. While the "major triad"
> is dissonant and doesn't sound much like a 4:5:6, you can get by with
> something that sounds like a 4:5:7. That same "4:5" might sound like a
> "3:4" in another context (say a melody where you're approximating 1/1 -
> 6/5 - 4/3). It also works as a 9/7 interval in a 4:5:7:9 chord.

I also notice that something like father temperament played with pure
tones is really a very interesting sound, as there's no irritating
beating at all, but it's still way out there. Stacking fifths in this
way is an interesting sound, because if you go C-G-D-A-E that E ends
up being more like an F.

> One thing about father and bug is that they do tend to take you away
> from diatonic interpretations. Anything with an uneven division of the
> major third (like the lemba decatonic), or an equal division of the
> minor third (like the 7- or 8-note porcupine scales), can do that to
> some extent.

I really like porcupine for this reason.

> Well, the idea of a harmonic series approximation does nicely fit with a
> good range of useful scales, and can even be stretched to extreme cases
> like "father" temperament. But it has its limitations, and there are
> other useful features of scales and tunings (e.g. whether a scale is
> strictly proper or distributionally even).
>
> I'm thinking of it as "harmonic series approximation" rather than "JI
> approximation" since that seems to be a better description of what's
> going on, especially in extreme temperaments like father where
> individual intervals might be far from just, but certain chords have the
> "flavor" of a portion of the harmonic series like 4:5:7:9.

Yeah. I had some initial theory about how all flavor came from the
harmonic series, and then the superpyth vs meantone thing destroyed
that. Then I thought that all flavor came from internal mappings (such
as a map for diatonic scales, for porcupine scales, etc), and now
Carl's example on the tuning list now casts doubt on that.

Hence my new theory is that flavor comes from a little man inside my
head who talks to me when chords are played.

-Mike

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

MikeB>"The 7-tet fifth is just as out there as the 12-tet major third, but the
7-tet fifth
bothers us way more. I would imagine that some of that is due to
cultural preferences,"
Ok so the 7TET fifth is about 52/35. I'm looking at the partials:

1
52/35
2
102/35 (only about 33/32 from 3....this hurts...not at all far from about 25/24
where roughness is the heaviest hence massive beating comes from even slight
fifth de-tuning...only 3/2 * 2 nails the third overtone of the root dead-on)
3
4
204/35
5
..........now that's not a "barely beat-less fifth"...that's strong beating, no
matter how you slice it!
It does seem there is an area between 3/1 and the first overtone of a "de-tuned"
fifth that seems to get scrambled very easily for the fifth in general, even on
a purely psychoacoustic level detuning certain "hurts" the fifth more than most
other intervals far as conflicts within the first 3, IE usually loudest,
partials.

Meanwhile if you take, say 8/5...notice 16/5 becomes a much more reasonable
distance from 3. Ditto for 9/5 where the first overtone approaches the
"maximum" of about 7/6 away from both 3 and 4.

Meanwhile for the 12TET major third
1
29/23
2
58/23 (a good 7/6 or so distance from 3 and 2...doesn't hurt at all)
3

...You'll see even from a pure beating standpoint that the 12TET major third
apparently has a clear advantage.

Specifically I wonder about:
>"I would imagine that some of that is due to cultural preferences,"

I seriously doubt it. It seems to follow along the same lines as rain
happens because the Lord makes it happen (waves his 'staff', cries, takes a
leak...whatever). Far as things like melodic vs. harmonic flexibility I agree
we have our cultural preferences (with music like Arab and Indian classical
leaning more toward melodic flexibility)...but if we restrict ourselves to
harmony the kind of scales cultures have used to match their instruments agree
quite closely with Sethares' roughness curves for those timbres.
It seems to me most of the "obvious" IE much that which follows mathematical
patterns from psychoacoustics has already been discovered in some form. But,
perhaps, by creative mix-and-matching of such ideas and analyzing the
correlation (or lack of) between them and people's compositional or listening
habits we can uncover patterns in things that don't make a lot of easy
mathematical sense rather than attributing them to "cultural preference".

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗gdsecor <gdsecor@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Kalle Aho" <kalleaho@...> wrote:
>
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@> wrote:
> > ...
> > Hi Kalle, good to hear from you again!
>
> Thanks, I'm still reading the lists but I've been in lurking mode for
> a while.
> ...

Hi Mike & Kalle,

I've not had much time lately to read the lists, so I just scan the message summaries, read a few here & there, and occasionally reply to something that jumps out at me. The following excerpt turned out to be one of those.

> > In reality, the more I delve into tuning theory, the more I
> > find that 12 is an excellent tuning. It's just not interesting to us,
> > because the whole point of these lists is to get away from it.

I would have to call that a half-truth. It's not *12* that we want to get away from, but rather *12-equal*. Have we forgotten that there are plenty of *12-unequal* alternatives, many of which have been popular longer than 12-equal?

When I read the following, I couldn't help noticing that it's all about alternatives to *12*, without any mention of alternatives to *equal*.

> > But I
> > sometimes think that if we had all started working with 17-equal or
> > 19-equal or something, we would all find 12 to be this enormously
> > expressive gem that we had missed and be reveling in its discovery
> > today.
>
> At one point I tried to hate 12 but I couldn't. :) Now I take the
> approach "what else is there?" but I always compare how 12 fits in.

Not only is there 12-unequal, but also 17-unequal, 19-unequal, 29-unequal, and 34-unequal, which are mentioned far less often around here than JI. I'm not talking about 12-, 17-, or 19-tone MOS's of regular temperaments, but rather circulating tempered tunings that are playable in all keys and optimized, i.e., tuned significantly "better" than equal (whatever that means), in a limited number of keys.

Key contrast gives an extra dimension to a tuning, and this is especially true in 12, where you can have something close to historical meantone on one side of the circle and something meta-pythagorean (or neo-medieval) on the other side, giving different moods in different keys. Another example is a 34-WT that optimizes pajara in about 10 different keys and favors 5-limit intervals in many other keys.

> > At some point in the future I'd like to do an ET survey and write a
> > piece in every tuning from 7 to 22 or something, and if I do, I'm not
> > going to skip 12, just for symbolic reasons (and also because I think
> > there's a lot of xenharmonic material to squeeze out of it too).

Yep, I'd say that just about all the xenharmonic material got squeezed out of 12-unequal when it finally succumbed to equalization in the latter half of the 19th century.

> > But
> > even this is besides the point, which is that even if you really HATE
> > 12...

(But not as much as I hate EQUAL ...)

> > 7-tet is way further out of tune with JI than 12, and on this
> > album, it still sounds great.

I listened to it, and I agree. However, I'll bet it would sound even better in 7-unequal, i.e., rational approximations such as:
18:20:22:24:27:30:33
or
17:19:21:23:25:28:31

Easley Blackwood already did a survey of equal tunings from 13 to 24. I would be more excited by the prospect of a survey of unequal circulating tunings from 5 to ?? instead.

> > A pleasure to talk to you as always.
>
> I return the compliment! :)

Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure to seize this opportunity to award your discussion a "rave" review. 8>}

--George

🔗Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...>

I agree with George here about unequal scales and it ability to give each key a particular flavor. The scales he mention does do that . Also both the temperaments he mentions and JI are much easier to expand upon without having to redo everything one has at hand.
I tend to find all equal scales sound "artificial" and work best only if fooling one they are something they are not.

