Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup makemicromusic Re: [MMM] Annika liked it; some news

I liked Igs' piece. Anything that gets Igs to post a tune, I'm
behind it 100%. But there's really very little in the way of
conclusions to be drawn from it.

Classical music is pitch obsessed. It uses pitch extensively to
say what it's got to say. American music introduced another
powerful tool: rhythm. But it also continued (and even extended)
the use of pitch, at first.

However, the disruptive 100-year (and counting) trend in the
falling cost of music reproduction has gradually caused a falling
level of music skill in the public. In 1920, pop stars made
money selling sheet music, and people heard it when the young lady
of the house performed it on a piano. Instead of the internet
threatening CDs, radio threatened sheet music sales (ASCAP was
the industry's response).

Today, most people can't carry a tune. And the popular music is
sparse, 2 or 3 part writing (if you're lucky), syncopated into a
rhythm with some hardly-pitched synthesizer burps.

I mean, consider this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHUXROqbZVQ

Fun piece, but ask yourself: does it really matter what tuning
was used? I doubt it's 12-ET in any meaningful sense. (Does
that make it Xenharmonic? NO!)

I probably sound like a curmudgeon, but I really think there's
truth in this. I dearly love a lot of the sparse, 2- or 3-part
songs with syncopated synth bleeps. But the fact is, such music
is not terribly affected by intonation.

Xenharmonic music is doubly screwed, in a way. Not only does
it have to go against the hegemony of 12, it has to go against
the trend of abandoning pitch. Xenharmonic music is all about
pitch. It is a celebration of pitch, an emancipation of pitch!
It demands a certain level of skill from its listeners.

Back to the matter at hand. We don't need Michael to create
bad scales. It's already known that 11, 13, and so on are
discordant (relatively speaking) tunings. And a far better
composer than any of us already wrote a piece in each ET from
13 to 24, trying his best to make each one sound good. And he
was one of those pitch-obsessed curmudgeons. He even studied
with Olivier Messiaen.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003H15428/ref=mu_dm_alb_dp

He even cheated and carefully chose timbres to make things
like 23 sound better (he told me on the phone how he spent
days setting up each patch).

Compare these etudes. Tell me 19 and 22 don't stand out as
being more concordant. I double DOG dare you.

Or go ahead and write a basic SATB ditty in 11-ET, that sounds
as smooth or harmonious as one in 19. I double DOG dare you.

Is any of this really open for debate?

-Carl

🔗Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...>

Carl,

What you say below assumes minimal electronic music is the only music that
is popular.

My daughter likes exceedingly simple acoustic arrangements which focus on
the words, and then the melody, and the harmony is there to set the mood.
Sometimes one repeated of an open voiced chord suffices.

But its not the only music she likes. Hip-Hop (which has a strong, although
repetitive harmonic motif) and pop acts like Lady Gaga. And when I took her
to the Chicago Symphony she was enthralled with Rachmanioff's *Isle of the
Dead*.

My son on the other hand is into Hans Zimmer and Radiohead and NIN.

Thank you however for the link to the album. I will purchase it.

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 10:40 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:

>
>
> I liked Igs' piece. Anything that gets Igs to post a tune, I'm
> behind it 100%. But there's really very little in the way of
> conclusions to be drawn from it.
>
> Classical music is pitch obsessed. It uses pitch extensively to
> say what it's got to say. American music introduced another
> powerful tool: rhythm. But it also continued (and even extended)
> the use of pitch, at first.
>
> However, the disruptive 100-year (and counting) trend in the
> falling cost of music reproduction has gradually caused a falling
> level of music skill in the public. In 1920, pop stars made
> money selling sheet music, and people heard it when the young lady
> of the house performed it on a piano. Instead of the internet
> threatening CDs, radio threatened sheet music sales (ASCAP was
> the industry's response).
>
> Today, most people can't carry a tune. And the popular music is
> sparse, 2 or 3 part writing (if you're lucky), syncopated into a
> rhythm with some hardly-pitched synthesizer burps.
>
> I mean, consider this
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHUXROqbZVQ
>
> Fun piece, but ask yourself: does it really matter what tuning
> was used? I doubt it's 12-ET in any meaningful sense. (Does
> that make it Xenharmonic? NO!)
>
> I probably sound like a curmudgeon, but I really think there's
> truth in this. I dearly love a lot of the sparse, 2- or 3-part
> songs with syncopated synth bleeps. But the fact is, such music
> is not terribly affected by intonation.
>
> Xenharmonic music is doubly screwed, in a way. Not only does
> it have to go against the hegemony of 12, it has to go against
> the trend of abandoning pitch. Xenharmonic music is all about
> pitch. It is a celebration of pitch, an emancipation of pitch!
> It demands a certain level of skill from its listeners.
>
> Back to the matter at hand. We don't need Michael to create
> bad scales. It's already known that 11, 13, and so on are
> discordant (relatively speaking) tunings. And a far better
> composer than any of us already wrote a piece in each ET from
> 13 to 24, trying his best to make each one sound good. And he
> was one of those pitch-obsessed curmudgeons. He even studied
> with Olivier Messiaen.
>
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003H15428/ref=mu_dm_alb_dp
>
> He even cheated and carefully chose timbres to make things
> like 23 sound better (he told me on the phone how he spent
> days setting up each patch).
>
> Compare these etudes. Tell me 19 and 22 don't stand out as
> being more concordant. I double DOG dare you.
>
> Or go ahead and write a basic SATB ditty in 11-ET, that sounds
> as smooth or harmonious as one in 19. I double DOG dare you.
>
> Is any of this really open for debate?
>
> -Carl
>
>
>

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

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 10:40 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>
> However, the disruptive 100-year (and counting) trend in the
> falling cost of music reproduction has gradually caused a falling
> level of music skill in the public. In 1920, pop stars made
> money selling sheet music, and people heard it when the young lady
> of the house performed it on a piano. Instead of the internet
> threatening CDs, radio threatened sheet music sales (ASCAP was
> the industry's response).

Wow. I've never heard that explanation before. That's the first time
I've ever heard an explanation that makes sense, actually.

> Today, most people can't carry a tune. And the popular music is
> sparse, 2 or 3 part writing (if you're lucky), syncopated into a
> rhythm with some hardly-pitched synthesizer burps.

Everyone in my grandparents' generation knows Rhapsody In Blue. They
all know that melody from the middle part, everyone's heard it a few
times, etc. In contrast, I can't imagine anyone my age listening to a
piece of music that's longer than about 6 minutes, tops.

> I probably sound like a curmudgeon, but I really think there's
> truth in this. I dearly love a lot of the sparse, 2- or 3-part
> songs with syncopated synth bleeps. But the fact is, such music
> is not terribly affected by intonation.

This is why I was so interested in subgroup temperaments a few weeks
ago; I figured it would be a good way to get into something completely
different. You could set up compact scales with lots of low-entropy
chords that have completely different melodic frameworks than we're
used to.

> He even cheated and carefully chose timbres to make things
> like 23 sound better (he told me on the phone how he spent
> days setting up each patch).
>
> Compare these etudes. Tell me 19 and 22 don't stand out as
> being more concordant. I double DOG dare you.

I thought the most concordant one on the entire album, and I mean this
100%, was the one in 17-tet. That was the first track that I actually
enjoyed listening to - at first I thought that the 19-tet one was
uncomfortably flat and "compressed" sounding. He wrote it in subminor
though, which is well represented in 17. He used the superpyth dorian
mode.

I actually came back to this album recently, about a week ago, and was
astonished at how much I enjoyed it. The first time I listened to it I
hated almost every track except for the 19-tet ones and the one in 17,
and now I like almost all of them. The 14 one is really nice too, and
the 21-tet one sounds like he's using the whitewood scale that we were
talking about over on tuning...?

-Mike

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

Carl>"I mean, consider this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHUXROqbZVQ"

LOL Mr. Oizo Flat Beat! Perhaps the cheeziest piece of techno EVER!
However, it's incredibly...confident. And, in the pop world, confidence
(not technical merit) seems to be the goal. Doesn't matter if it's Mariah
Carey's effortless high pitches, Daft Punk's auto-tuned vocoded vocals, a rapper
saying how he's king of the world....or a flat beat and a few sound
blips...confidence and effortless execution is the common thread. Everyone
wants to be confident, everyone wants to have friends, everyone wants to know
musicians everyone knows about as an excuse to start a conversation... Music
makes money the same way Mark Zuckerberg does on Facebook...off people using it
primarily as a springboard for their social lives.