/^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
Mesotonal Music from:
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere:
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

a momentary antenna as i turn to water
this evaporates - an island once again

On 15/09/10 7:40 AM, gdsecor wrote:
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "Kalle Aho"<kalleaho@...> wrote:
>> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia<battaglia01@> wrote:
>>> ...
>>> Hi Kalle, good to hear from you again!
>> Thanks, I'm still reading the lists but I've been in lurking mode for
>> a while.
>> ...
> Hi Mike& Kalle,
>
> I've not had much time lately to read the lists, so I just scan the message summaries, read a few here& there, and occasionally reply to something that jumps out at me. The following excerpt turned out to be one of those.
>
>>> In reality, the more I delve into tuning theory, the more I
>>> find that 12 is an excellent tuning. It's just not interesting to us,
>>> because the whole point of these lists is to get away from it.
> I would have to call that a half-truth. It's not *12* that we want to get away from, but rather *12-equal*. Have we forgotten that there are plenty of *12-unequal* alternatives, many of which have been popular longer than 12-equal?
>
> When I read the following, I couldn't help noticing that it's all about alternatives to *12*, without any mention of alternatives to *equal*.
>
>>> But I
>>> sometimes think that if we had all started working with 17-equal or
>>> 19-equal or something, we would all find 12 to be this enormously
>>> expressive gem that we had missed and be reveling in its discovery
>>> today.
>> At one point I tried to hate 12 but I couldn't. :) Now I take the
>> approach "what else is there?" but I always compare how 12 fits in.
> Not only is there 12-unequal, but also 17-unequal, 19-unequal, 29-unequal, and 34-unequal, which are mentioned far less often around here than JI. I'm not talking about 12-, 17-, or 19-tone MOS's of regular temperaments, but rather circulating tempered tunings that are playable in all keys and optimized, i.e., tuned significantly "better" than equal (whatever that means), in a limited number of keys.
>
> Key contrast gives an extra dimension to a tuning, and this is especially true in 12, where you can have something close to historical meantone on one side of the circle and something meta-pythagorean (or neo-medieval) on the other side, giving different moods in different keys. Another example is a 34-WT that optimizes pajara in about 10 different keys and favors 5-limit intervals in many other keys.
>
>>> At some point in the future I'd like to do an ET survey and write a
>>> piece in every tuning from 7 to 22 or something, and if I do, I'm not
>>> going to skip 12, just for symbolic reasons (and also because I think
>>> there's a lot of xenharmonic material to squeeze out of it too).
> Yep, I'd say that just about all the xenharmonic material got squeezed out of 12-unequal when it finally succumbed to equalization in the latter half of the 19th century.
>
>>> But
>>> even this is besides the point, which is that even if you really HATE
>>> 12...
> (But not as much as I hate EQUAL ...)
>
>>> 7-tet is way further out of tune with JI than 12, and on this
>>> album, it still sounds great.
> I listened to it, and I agree. However, I'll bet it would sound even better in 7-unequal, i.e., rational approximations such as:
> 18:20:22:24:27:30:33
> or
> 17:19:21:23:25:28:31
>
> Easley Blackwood already did a survey of equal tunings from 13 to 24. I would be more excited by the prospect of a survey of unequal circulating tunings from 5 to ?? instead.
>
>>> A pleasure to talk to you as always.
>> I return the compliment! :)
> Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure to seize this opportunity to award your discussion a "rave" review. 8>}
>
> --George
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 5:40 PM, gdsecor <gdsecor@...> wrote:
>
> I would have to call that a half-truth. It's not *12* that we want to get away from, but rather *12-equal*. Have we forgotten that there are plenty of *12-unequal* alternatives, many of which have been popular longer than 12-equal?
>
> When I read the following, I couldn't help noticing that it's all about alternatives to *12*, without any mention of alternatives to *equal*.

Haha. Well, I admit that I like 12-equal. And I like equal
temperaments in general. I'm actually pretty surprised that you're
such a big fan of unequal ones, since I know you have AP, and as
someone else with AP, the whole concept irritates me. Not that I can't
get used to them, but I prefer being able to create any sonority over
any chroma that I wish. This is, admittedly, a part of microtonal
music I have not explored so much, and perhaps my ideas will change
when I mess around with them more.

> Not only is there 12-unequal, but also 17-unequal, 19-unequal, 29-unequal, and 34-unequal, which are mentioned far less often around here than JI. I'm not talking about 12-, 17-, or 19-tone MOS's of regular temperaments, but rather circulating tempered tunings that are playable in all keys and optimized, i.e., tuned significantly "better" than equal (whatever that means), in a limited number of keys.

Ah yes, limiting the number of keys... :(

> > > At some point in the future I'd like to do an ET survey and write a
> > > piece in every tuning from 7 to 22 or something, and if I do, I'm not
> > > going to skip 12, just for symbolic reasons (and also because I think
> > > there's a lot of xenharmonic material to squeeze out of it too).
>
> Yep, I'd say that just about all the xenharmonic material got squeezed out of 12-unequal when it finally succumbed to equalization in the latter half of the 19th century.

Well, don't forget that 12-equal has good approximations to 17/16 and
19/16 as well. So chords like E-F#-D-F sound something like 8:9:14:17.
There are scales that can be constructed with these sonorities, one of
which is a mode of the Magen Abot scale I posted on tuning a while
ago.

There's also the fact that a lot of the really, really hip modern
stuff I listen to, I think, has amazing and beautiful sonorities that
have emerged from a radically expanded approach to 12-equal and
diatonic harmony, which I think hasn't fully crossed back over to
classical music yet. So to take some of these ideas and put them back
in a classical setting would be xenharmonic in its own right.

For example, this piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMINC9EOZME

Start listening at 4:10. At 4:58 onward, I get chills. If this isn't
truly xenharmonic, it's at least pseudo-xenharmonic :) I haven't
worked it out yet, but I strongly suspect that what they're doing here
is treating 12-equal like a tempered CPS, and modulating all over the
place, but pedaling it over the Db. That is, they try to modulate
continuously to a mode that shares a common dyad or two, and do it in
a way that it keeps sounding unresolved and yet harmonic. Then they
pedal it over the Eb.

> > > But
> > > even this is besides the point, which is that even if you really HATE
> > > 12...
>
> (But not as much as I hate EQUAL ...)
>
> > > 7-tet is way further out of tune with JI than 12, and on this
> > > album, it still sounds great.
>
> 18:20:22:24:27:30:33
> or
> 17:19:21:23:25:28:31

That is an interesting possibility. That would probably sound really good.

> Gentlemen, it's been a pleasure to seize this opportunity to award your discussion a "rave" review. 8>}

Aaaaaaaaaa HA!

By the way, I sent you an offlist about 68-equal a little bit ago...
did you by chance get it?

-Mike

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

🔗Marcel de Velde <m.develde@...>

12 equal, 12 unequal, classic JI, they all fall short in my opinion.

And btw of the above options 12 equal gets the musical message and emotion
through the most consitently well to my ears.

12 equal makes every key equally out of tune it seems at first.
But.. this has the assumption that a "key" has a fixed 12tone tuning??
I don't agree with this at all.
I think the tuning depends on what the music is doing.
The fundamental bass and it's movement, where the 5ths are beeing made etc.
The things that give music it's structure are also the things that indicate
the true JI tuning I think.
So some things played in what's referred to in normal music theory as a
"key" are way more out of tune in 12tet than some other things played in
that same key and belonging to that same key according to normal music
theory, yet has a different musical structure and a different true JI tuning
which could coincidently be closer to 12tet.
But atleast in 12tet a chord with a specific true JI tuning / musical
message, will be equally out of tune no matter where it's played.

In 12 unequal one has the chance to have some of the chords more in tune
according to true JI, and in very very very simple music this will actually
help a lot.
Or one could see some cords as more important to get right, like the final
major triad, in this case 12 unequal has some benefits.
But in actual music 12 unequal will get half the things more out of tune
relative to true JI than 12tet.
Overall I personally don't see big enough benefits over 12tet, instead more
disadvantages as things can get really unacceptably out of tune.
As for each "key" having a color, this must be a bad thing for sure. Surely
the music / musical content is what should give the color, not the key!

classic 5-limit JI (or any classic way of JI thinking)
This must surely be the worst option by far.
To think a major chord is allways 1/1 5/4 3/2 and minor 1/1 6/5 3/2 is just
as colorless and unmusical than 12tet thinking.
I doesn't even work out mathematically (in other words it's impossible
without comma shifts in actual music, and we all know how even more terrible
they sound).
And to play 1/1 5/4 3/2 or 1/1 6/5 3/2 for instance where true JI would give
a very different chord like 1/1 81/64 3/2 or 1/1 34/27 3/2 or 1/1 19/16 3/2
etc, is making something more out of tune than 12tet does, and worse yet as
some of the chords will be in tune and others out of tune relative to true
JI making the contrast very big and very audible.

The only tuning that'll give a true benefit over 12tet (or 24tet) will be a
tuning that understands how music works at it's core / is based on a better
music theory than we have today. And tunes according to the music.
So the music itself should give the color / and emotional tuning content.

Btw one other thing.
12tet is a chromatic scale in it's own right.
But the most natural scale is offcourse 7 diatonic tones per octave.
Transpose this to all keys and temper the result optimally and you get
12tet.
Do the same with more exotic 7 tone scales and you get 24tet.
I don't think any other tet will ever give anywhere near as musically
usefull scales as these 2.

Marcel

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...>

they are inseparable. If the tuning will not let you do something you can't do it convincingly by texture

If every key has the same color why bother modulating if you are just going to have what you already have.
Or even if you do just how many keys do you need to do the same thing.
How many keys do most of what we hear on this list use for example. Do one really need or even want 12 matching keys?

when you have different color in different keys it gives one more options musically that one will not otherwise, these in turn one interacts with. One can take the same material and the subtle difference will in turn inspire new variations.

That is what i want from a tuning something that 'inspires' by it sound and capabilities.

On 15/09/10 11:51 AM, Marcel de Velde wrote:
> As for each "key" having a color, this must be a bad thing for sure. Surely
> the music / musical content is what should give the color, not the key!

/^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
Mesotonal Music from:
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere:
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

a momentary antenna as i turn to water
this evaporates - an island once again

🔗Marcel de Velde <m.develde@...>

Hi Kraig,

they are inseparable. If the tuning will not let you do
> something you can't do it convincingly by texture
>

I'm not sure what you mean by this.
But what I ment is that I think the concept of "key" does not translate to a
fixed tuning for that "key".
I think that when some music is in a certain "key" there are hundreds of
pitches possible within one octave for normal common practice classical
music.
I think the music indicates tuning in different ways than merely with a
"key".

> If every key has the same color why bother modulating if you are
> just going to have what you already have.
>

Well I don't agree with the concept of "key" and modulating as discribed in
normal music theory.
But in any case, when one plays a musical passage at a certain pitch and
then play it again completely a few tones higher, then why would the tuning
be any different except transposed up? (unless the musical structure
indicates differently but that's another story)
Why would this make "modulating" pointless? One plays something at different
pitches which is point enough, why would the ratios between the notes be
different when playing complete music higher or lower?
Like a record, when you play it slower the whole music changes pitch, but
the ratios between the notes don't change.

Or even if you do just how many keys do you need to do the same
> thing.
> How many keys do most of what we hear on this list use for
> example. Do one really need or even want 12 matching keys?
>
> when you have different color in different keys it gives one
> more options musically that one will not otherwise, these in
> turn one interacts with.
>

I don't think this will give new musical options.
It gives out of tune options, beating options etc.
But these are not musical options I think.
In true JI you have all the options there are available.

One can take the same material and the
> subtle difference will in turn inspire new variations.
>
> That is what i want from a tuning something that 'inspires' by
> it sound and capabilities.
>

Try music theory for inspiration, in history that one hasn't been beaten yet
in my opinion :)
Simply loading a scale will give nowhere near the inspiration or
understanding of music than music theory.
And I think music theory has it's basis in how true JI would work.

Marcel

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...>

/^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
Mesotonal Music from:
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere:
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

a momentary antenna as i turn to water
this evaporates - an island once again

On 15/09/10 1:37 PM, Marcel de Velde wrote:
>
> Well I don't agree with the concept of "key" and modulating as discribed in
> normal music theory.
> But in any case, when one plays a musical passage at a certain pitch and
> then play it again completely a few tones higher, then why would the tuning
> be any different except transposed up? (unless the musical structure
> indicates differently but that's another story)
> Why would this make "modulating" pointless? One plays something at different
> pitches which is point enough, why would the ratios between the notes be
> different when playing complete music higher or lower?
> Like a record, when you play it slower the whole music changes pitch, but
> the ratios between the notes don't change.
You have the same type of shift in a diatonic scale where the same contour takes on new meaning. It is quite useful musically to do so. Many time we prefer tonal transposition over real ones.
Maybe more often than not.

> Or even if you do just how many keys do you need to do the same
>> thing.
>> How many keys do most of what we hear on this list use for
>> example. Do one really need or even want 12 matching keys?
>>
>> when you have different color in different keys it gives one
>> more options musically that one will not otherwise, these in
>> turn one interacts with.
>>
> I don't think this will give new musical options.
> It gives out of tune options, beating options etc.
> But these are not musical options I think.
> In true JI you have all the options there are available.
It depends what one is doing with it and why.
Well these are options i have been using for 30 years now. I see no reason a musical language cannot run the gambit from beatless chords to those that beat allot. One will always be able to add notes to chords to make them beat anyways.
If a triad does in particular places, that can be useful in that i don't need to add 2 more notes to make it want to move.

> One can take the same material and the
>> subtle difference will in turn inspire new variations.
>>
>> That is what i want from a tuning something that 'inspires' by
>> it sound and capabilities.
>>
> Try music theory for inspiration, in history that one hasn't been beaten yet
> in my opinion :)
I am quite extensively read in music history.
why rely on history when one has sound immediately there to interact with.
> Simply loading a scale will give nowhere near the inspiration or
> understanding of music than music theory.
This is the exact opposite of my experience.
Theory is written after the fact too.
The true impulse in history has been individuals attempted to expand and develop music as a whole, to broaden it.
I refuse to worship the dead because they don't want that anyway. They want to hear the living

> And I think music theory has it's basis in how true JI would work.
JI can work in all types of different ways just like intonational systems as a whole.
Let each go forth and wrestle with what one finds of worth according to ones inner necessity.
> Marcel
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>

🔗Marcel de Velde <m.develde@...>

> But in any case, when one plays a musical passage at a certain pitch and
> then play it again completely a few tones higher, then why would the tuning
> be any different except transposed up? (unless the musical structure
> indicates differently but that's another story)
> Why would this make "modulating" pointless? One plays something at
> different pitches which is point enough, why would the ratios between the
> notes be different when playing complete music higher or lower?
> Like a record, when you play it slower the whole music changes pitch, but
> the ratios between the notes don't change.
>

Btw just want to add the following.
When one transposes music up or down, while keeping the same ratios between
the notes.
The transposed music will automatically get a different "color" in a certain
way.
Simply because different frequencies do have a different "sound" to them.