Carl>"Not only does it have to go against the hegemony of 12, it has to go
against the trend of abandoning pitch. "
I doubt it's really the trend of abandoning pitch. It's a trend of
embracing (perhaps too heavily) the idea of confidence. And rhythm typically
sounds more confident than melody/harmony...unless said melody/harmony is very
simple and effortless...so the easy path (especially among not-so-talented
musicians) is lots of rhythm and little melody (IE lack of stress on tone is a
symptom, not a cause). One of the most popular video game songs ever from Dance
Dance Revolution is AA -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRi4BAgFs8Y It uses
not-so-basic tonality and melodies...but still manages to hold it's ground
because of its confidence (IMVHO)...in fact I could easily imagine a track like
that in microtonal being even more popular. Yep, there's still hope... :-)

>"Back to the matter at hand. We don't need Michael to create bad scales. It's
>already known that 11, 13, and so on are discordant (relatively speaking)
>tunings"
Actually, 14TET, IMVHO, is just about the worst TET far as dyadic sourness.
I've composed in that and 13 and 10...and 14 is easily the hardest for me. But,
it's true, the worst TET tunings are at least almost as bad as anything I can
dream up...

>"http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003H15428/ref=mu_dm_alb_dp"
Ah, getting to hear the famous Easley Blackwood. Yep, even with him "at the
wheel" I can still tell it's 13TET.

But you know what? I'm half convinced the 1 minute piece I just a few
minutes ago makes 14TET sound somewhat comparably consonant to 12TET. Here's
the link
->/makemicromusic/files/djtrancendance/Relived%20In%2014TET.mp3.

You know what else? I found VERY VERY few chords in 14TET that worked
well...and thus the mood in the song is not half as varied as it would be if it
were written in 12TET or a "better" tuning.

Carl (and or any others)...would you agree with me this is a pattern...that
it's not that its impossible to write smooth-sounding songs in bad tunings but,
rather, if you do so your mood and range of chords/intervals/etc. used will be
severely limited?

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

🔗genewardsmith <genewardsmith@...>

🔗cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
> I probably sound like a curmudgeon, but I really think there's
> truth in this. I dearly love a lot of the sparse, 2- or 3-part
> songs with syncopated synth bleeps. But the fact is, such music
> is not terribly affected by intonation.

This is very true. VERY. Any conscious musician who's ever walked the Playa at Burning Man has surely observed that when it comes to a lot of electronic music, intonation is all but meaningless. But then again, none of that stuff is on the radio even.

> Xenharmonic music is doubly screwed, in a way. Not only does
> it have to go against the hegemony of 12, it has to go against
> the trend of abandoning pitch. Xenharmonic music is all about
> pitch. It is a celebration of pitch, an emancipation of pitch!
> It demands a certain level of skill from its listeners.

I'm not sure I agree on this matter. That is what xenharmonic music is *supposed* to be about, yes indeedy, and I agree that a certain level of skill is demanded of the listener...but the demand is only made because many listeners cannot tell the difference! If the familiar harmonies are in-tune enough, the difference is so subtle...and unless there are flagrant uses of micro-chromatic ornamentations (which usually sound like rubbish, anyway), it's far from obvious that anything unusual is going on in the tuning. I really think we all get a bit carried away with the whole "emancipation of pitch" thing--it does not make the "worlds of difference" it is often claimed to!

> Back to the matter at hand. We don't need Michael to create
> bad scales. It's already known that 11, 13, and so on are
> discordant (relatively speaking) tunings. And a far better
> composer than any of us already wrote a piece in each ET from
> 13 to 24, trying his best to make each one sound good. And he
> was one of those pitch-obsessed curmudgeons. He even studied
> with Olivier Messiaen.
>
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003H15428/ref=mu_dm_alb_dp
>
> He even cheated and carefully chose timbres to make things
> like 23 sound better (he told me on the phone how he spent
> days setting up each patch).
>
> Compare these etudes. Tell me 19 and 22 don't stand out as
> being more concordant. I double DOG dare you.

The 17-EDO piece sounds more concordant than either of those. The 22-EDO piece sounds like rubbish; too bad he didn't know about Pajara[10]. The 19-EDO piece occasionally lapses into some rather jarring passages whenever it slips out of 5-limit harmony. I've always found the 17-EDO piece to consistently sound normal and natural. Frankly though, I think the 23-EDO piece sounds the nicest. Of all of them, I find the 15-EDO piece the roughest and most unpleasant sounding (if you can believe it), followed by the 14-EDO piece.

> Or go ahead and write a basic SATB ditty in 11-ET, that sounds
> as smooth or harmonious as one in 19. I double DOG dare you.
>
> Is any of this really open for debate?

Is "smooth and harmonious" all there is to music? There is a place for it, and there is a place for dissonance, and there is a place for everything in between. Yes, some tunings are better at certain things than are others. Of course that is the case! But it's not as if anything written in 11-EDO is going to sound like garbage. There are feelings, ideas, emotions that can be expressed in 11 and 13-EDO that tunings like 12 and 19 can barely hint at.

It's not so much that my modus operandi is to prove that all tunings sound smooth and harmonious. It's that all tunings can sound likable, if given the right touch. "Smooth and harmonious" is only good for so much, especially when 12-tET is smooth and harmonious *enough* for the great masses of Western ears. It's not hard to achieve that level of smoothness with a lot of different tunings.

-Igs

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 1:45 AM, cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
> > I probably sound like a curmudgeon, but I really think there's
> > truth in this. I dearly love a lot of the sparse, 2- or 3-part
> > songs with syncopated synth bleeps. But the fact is, such music
> > is not terribly affected by intonation.
>
> This is very true. VERY. Any conscious musician who's ever walked the Playa at Burning Man has surely observed that when it comes to a lot of electronic music, intonation is all but meaningless. But then again, none of that stuff is on the radio even.

I will say that nowadays, when I listen to deadmau5 and his signature
bass register sawtooth wave open voiced major triads, I wish that 5
was more in tune. I think people would subtly notice a difference. I
don't think that people are really paying attention to that, though,
when they're listening to deadmau5 mostly to dance.

On a related note, there's a lot of amazing rhythmic innovation going
on these days as well. People are doing ridiculous things with
polyrhythms, as well as deliberately introducing rhythmic error that's
the same every bar (like the bass drum is slightly ahead of the beat
every time it comes around). People are also doing I guess something
similar to rhythmic tempering, and here's an example:

If you accent every third sixteenth note, and you're playing in 5/4,
you get something that is only slightly faster than quarter note
septuplets. That is, if the frequency of the bar is 1, then the
frequency of each beat is 5, and the frequency of each sixteenth note
is 20, then to accent every third 16th note would be a frequency of
20/3. Meanwhile, septuplets would be a frequency of 7.

So people exploit similarities like this to temporarily "transform"
the time feel into something completely different; at first they're
playing something in 3 against 5 and suddenly you transform into the
septuplet world where beats are flying left and right and wheels are
spinning around you and then bam, you're back in on the 1. You would
slightly drag the 7 so that the frequency of the bar doesn't change.
So they're equating 20/3 and 7, which means they're tempering out
21/20.

If you do this with too simple a rhythm, like if you screw up and
equate quarter note triplets with sixteenth groups of 3, it doesn't
sound "cool," it just sounds sloppy and like you don't know what
you're doing. This is because quarter note triplets would have a
frequency of 6, and sixteenth groups of 3 would have a frequency of
16/3, and to equate the two would be tempering out 16/15, and father
temperament doesn't work too well for rhythms.

There's also a lot of rhythmic innovations that I'm not sure have a
specific microtonal correlation, like turning sixteenth note groups of
3 into the new "time feel" temporarily by playing a faux-backbeat over
it; this tempts your brain to think the tempo has switched, but if you
continue to explore the space between the two times, you can get your
brain to think that there are two harmonically related tempos
occurring simultaneously. Tony Williams and Vinnie Colaiuta pioneered
this but they're taking it to a whole new levels these days.