See for instance this equalization guide:
http://www.recordingeq.com/EQ/req0400/OctaveEQ.htm

But no need to change ratios between notes for this type of "color" effect
due to playing in a different key.

Marcel

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

🔗Marcel de Velde <m.develde@...>

> You have the same type of shift in a diatonic scale where the
> same contour takes on new meaning. It is quite useful musically
> to do so. Many time we prefer tonal transposition over real ones.
> Maybe more often than not.
>

If I understand you correctly, you mean transpositions of a melody that is
not a true transposition (as in keeping thesame ratios between notes)
If so, then I agree it's used a lot, perhaps indeed even more often than the
true transposition.

>
> Well these are options i have been using for 30 years now. I see
> no reason a musical language cannot run the gambit from beatless
> chords to those that beat allot. One will always be able to add
> notes to chords to make them beat anyways.
> If a triad does in particular places, that can be useful in that
> i don't need to add 2 more notes to make it want to move.
>

I completely agree!
The only thing I don't agree with is that a "key" is the decisive factor in
the tuning of these chords.
I think it's things like the movement of the bass, and the movement of the
melodies.
Play 1/1 5/4 3/2 and then a major triad again one semitone higher and that
one won't be a 1/1 5/4 3/2.
But go for instance from the original 1/1 5/4 3/2 through a sequence of
chords where one moves the bass by consecutive 3/2 intervals and you can
reach the 1/1 5/4 3/2 chord a semitone higher than the one you started at I
think.

I am quite extensively read in music history.
> why rely on history when one has sound immediately there to
> interact with.
>

In history people had sound too ;-)

This is the exact opposite of my experience.
> Theory is written after the fact too.
>

I think written both before and after.

> The true impulse in history has been individuals attempted to
> expand and develop music as a whole, to broaden it.
> I refuse to worship the dead because they don't want that
> anyway. They want to hear the living
>

Yes, but the living are having a hard time improving upon the dead to my
ears.
I hope tuning theory will lead to a better music theory which will lead to
new great composers.

JI can work in all types of different ways just like
> intonational systems as a whole.
>

Yeah it's a name thing.
There's classic JI, which I think wrongly claimed the name.
And there's the true meaning of the name Just Intonation, which would mean
the "correct" way to tune, if one beliefs in that.

> Let each go forth and wrestle with what one finds of worth
> according to ones inner necessity.
>

Offcourse, and this goes for everything in life :)
Merely venting my opinion on things here.

Marcel

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

>"I like unequal temperaments though, I just don't think that they are
inherently
better than equal temperaments."
Far as unequal temperaments, I wouldn't say "better" since that's so
subjective, but I do believe they can be more accurate, at least with respect to
scales and mini-max error. A rule of thumb that has worked for me so far in my
own scales is start with a temperament, find a scale under it, and then look for
a combination with the best overall mini-max error for the dyads you like the
sound of the most.
Thing is with mini-max....many times I've found the result does not follow a
single generator (meaning the generator(s) do not overlap at any number of tones
exactly or sometimes even anywhere near exactly)...hence the occasional need for
unequal temperament to get the best mini-max result and forms of dyads with the
least beating interference (if that's what you're going for, which I realize you
very well may not be). The result of such often "un-equal" scale creation, from
my experience, is that the moods are preserved but the detail in composition is
more clearly heard...and you can do things like add more layers of instruments
without production quality issues in your compositions.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...>

No question that each equal key can have it own flavor too, albeit even more subtle, and instruments will react to range.

Since practically all of my instruments are hard wired, i like to get as much variety with the least amount of notes.
there is no turning back

/^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
Mesotonal Music from:
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere:
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

a momentary antenna as i turn to water
this evaporates - an island once again

On 15/09/10 2:13 PM, Mike Battaglia wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 10:47 PM, Kraig Grady<kraiggrady@...>
> wrote:
>> they are inseparable. If the tuning will not let you do
>> something you can't do it convincingly by texture
>>
>> If every key has the same color why bother modulating if you are
>> just going to have what you already have.
>> Or even if you do just how many keys do you need to do the same
>> thing.
>> How many keys do most of what we hear on this list use for
>> example. Do one really need or even want 12 matching keys?
> For some of us, every key has a different color even if it's equal :) I like
> unequal temperaments though, I just don't think that they are inherently
> better than equal temperaments.
>
> -Mike
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

Alright, finally, I have a second to respond.

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 1:50 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> First and foremost, playing around in Scala tells you nothing. General MIDI sounds are the worst in the world for telling you how a tuning sounds. They don't sound "good" for 12-tET, why should we expect them to sound good with tunings of lower accuracy? Get yourself a decent soft synth that can be retuned, even if only to 12 notes at a time. This is my experience talking.

Can you recommend one? And what do I do, just only use 12 note subsets
of everything?

> Third: extended-voice chords are your friend! More unique or more clustered notes in a chord always means that you are approximating a higher-order chunk of the harmonic series, meaning even the best approximation will involve larger ratios than in traditional triads. Some temperaments that look terrible in the 5-limit can really shine here!

Like 12-tet, for instance :) Note that it approximates 17/16 and 19/16
really well.

> Four: one concord makes up for a thousand discords. Sure, a thousand concords might be even better, but people don't realize how much mileage you can really get out of *one* concordant interval in a tuning. Even if that concord is not so concordant! For instance, the near-10/9 and near-7/6 in 13-EDO work GREAT. In all honesty, I've actually found 13-EDO to be more consonant that 14-EDO (at least on piano)!

I need to listen to more 13-EDO, it's a father temperament right? I
have never managed to really get into it. How in the hell are you
messing with 13-EDO on piano?

> Fifth: know the *mood* inherent to the temperament! One thing I absolutely LOVE about low-accuracy temperaments is that they seem to have much more obvious "character" to them than high-accuracy ones. It takes some playing around to really understand the mood, but they will reveal themselves with careful listening. Almost ALL my work with low-numbered EDOs revolves around exploiting their unique moods. From a concordance stand-point, 11-EDO and 13-EDO are pretty similar, but their moods are like night and day. The difference between these two is much greater than the difference between 12-EDO and 19-EDO, or 22-EDO and 31-EDO, and to me, this makes the former tunings more musically valuable.

What's your take on 11-EDO? Also what about 14-EDO?

-<ole

🔗Daniel Forró <dan.for@...>

🔗cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> Alright, finally, I have a second to respond.

Ah good, I was afraid you were ignoring it!

> > Get yourself a decent soft synth that can be retuned, even if only to 12 notes at a
> > time. This is my experience talking.
>
> Can you recommend one? And what do I do, just only use 12 note subsets
> of everything?

Well, I use Apple Logic and just use 12 note subsets, and previously I used only an FM7--which does support Scala, but I never used it that way, I just retuned 12-note sets by hand. (I know, Ivor Darreg would bitch-slap me for advocating this). But what sort of computer audio setup do you have?

> > Third: extended-voice chords are your friend! More unique or more clustered notes in > >a chord always means that you are approximating a higher-order chunk of the
> > harmonic series...
>
> Like 12-tet, for instance :) Note that it approximates 17/16 and 19/16
> really well.

Precisely. And Carl is helping me work out some harmonic series chords that are well-approximated in other EDOs. 18-EDO and 13-EDO really shine when you get away from 4:5:6.

> I need to listen to more 13-EDO, it's a father temperament right? I
> have never managed to really get into it. How in the hell are you
> messing with 13-EDO on piano?

Well, "fake" piano ;->. But yeah, 13-EDO is technically a Father temperament, an Orwell temperament, a really bad Magic temperament (or maybe a really bad Beatles temperament), and probably a few other "really bad" versions of other temperaments. From a strictly-JI standpoint, you can get chords like 8:11:13 and 9:10:13 with actually fairly low error. However, the chord I find most concordant I can't find a good harmonic series approximation for: it's 0-2-5, and to me it sounds as perfectly "relaxed" as anything in 12-tET. It works well with the 8-note Father scale of LsLLsLLs.

> What's your take on 11-EDO? Also what about 14-EDO?

11-EDO has a very bright mood to my ears, perhaps because it's like 12-tET with everything "sharpened". I think it's naturally a very "sunny" and "happy" tuning, it likes widely-spaced chords and it has a very "active" feeling--there really aren't any "restful" triads, but that's okay! Restfulness is over-rated. Keeping intervals away from tight critical-band areas makes for harmonies that are concordant enough to keep you from gritting your teeth. Have you heard the track in 11 I did on "Map of an Internal Landscape"? It's the happiest track on the whole album.

14-EDO is undeniably exotic, but it's also sort of familiar. It's like being in an east-Asian country and going to a "quote-unquote-American" restaurant: the food *almost* looks right, and most of the ingredients are there, but there's still something not quite "domestic" about it. Maybe it's the soy sauce on the burger, or the mayo with the fries, or the pickled radish on the side...14-EDO suggests familiarity but doesn't quite achieve it. It's unstable but not so active as 11, and triadically the chords have a nice "shimmer" to them. The subminor third/"hemifourth" has a bit of an Indonesian feel to it, and using it as a generator makes for two great scales: a 4L+1s scale, and a 5L+4s scale. The latter scale gives a bunch of triads that have both major and minor thirds, but these thirds are separated by a whole-tone, so you can also play them simultaneously. It's pretty neat!

-Igs

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 1:17 AM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
> Well, I use Apple Logic and just use 12 note subsets, and previously I used only an FM7--which does support Scala, but I never used it that way, I just retuned 12-note sets by hand. (I know, Ivor Darreg would bitch-slap me for advocating this). But what sort of computer audio setup do you have?

I don't have logic. I have a windows PC, and I'm using SONAR. Because
I'm stuck in the stone age, and can't afford a Mac at the moment. I
can probably get better software "somehow." I have EastWest and
Komplete and stuff.

> > I need to listen to more 13-EDO, it's a father temperament right? I
> > have never managed to really get into it. How in the hell are you
> > messing with 13-EDO on piano?
>
> Well, "fake" piano ;->. But yeah, 13-EDO is technically a Father temperament, an Orwell temperament, a really bad Magic temperament (or maybe a really bad Beatles temperament), and probably a few other "really bad" versions of other temperaments. From a strictly-JI standpoint, you can get chords like 8:11:13 and 9:10:13 with actually fairly low error. However, the chord I find most concordant I can't find a good harmonic series approximation for: it's 0-2-5, and to me it sounds as perfectly "relaxed" as anything in 12-tET. It works well with the 8-note Father scale of LsLLsLLs.

Well, in keeping with what we've been talking about wrt mappings,
there is no "one true approximation" for 0-2-5, right? Just different
ways to intone it, and perhaps one "most concordant" way.

You could have that be a 7/6 on top of a 10/9, or view it as a 7/6 on
top of a 9/8, or view it as a 6/5 on top of a 10/9 perhaps.

As you say below this that 11-tet is like 12-tet with everything
sharpened, I hear the sonority you listed as a mistuned C-D-F in
12-tet, which is pretty concordant in and of itself.

> > What's your take on 11-EDO? Also what about 14-EDO?
>
> 11-EDO has a very bright mood to my ears, perhaps because it's like 12-tET with everything "sharpened". I think it's naturally a very "sunny" and "happy" tuning, it likes widely-spaced chords and it has a very "active" feeling--there really aren't any "restful" triads, but that's okay! Restfulness is over-rated. Keeping intervals away from tight critical-band areas makes for harmonies that are concordant enough to keep you from gritting your teeth. Have you heard the track in 11 I did on "Map of an Internal Landscape"? It's the happiest track on the whole album.

Which one was "Audiospark spring bubbles turquoise?" That's the one I
keep coming to.

> 14-EDO is undeniably exotic, but it's also sort of familiar. It's like being in an east-Asian country and going to a "quote-unquote-American" restaurant: the food *almost* looks right, and most of the ingredients are there, but there's still something not quite "domestic" about it. Maybe it's the soy sauce on the burger, or the mayo with the fries, or the pickled radish on the side...14-EDO suggests familiarity but doesn't quite achieve it. It's unstable but not so active as 11, and triadically the chords have a nice "shimmer" to them. The subminor third/"hemifourth" has a bit of an Indonesian feel to it, and using it as a generator makes for two great scales: a 4L+1s scale, and a 5L+4s scale. The latter scale gives a bunch of triads that have both major and minor thirds, but these thirds are separated by a whole-tone, so you can also play them simultaneously. It's pretty neat!

-Mike

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

🔗Daniel Forró <dan.for@...>

Yes, I know, there's such a General Meaning on General Midi.

But about 15 years ago I started to think if GM can be used creatively, and the answer was yes. Despite the limited number of useful sounds, we can creatively use for example:
- extreme transpositions of sounds, unusual ranges

- application of additive principle (vertical structure) - shadowing arranging technique (layering the sounds in differently balanced levels and transpositions, even with some delay)

- simulating of the other sound synthesis types, developing in time (horizontal structure), like wavetable synthesis (quick switching the sounds), vector synthesis (four or more layered sounds change dynamically their balance in the mix during sustained sounding), LA synthesis, wave sequencing or similar sample chaining techniques

- using sounds with the articulation not appropriate to its envelope, changing the envelope shape by MIDI volume control data

- using lot of modulations, pitch bending, portamento/glissando

- simulating missing echo and reverb FX directly by clever MIDI note events and volume control data programming

and more.

I could confirm my rather positive opinion on GM about 6 years ago when I've been working for some time for an agency producing music for mobile phones. We programmers/musicians got an audio record of some music and had to translate it into MIDI file in customized GM format. There were even more limitations - some MIDI channels were used for special control codes, lot of sounds in GM was not allowed to use etc. I had to find clever programming techniques to hide limitations and to get good sounding result. Maybe even all those limitations were provoking and inspiring the creativity.

Daniel Forro

On 16 Sep 2010, at 4:55 PM, Carl Lumma wrote:

> Daniel wrote:
>
>> GM is just part of MIDI standard, it has nothing to do with the sound
>> quality which depends only on the quality of samples or sound
>> synthesis inside the concrete instrument, sound card, plugin...
>
> Indeed! Yet somehow, it has become synonymous for 'bad sounds'.
> I had this argument with my fellow editors at Keyboard. I was
> outvoted. I could not mention "GM sounds" when reviewing a
> product -- too negative. I headed for the door shortly after that.
>
> -Carl

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

GM is just a spec for which instruments should be mapped to
which patch numbers. That is all! A very useful concept that
somehow the industry failed to understand. -C.