Anyway, this is off topic, but thought it was interesting enough to share... :)

> The 17-EDO piece sounds more concordant than either of those. The 22-EDO piece sounds like rubbish; too bad he didn't know about Pajara[10]. The 19-EDO piece occasionally lapses into some rather jarring passages whenever it slips out of 5-limit harmony. I've always found the 17-EDO piece to consistently sound normal and natural. Frankly though, I think the 23-EDO piece sounds the nicest. Of all of them, I find the 15-EDO piece the roughest and most unpleasant sounding (if you can believe it), followed by the 14-EDO piece.

After listening to knowsur's album several thousand times I think that
I understand the 14-EDO piece a lot better now. I actually like his
14-EDO piece a lot, but think it would have sounded cleaner if he
hadn't put so many dense closed voicings in the lower register. I
think that you have to be sensitive to stuff like that with 14-EDO.

> Is "smooth and harmonious" all there is to music? There is a place for it, and there is a place for dissonance, and there is a place for everything in between. Yes, some tunings are better at certain things than are others. Of course that is the case! But it's not as if anything written in 11-EDO is going to sound like garbage. There are feelings, ideas, emotions that can be expressed in 11 and 13-EDO that tunings like 12 and 19 can barely hint at.
>
> It's not so much that my modus operandi is to prove that all tunings sound smooth and harmonious. It's that all tunings can sound likable, if given the right touch. "Smooth and harmonious" is only good for so much, especially when 12-tET is smooth and harmonious *enough* for the great masses of Western ears. It's not hard to achieve that level of smoothness with a lot of different tunings.

Then I suppose my modus operandi at this point is to theoretically
formalize what it is that you're doing, at least until I get my own
synths set up. >:|

-Mike

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

The most popular form of music in the world in the past 20 years
has been hip-hop. It makes negligible use of pitch. QED.
(And I know ALL the words from all NWA, Eminem, and Jurassic5
albums so don't even go there.)

Of course there are exceptions. My friends and I all listened
to stuff like Yes, Phish, Rush, King Crimson, Ry Cooder, Mahler,
Bach, etc. in high school. We all either played instruments,
sang in the choir, or both.

Lady Gaga's music sounds like somebody discovered an old hard
drive of Acid loops from the year 2000 and dropped them onto a
track. [*ducks*]

-Carl

Chris wrote:

>Carl,
>
>What you say below assumes minimal electronic music is the only music that
>is popular.
>
>My daughter likes exceedingly simple acoustic arrangements which focus on
>the words, and then the melody, and the harmony is there to set the mood.
>Sometimes one repeated of an open voiced chord suffices.
>
>But its not the only music she likes. Hip-Hop (which has a strong, although
>repetitive harmonic motif) and pop acts like Lady Gaga. And when I took her
>to the Chicago Symphony she was enthralled with Rachmanioff's *Isle of the
>Dead*.
>
>My son on the other hand is into Hans Zimmer and Radiohead and NIN.
>
>Thank you however for the link to the album. I will purchase it.
>

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

Igs wrote:

>> Compare these etudes. Tell me 19 and 22 don't stand out as
>> being more concordant. I double DOG dare you.
>
>The 17-EDO piece sounds more concordant than either of those.

You and Mike both. If you listen closely, you'll hear the chords
aren't concordant at all. They're bland. The piece is uniform in
this fashion. That doesn't make it concordant.

Yes, the 19-tone etude (and don't forget the Fanfare) have
contrast. That's because there's something to contrast against.

>The
>22-EDO piece sounds like rubbish; too bad he didn't know about
>Pajara[10].

That was Paul's assessment but I strongly disagree. I love
the piece but even if you hate it, that the chords are consonant
is undeniable.

>> Or go ahead and write a basic SATB ditty in 11-ET, that sounds
>> as smooth or harmonious as one in 19. I double DOG dare you.
>>
>> Is any of this really open for debate?
>
>Is "smooth and harmonious" all there is to music?

Of course not. Give me a break!