At 04:34 AM 9/16/2010, Daniel wrote:
>Yes, I know, there's such a General Meaning on General Midi.
>
>But about 15 years ago I started to think if GM can be used
>creatively, and the answer was yes. Despite the limited number of
>useful sounds, we can creatively use for example:
>- extreme transpositions of sounds, unusual ranges
>
>- application of additive principle (vertical structure) - shadowing
>arranging technique (layering the sounds in differently balanced
>levels and transpositions, even with some delay)
>
>- simulating of the other sound synthesis types, developing in time
>(horizontal structure), like wavetable synthesis (quick switching
>the sounds), vector synthesis (four or more layered sounds change
>dynamically their balance in the mix during sustained sounding), LA
>synthesis, wave sequencing or similar sample chaining techniques
>
>- using sounds with the articulation not appropriate to its envelope,
>changing the envelope shape by MIDI volume control data
>
>- using lot of modulations, pitch bending, portamento/glissando
>
>- simulating missing echo and reverb FX directly by clever MIDI note
>events and volume control data programming
>
>and more.
>
>I could confirm my rather positive opinion on GM about 6 years ago
>when I've been working for some time for an agency producing music
>for mobile phones. We programmers/musicians got an audio record of
>some music and had to translate it into MIDI file in customized GM
>format. There were even more limitations - some MIDI channels were
>used for special control codes, lot of sounds in GM was not allowed
>to use etc. I had to find clever programming techniques to hide
>limitations and to get good sounding result. Maybe even all those
>limitations were provoking and inspiring the creativity.
>
>Daniel Forro
>

🔗Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...>

🔗aum <aum@...>

🔗cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> I don't have logic. I have a windows PC, and I'm using SONAR. Because
> I'm stuck in the stone age, and can't afford a Mac at the moment. I
> can probably get better software "somehow." I have EastWest and
> Komplete and stuff.

Sonar, eh? Didn't yours come with z3ta+? Chris Vaisvil could no doubt offer some good suggestions, since he uses Sonar as well. But a little googling for "microtonal directx" might turn up something. You can also try ZynAddSubFX:

http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/

> Well, in keeping with what we've been talking about wrt mappings,
> there is no "one true approximation" for 0-2-5, right? Just different
> ways to intone it, and perhaps one "most concordant" way.

Yeah, well, usually I tend to ignore mappings when I talk about approximations, and just go with whatever lowest chunk of the harmonic series gets within 10-15 cents of the chord I'm looking at.

> You could have that be a 7/6 on top of a 10/9, or view it as a 7/6 on
> top of a 9/8, or view it as a 6/5 on top of a 10/9 perhaps.

I think I look at it as a 13/11 on top of a 10/9, but it also sounds awfully similar to the 16:18:21 chord in 18-EDO that I love so dearly.

> As you say below this that 11-tet is like 12-tet with everything
> sharpened, I hear the sonority you listed as a mistuned C-D-F in
> 12-tet, which is pretty concordant in and of itself.

Yes, but unlike that sonority, the one in 13 becomes *less* concordant if you put it in other inversions. 13 is one of the few tunings that seems to make clustered chords sound better than normally-spaced chords.

> Which one was "Audiospark spring bubbles turquoise?" That's the one I
> keep coming to.

25-EDO. That one seems to be everyone's favorite. 25 is a cool tuning, too. The 11-EDO piece is "She is My Lilac-Hued Obsession".

-Igs

🔗cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Forró <dan.for@...> wrote:
>
> GM is just part of MIDI standard, it has nothing to do with the sound
> quality which depends only on the quality of samples or sound
> synthesis inside the concrete instrument, sound card, plugin...
>
> Any sound is usable when we know how to use it, when and in which
> context.
>
> And why there should be any connection between tuning and quality of
> the sound? Which quality do you mean? Piano sound is piano sound, be
> it bad or good, for example. If we can still recognize it as a piano
> then it's probably good enough :-)

Okay, look. I love General MIDI sounds, whether they're the low-quality ones that have been on every Mac since the mid-'90s, or the (rare) high-quality ones on some higher-end keyboards or Soundfont packages. When I was in high school, I wrote several hundred General MIDI songs using a demo of a program called "Easy Beat", and they are to date still some of my favorites of my own work. I was proud enough of that album to release it on my website (www.cityoftheasleep.com) recently, recorded DIRECT off my old Macintosh Performa 6400. I too used all sorts of neat tricks with MIDI to get some rather interesting sounds.

But the thing is, few people use "good" General MIDI sounds, since few computer manufacturers (or is it the sound card manufacturers?) bother to bundle decent GM sounds with their computers. After messing around with different tunings in Scala, using the GM sounds on my SoundBlaster sound card and my computer keyboard as a generalized keyboard, I thought I knew how certain tunings sounded and felt. Then I had a couple guitars refretted and realized that I learned nothing about those tunings playing around with GM sounds. Playing a tuning on an acoustic instrument tells you more about it than anything, and playing it on a quality synth is *just about* as good (but not quite, IMHO).

Yeah, if you have good General MIDI sounds at your disposal, then you're probably in the clear. But generally-speaking, most people don't, and if you don't, then you shouldn't be using your low-quality sounds to judge a tuning. It makes a difference! Low-quality sounds lack dynamics, they lack naturalness--they're hard to interact with. They sound thin, mechanical, artificial. It's like trying to judge the beauty of a work of art by a pixelated thumb-nail of the real thing. It doesn't give you the "full experience". If you want to evaluate tunings, I think it's important to try them with the best sounds you've got, or else you're not really giving them a fair shake.

-Igs

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

Igs:
>Okay, look. I love General MIDI sounds,
Daniel:
>But about 15 years ago I started to think if GM can be used
>creatively, and the answer was yes. Despite the limited number of
>useful sounds,

I see there is still serious misunderstanding of General MIDI.
There is no such thing as a "GM sound". There are only sounds.
There are 128 GM addresses, which should be more than enough
for a lifetime of musical work. Beethoven probably never heard
an orchestra so large in his entire life. The reason they are
not enough is because the sounds suck, and not only "GM sounds",
but almost all synthesized sounds. There is a constant thirst
for new sounds because none of them can be enjoyed for more than
five minutes. Essentially no progress has been made in the
expressively of synthesized sounds since the Minimoog. Which is
why the Minimoog is still being made and in fact is considered
one of the best synthesizers available.

Of course even 128 is not a real limit. Different sound banks
can be loaded on command. Also an ensemble of synths with
different banks can play together. The only limitation is that
patch 72 should sound something like a clarinet. Wendy Carlos
wrote that she discovered, to her surprise, the orchestral
instruments we have are not arbitrary, but rather evolved over
hundreds of years to precisely satisfy human ears. In the
process of her discovery she created one of the best GM banks
ever, the "LSI Philharmonic". That is not to say that new
instruments will never be invented, but it is to say that the
128 GM addresses are not the enemy.

The response to this from my fellow Keyboard editors was,
"yeah, but nobody wants GM sounds". FUUUUUUU

-Carl

🔗Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...>

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

Hi Milan,

>Not only patch numbers and instruments mapping. It specifies more things:
>MIDI channels polyphony and drum-set channel number
>minimum number of voices
>dynamic voices allocation
>minimum number of patches
>minimum number of drum/percussion sounds
>octave registration (middle C = 60 [C3hex])
>pitch bend default range
>some controllers usage

Yes of course, but here we were just discussing "GM sounds".

>I think most of the industry understands to the specification, majority
>of consumer level synths conform to GM.

In the case of "GM sounds", the industry badly failed. The
GM banks, if present, are stocked with purposely poor sounds.
Even if there is an excellent clarinet elsewhere on the
instrument, there will be a separate and much worse clarinet
added just for the GM clarinet! Why? Because the GM clarinet
became stigmatized by the early GM clarinets. People expect
it to sound that way. That is the real meaning of
"GM sounds" -- bad sounds! But the intent of the standard
was for synths to be able to play together, and MIDI files to
be portable. If the sounds improved over the years, the music
would improve. It was meant to be a layer of abstraction!