-Carl

🔗genewardsmith <genewardsmith@...>

🔗Daniel Forró <dan.for@...>

On 7 Jan 2011, at 12:40 PM, Carl Lumma wrote:

> Classical music is pitch obsessed. It uses pitch extensively to
> say what it's got to say.

Not truth since the invention of rhythm, organ, and orchestra.

> American music introduced another
> powerful tool: rhythm.

Slightly exaggerated. Don't forget it was my compatriot, certain Mr. Dvorak who came to your Wild West to teach you something about music :-)

And have you ever heard about people like Janacek, Bartok, Stravinski, Messiaen etc.etc.? They also knew something about rhythm.

Yes, you have Ives, Nancarrow, Varese, Antheil, Cowell... and minimalists. I don't count in African and Latin rhythms, that was also import.

But try French mannerism of Ars subtilior, Chantilly Codex. You will be surprised where European music was 100 years before New World was even known officially.

> But it also continued (and even extended)
> the use of pitch, at first.

What about timbre, articulation, expression, form...? 19th and 20th century did a lot in balancing all music parameters, and multiserialism tried to use them equally.

>
> However, the disruptive 100-year (and counting) trend in the
> falling cost of music reproduction has gradually caused a falling
> level of music skill in the public. In 1920, pop stars made
> money selling sheet music, and people heard it when the young lady
> of the house performed it on a piano.

I don't think so. Don't forget about gramophone records, pianola and radio. This decline of music culture among common people started much sooner.

> Instead of the internet
> threatening CDs, radio threatened sheet music sales (ASCAP was
> the industry's response).
>
> Today, most people can't carry a tune. And the popular music is
> sparse, 2 or 3 part writing (if you're lucky), syncopated into a
> rhythm with some hardly-pitched synthesizer burps.
>

And this is the main problem of most of microtonal works I've heard. They are boring, because they look not like real artistic music works, but like primitive pitch etudes based on poor improvisations. What microtonalism needs are composers writing contemporary music in all parameters, and additionally to this use also microintervalls. Just as one of the parameters of music, and as naturally like all the other ones. It's even not necessary to talk about it and emphasize it, like it would automatically makes music interesting and appealing. Not at all. There's lot of classical music shit, jazz shit, pop shit, as well as microtonal shit. I see a big danger in microtonalism snobbery, fundamentalism, isolationism and fractions and numbers fetishism.

It's just enough to do good music. Microtonality can help in it, but it's not without some effort.

Daniel Forro

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

Igs>"And unless there are flagrant uses of micro-chromatic ornamentations
(which usually sound like rubbish, anyway), it's far from obvious that anything
unusual is going on in the tuning. I really think we all get a bit carried
away with the whole "emancipation of pitch" thing--it does not make the "worlds
of difference" it is often claimed to!"

Agreed! Usually when I either make a tuning that "works" or pick a subset
of tones from any tuning (including terrible ones) that works, it sounds at
least 65-70% like 12TET (IE far as diatonic feel). Intervals like 11/6, 11/7,
13/8, and 7/6 do sound to me very uniquely different than 12TET...but most dyads
I've found end up sounding a lot more like variations on 12TET, even if that
means "notes that can swap between sounding major and minor", than their own
identities. Especially in that latter case, microtonallity seems to focus on
giving more options to the composer despite sounding often similar to the
listener: it's like being able to program a computer with C#.net instead of the
old Visual Basic 6 language: same looking result, more ways to get there.

>"The 17-EDO piece sounds more concordant than either of those. "
Agreed! I'm beginning to wonder why 17TET hasn't gained more
traction...particularly on things like guitars.

>"Is "smooth and harmonious" all there is to music? There is a place for it,
>and there is a place for dissonance, and there is a place for everything in
>between."

I've always thought that music is a balancing act...like building a bridge
where the supports at the end are consonance and the parts in between are
dissonance. Dissonance adds the variety, but consonance keeps it all steady and
standing. Thus, I think an ideal way to compose involves both...but the common
problem becomes having "too heavy a bridge for the supports" IE too many
dissonance options per consonant option. You can, of course, take a bad tuning
and use fewer notes or fewer combinations of notes to "take weight off the
bridge" and balance it...but then you are often left with less options as a
composer, although often also a rather unique mood. Yes, you can do moods in
odd-"disharmonious" TET scales you can't in "normal" scales...but the options
that sound "stable" in such scales are often far and few between: by simply
choosing such "bad" scales...you often define most of the mood of your song
leaving little room for deviation from said mood. And thus, if you want to
write many different moods in songs you'd need many different tunings if they
are all "bad" tunings...but often only one of two if you are using "good"
tunings.