For various reasons, especially in the case of sampled
instruments, a MIDI file optimized for one patch may not sound
as good with another. So it is not entirely the industry's
fault -- the abstraction layer isn't perfect. However, more
could have been done. Anyway, I am flogging a horse. :)

-Carl

🔗cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
> I see there is still serious misunderstanding of General MIDI.

No, dude, I get it. GM is just a standard, it has nothing to do with actual sounds. Those MIDI addresses can correspond to any sound you want on any MIDI-compatible synth. But at the same time, when I use the term "General MIDI sounds", most people realize that I am in fact referring to the almost universally-crappy sound sets that come with GM-compatible sound cards. The term has taken on a bad association because too many companies saturated the market with bad sounds. The particular "orchestra" associated with GM, i.e. the set of instruments meant to be simulated/sampled, is an excellent set, and a high-quality GM sound set would be friggin' fantastic.

In the future, I will be sure to specify that I'm referring to "low-quality sounds typically associated with cheap General MIDI instruments", and not use the term "General MIDI" as a blanket term for the cheap sounds that are frequently--but not always, and not by necessity--associated with it. It's a damn shame that that association exists and that your former editors were such idiots about it.

-Igs

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

🔗aum <aum@...>

> In the case of "GM sounds", the industry badly failed. The
> GM banks, if present, are stocked with purposely poor sounds.
> Even if there is an excellent clarinet elsewhere on the
> instrument, there will be a separate and much worse clarinet
> added just for the GM clarinet! Why? Because the GM clarinet
> became stigmatized by the early GM clarinets. People expect
> it to sound that way. That is the real meaning of
> "GM sounds" -- bad sounds! But the intent of the standard
> was for synths to be able to play together, and MIDI files to
> be portable. If the sounds improved over the years, the music
> would improve. It was meant to be a layer of abstraction!
> You are right, there are bad association connected with GM. As igs wrote in the next mail: ... almost universally-crappy sound sets that come with GM-compatible sound cards. The term has taken on a bad association because too many companies saturated the market with bad sounds.
Most of the instruments on the market are the cheap ones, with crappy sounds. They are GM to be compatible with crappy MIDI files. I don't know it should be marked as an industry fail. It is the principle of consumer-level products production.
> For various reasons, especially in the case of sampled
> instruments, a MIDI file optimized for one patch may not sound
> as good with another. So it is not entirely the industry's
> fault -- the abstraction layer isn't perfect. However, more
> could have been done. Anyway, I am flogging a horse. :)
>
> -Carl
> Right again. From some level of optimization MIDI file is not compatible with another instrument. Same in the case of "normal" instruments, every one requires slightly different playing technique to get most from it.

I think we all here agree now what "bad GM sound" means. Let's switch to another topics.

Best
M

🔗Daniel Forró <dan.for@...>

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

🔗Daniel Forró <dan.for@...>

On 17 Sep 2010, at 2:32 AM, cityoftheasleep wrote:
>
> Yeah, if you have good General MIDI sounds at your disposal, then > you're probably in the clear. But generally-speaking, most people > don't, and if you don't, then you shouldn't be using your low-> quality sounds to judge a tuning. It makes a difference! Low-> quality sounds lack dynamics, they lack naturalness--they're hard > to interact with. They sound thin, mechanical, artificial.

But this can be true about ALL electronically produced sounds. Sound and its samples quality itself doesn't mean too much, more important is musical using of it. Dynamics is done by user (velocity, MIDI controllers).

Mechanical sound can be caused by quantized rhythm.

Thin and artificial sound - yes, of course, if we both talk about electronic simulation of acoustic instruments, usually it sounds so (except physical modeling). Electronic instruments are good for electronic sounds mainly.

Besides still I don't know why all this should be problem for evaluating the tuning.

> It's like trying to judge the beauty of a work of art by a > pixelated thumb-nail of the real thing. It doesn't give you the > "full experience". If you want to evaluate tunings, I think it's > important to try them with the best sounds you've got, or else > you're not really giving them a fair shake.
>
> -Igs

Here you mix evaluating of tuning with evaluating of microtuned music. I thought you wrote just about the first case.

Daniel Forro

🔗Daniel Forró <dan.for@...>

Then I'm not sure if you understand well what GM limitations are :-)
Let's talk about the standard itself, not concrete sound quality in
some good instrument.

Basic selection of sounds is bad, important instruments are missing,
synthetic sounds are bad and unusable, lot of other sounds have
limited use because they are not universally usable (acoustic sounds,
especially ethnic, and all sound FX). So we have much less usable
sounds then 128. For sure not for lifetime work.

It looks also you don't understand what electronic sound means and
you ignore all development here in last 40 years. Electronic sound is
electronic sound. Dot. We can shape it, make a lot with it, with it's
expressivity, articulation, modulation... There are many types of
sound synthesis, each sounds typically and differently (just to name
additive harmonic, FM, vector, WS, FS, RCM, wavetable...), we can use
this as orchestral groups in orchestration of electronic work.

As for expressivity - have you ever heard about physical modeling?
Yamaha VL1? VP1? Have you tried to play it?

Besides - electronic sound itself is not guilty. Only unable
performers and MIDI sequencer users with limited ability to record
directly or edit MIDI data to make them sound expressively.

Minimoog is one of most limited instruments I know. I had four pieces
in my life and sold them all. Totally primitive. So I can't agree
with you it was good instrument. I don't understand all that rumour
about it. Simple envelopes, basic waveshapes, filter (only LPF) which
distorts the sound, very limited modulations, no LFO, poor keyboard,
no velocity control... But nice design, beautiful look.
You talk about expressivity here? Beg you pardon. Your statement
sounds like a provocation if not lack of knowledge or pure naivity or
just repeating common myths. But I wouldn't protest if I will find
new Voyager XL under Weinachtsbaum :-)

I don't know any hardware GM instrument following this standard which
can load the other sound banks on command (which command?). Maybe you
mean some soundcards with RAM for samples? Isn't this RAM usually too
small for good quality soundbank?

Ensemble of synths, do you mean GM synths with different quality of
GM sounds? Or why do you mention this? It has nothing to do with GM
standard itself which we discuss.

Yes, they will be new instruments invented, for sure, but when they
will use GM standard they have to follow it. So I don't see any sense
in it. Even the best synthesizer when used in GM mode goes to pretty
low level on usability domain. Sound quality is not the problem. GM
standard is.

Daniel Forro

On 17 Sep 2010, at 3:07 AM, Carl Lumma wrote:
>
> I see there is still serious misunderstanding of General MIDI.
> There is no such thing as a "GM sound". There are only sounds.
> There are 128 GM addresses, which should be more than enough
> for a lifetime of musical work. Beethoven probably never heard
> an orchestra so large in his entire life. The reason they are
> not enough is because the sounds suck, and not only "GM sounds",
> but almost all synthesized sounds. There is a constant thirst
> for new sounds because none of them can be enjoyed for more than
> five minutes. Essentially no progress has been made in the
> expressively of synthesized sounds since the Minimoog. Which is
> why the Minimoog is still being made and in fact is considered
> one of the best synthesizers available.
>
> Of course even 128 is not a real limit. Different sound banks
> can be loaded on command. Also an ensemble of synths with
> different banks can play together. The only limitation is that
> patch 72 should sound something like a clarinet. Wendy Carlos
> wrote that she discovered, to her surprise, the orchestral
> instruments we have are not arbitrary, but rather evolved over
> hundreds of years to precisely satisfy human ears. In the
> process of her discovery she created one of the best GM banks
> ever, the "LSI Philharmonic". That is not to say that new
> instruments will never be invented, but it is to say that the
> 128 GM addresses are not the enemy.
>
> The response to this from my fellow Keyboard editors was,
> "yeah, but nobody wants GM sounds". FUUUUUUU
>
> -Carl

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Daniel Forró <dan.for@...>

This your answer is better, maybe we have the same opinion on this.

What I know, Yamaha or Korg at least use internal high quality sounds even for GM mode on their instruments...

Intent of GM standard was not for synths to play together, why. The main reason was portability of music. Don't forget there were also pre-GM standards like Roland C/M, Yamaha PK, Clavinova, DOC... so there was consens to make common standard 20 years ago. Which was rather idealistic, as very soon new and better standards were created - Roland GS (even in the same year 1991 as GM), Yamaha XG, GM2. So in my opinion GM is dead language anyway.

Daniel Forro

On 17 Sep 2010, at 3:20 AM, Carl Lumma wrote:

> Hi Milan,
>
>> Not only patch numbers and instruments mapping. It specifies more >> things:
>> MIDI channels polyphony and drum-set channel number
>> minimum number of voices
>> dynamic voices allocation
>> minimum number of patches
>> minimum number of drum/percussion sounds
>> octave registration (middle C = 60 [C3hex])
>> pitch bend default range
>> some controllers usage
>
> Yes of course, but here we were just discussing "GM sounds".
>
>> I think most of the industry understands to the specification, >> majority
>> of consumer level synths conform to GM.
>
> In the case of "GM sounds", the industry badly failed. The
> GM banks, if present, are stocked with purposely poor sounds.
> Even if there is an excellent clarinet elsewhere on the
> instrument, there will be a separate and much worse clarinet
> added just for the GM clarinet! Why? Because the GM clarinet
> became stigmatized by the early GM clarinets. People expect
> it to sound that way. That is the real meaning of
> "GM sounds" -- bad sounds! But the intent of the standard
> was for synths to be able to play together, and MIDI files to
> be portable. If the sounds improved over the years, the music
> would improve. It was meant to be a layer of abstraction!
>
> For various reasons, especially in the case of sampled
> instruments, a MIDI file optimized for one patch may not sound
> as good with another. So it is not entirely the industry's
> fault -- the abstraction layer isn't perfect. However, more
> could have been done. Anyway, I am flogging a horse. :)
>
> -Carl

🔗aum <aum@...>

🔗Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...>

Ok,

I figured you would have to use pitch bends. However, I thought the midi
standard allowed for re-tuning but nearly no one uses it.

When I had an adlib card (the very first pc card to have a FM synth chip) I
played around with microtonal music.
None of it worth sharing though. I did it by pitch bends. This was... 1988?

Chris

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 7:32 PM, Daniel Forr� <dan.for@...> wrote:

>
>
> Instruments based on GM standard can't work with microtones, it's not
> part of this standard. It could be possible to use only pitch bend
> for this, I don't use this technique to obtain microtones. So I
> didn't make microtonal works in GM.
>
> Roland GS and Yamaha XG standards support 12 tone detuning (common to
> all octaves).
>
> Daniel Forro
>
> On 17 Sep 2010, at 1:47 AM, Chris Vaisvil wrote:
> >
> > Out of curiosity - did you have any microtonal work at the time in
> > that system?
> >
> > Chris
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

Daniel wrote:
>Electronic sound is electronic sound. Dot. We can shape it,

We could but we don't, not in the subtle ways that real instruments
shape their sounds.

>make a lot with it, with it's
>expressivity, articulation, modulation... There are many types of
>sound synthesis, each sounds typically and differently (just to name
>additive harmonic, FM, vector, WS, FS, RCM, wavetable...), we can use
>this as orchestral groups in orchestration of electronic work.

Unfortunately only subtractive and wavetable are widely used.

>As for expressivity - have you ever heard about physical modeling?
>Yamaha VL1? VP1? Have you tried to play it?

I played a VL1 briefly once; I've played other physically modeled
instruments like pianoteq and String Studio a bit more. MMM regulars
know I'm a big advocate of this technology. Unfortunately it hasn't
caught on. Mostly because we lack proper controllers. Of course
a controller as expressive as a real bassoon would probably be just
as hard to learn and just as expensive to buy, and synth jocks
wouldn't like that.

Synful is an interesting try, because it automates expression.
Unfortunately again, the technique hasn't really caught on.

>Minimoog is one of most limited instruments I know.

I played a vintage mini with Arlan Schierbaum's group at a show
once, and thought it was one of the most expressive synthesizers
I've used, in terms of being able to manipulate the sound in real
time in a musical and intuitive fashion. Only for leads of course.
MIDI dynamic range just doesn't seem the same, I'm not sure why.
I've only seen the new Voyagers in stores, but it looks like they
got it right.

-Carl

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

🔗Daniel Forró <dan.for@...>

I mentioned it in the second edition of my book on MIDI published in Czech language in 1993 and 1997, which you maybe can know :-) I just translated what was written in GM Spec 1 standard. I bought the brochure from IMA (International MIDI Association) many years ago. (Unfortunately not all MIDI standards are free on the net even now.)

I didn't see new versions of printed materials, but anyway it seems the original idea was abandoned, it's not mentioned too much now.

GM Score was nothing else than song MIDI data stored in a sequencer or in SMF. It was mentioned only in one sentence without any detailed explanation in that GM standard brochure.

But later there were some attempts to standardize more how the song arrangement should be done, for example bass part should be always on MIDI channel 2, external harmonizer control data on channel 5 and similar.

Now I found just this:

http://www.cakewalk.com/support/Docs/MIDIFilesInCakewalk.asp

http://www.midi.org/techspecs/gmguide2.pdf

Daniel Forro

On 17 Sep 2010, at 9:58 AM, aum wrote:

> Yes, to be precise. (I expected drum map was already covered by
> instruments mapping.)
> But what is GM score definition? I've never heard of it. Could you
> please send me some reference, link, etc.
> Thanks
> M

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>
> >I think most of the industry understands to the specification, majority
> >of consumer level synths conform to GM.
>
> In the case of "GM sounds", the industry badly failed. The
> GM banks, if present, are stocked with purposely poor sounds.
> Even if there is an excellent clarinet elsewhere on the
> instrument, there will be a separate and much worse clarinet
> added just for the GM clarinet! Why? Because the GM clarinet
> became stigmatized by the early GM clarinets.

As an aside, I actually have really come to enjoy "GM" sounds, in a
way. Early sampling techniques sucked, but in retrospect they added an
interesting character to the sound that I sometimes want to exploit in
my compositions. Perhaps it's because it reminds me of my childhood.

On a lot of synths I've seen, the "GM" patch for a sound is also just
a lightweight patch with less samples and less effects on it,
presumably due to the limitations of the synth. For example, a lot of
synths that I've worked with have only a few DSP channels (maybe 3,
one for chorus, one for reverb, and a "variable" one with distortion
and flanger and ring mod and such), and when you're dealing with GM
instruments, you need them to be as lightweight as possible. If every
GM patch has its own variable effect, then when you have 16 going at
once, which one gets applied? That sort of thing. Maybe it's different
these days...

BTW, you said you used to work for keyboard mag? I might have a
question or two for you offlist... I'm trying to overhaul my rig now
and have no idea at all what's good to get these days :)

-Mike