>""Smooth and harmonious" is only good for so much, especially when 12-tET is
>smooth and harmonious *enough* for the great masses of Western ears."
12TET as smooth and harmonious enough for most (IE untrained) ears, yes.
Fresh...not really. I think that's another reason composers are leaning
increasingly toward texture and rhythm rather than melodies (especially in
electronica)...a majority of the options so far as chord progressions and
melodies in 12TET have already been done, so they aim for originality in
rhythm/phrasing/effects...of their music rather than original melodies: in fact
it's most often rhythm, not melody and harmony, that separates genres (minus
things like blues and country where simple chord progressions are by and large
pre-defined for the genres). Perhaps we can help change that... :-)

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

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

MikeB>"So people exploit similarities like this to temporarily "transform" the
time feel into something completely different; at first they're playing
something in 3 against 5 and suddenly you transform into the
septuplet world where beats are flying left and right and wheels are spinning
around you and then bam, you're back in on the 1."

Right, so they "intersect" at beat 15 (3*5)...if I follow what you are
saying?

One of my favorite beat tricks is to constantly alternate gaps of all drums
for a fairly long duration. For example (where K is a kick drum and S is a snare
and * is a 16th note timing gap

<K> * <K> **** <K> ** <K> ** * (beat repeats with kick starting here)
* * * **S* * S* * **<S>

Note the gap for the kicks are 1,4,2,3 and the gap for the snares are
5,2,4....this (the fact each timing gap length is different than any of the last
4 timing gaps) give a constant sense of movement and no two drums hit at the
same time.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Compare that to the usual

<K> * * * <K> <K> * * (beat repeats with kick starting here)
* * S * * * S *

Where the gap between the kick is 3,2 (timing gap repeats every 2 timing gaps IE
3,2,3,2 in a repeating rhythm) and the gap between the snares is 3,3 (no
difference in timing gap length)....much less sense of movement...

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

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

Carl>"You and Mike both. If you listen closely, you'll hear the chords aren't
concordant at all. They're bland. The piece is uniform in this fashion. That
doesn't make it concordant."

Here we go again... I think Carl is most likely "technically correct" in saying
17TET isn't concordant (IE psychoacoustically correct)...but in the issue here
(pertaining to pop music), being technically correct isn't exactly relevant.
Maybe the 17TET piece is uniform. Heck, maybe Chris's oddly popular piece with
my PHI scale works because it is uniform...who knows...but the fact seems to be
both of those pieces come across as confident and easily listenable or just
plain old "close enough to correct for the average listener".

If I "listen closely" to 12TET, I can tell just how nastily off the 6th and
major 3rd are...or that the tri-tone fails as either a 7/5 or a 10/7...but, in
the greater scheme of the music, it's close enough that the sense of confidence
breaks through...which seems to be the greater forest (rather than just the
trees). The other thing is, I swear most people aren't anal-retentively trained
at subtle differences between intervals an 100% psychoacoustic correctness...so
I don't think the slight concordant slips only a very trained listener would
hear would bother them much at all.

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

🔗genewardsmith <genewardsmith@...>

🔗akjmicro <aaron@...>

Well written, Daniel....

There's some irony here for me, because I'm actively running an organization that underlines the interest in music that deals with tunings and microtones. But I think what you say is true nonetheless, and I look at UnTwelve as an excuse to frame interesting and good music under one banner than one might not be able to do under another, b/c they were too stylistically divergent.

AKJ

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Forrï¿½ <dan.for@...> wrote:
>
>
> On 7 Jan 2011, at 12:40 PM, Carl Lumma wrote:
>
> > Classical music is pitch obsessed. It uses pitch extensively to
> > say what it's got to say.
>
> Not truth since the invention of rhythm, organ, and orchestra.
>
> > American music introduced another
> > powerful tool: rhythm.
>
> Slightly exaggerated. Don't forget it was my compatriot, certain Mr.
> Dvorak who came to your Wild West to teach you something about music :-)
>
> And have you ever heard about people like Janacek, Bartok,
> Stravinski, Messiaen etc.etc.? They also knew something about rhythm.
>
> Yes, you have Ives, Nancarrow, Varese, Antheil, Cowell... and
> minimalists. I don't count in African and Latin rhythms, that was
> also import.
>
> But try French mannerism of Ars subtilior, Chantilly Codex. You will
> be surprised where European music was 100 years before New World was
> even known officially.
>
> > But it also continued (and even extended)
> > the use of pitch, at first.
>
> What about timbre, articulation, expression, form...? 19th and 20th
> century did a lot in balancing all music parameters, and
> multiserialism tried to use them equally.
>
> >
> > However, the disruptive 100-year (and counting) trend in the
> > falling cost of music reproduction has gradually caused a falling
> > level of music skill in the public. In 1920, pop stars made
> > money selling sheet music, and people heard it when the young lady
> > of the house performed it on a piano.
>
> I don't think so. Don't forget about gramophone records, pianola and
> radio. This decline of music culture among common people started much
> sooner.
>
> > Instead of the internet
> > threatening CDs, radio threatened sheet music sales (ASCAP was
> > the industry's response).
> >
> > Today, most people can't carry a tune. And the popular music is
> > sparse, 2 or 3 part writing (if you're lucky), syncopated into a
> > rhythm with some hardly-pitched synthesizer burps.
> >
>
>
>
> > Xenharmonic music is doubly screwed, in a way. Not only does
> > it have to go against the hegemony of 12, it has to go against
> > the trend of abandoning pitch. Xenharmonic music is all about
> > pitch. It is a celebration of pitch, an emancipation of pitch!
> > It demands a certain level of skill from its listeners.
>
> And this is the main problem of most of microtonal works I've heard.
> They are boring, because they look not like real artistic music
> works, but like primitive pitch etudes based on poor improvisations.
> What microtonalism needs are composers writing contemporary music in
> all parameters, and additionally to this use also microintervalls.
> Just as one of the parameters of music, and as naturally like all the
> other ones. It's even not necessary to talk about it and emphasize
> it, like it would automatically makes music interesting and
> appealing. Not at all. There's lot of classical music shit, jazz
> shit, pop shit, as well as microtonal shit. I see a big danger in
> microtonalism snobbery, fundamentalism, isolationism and fractions
> and numbers fetishism.
>
> It's just enough to do good music. Microtonality can help in it, but
> it's not without some effort.
>
> Daniel Forro
>

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 3:29 AM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>
> Igs wrote:
>
> >> Compare these etudes. Tell me 19 and 22 don't stand out as
> >> being more concordant. I double DOG dare you.
> >
> >The 17-EDO piece sounds more concordant than either of those.
>
> You and Mike both. If you listen closely, you'll hear the chords
> aren't concordant at all. They're bland. The piece is uniform in
> this fashion. That doesn't make it concordant.

How does the 6:7:9 damage in 17-tet measure up to the 4:5:6 damage in
19 and 22-tet?

But the chords sound as concordant to me as any minor triad in which
there is low tonalness, as per your own definition. That is, we aren't
really hearing it as 6:7:9 anyway, we're hearing it as 3/2 + crap.
(Didn't I steal this concept from you...? :) )

What is admittedly less concordant about these chords is their lack of
periodicity buzz, which really does have to do with more than just 3/2
+ crap, as per the other thread. So you could say that this is a third
type of concordance, one that people generally only discover once they
first get into microtonal music, and that a lot of people become
extremely attracted to since it only increases in intensity as you go
up to 13-limit JI and beyond.

Once I get those examples posted in the other thread perhaps we could
make some more headway in formalizing a theory based on it...

-Mike

🔗genewardsmith <genewardsmith@...>

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 1:32 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > Once I get those examples posted in the other thread perhaps we could
> > make some more headway in formalizing a theory based on it...
>
> I say again, if you would tell us what the hell "periodicy buzz" is I at least might try to follow the conversation. WHAT are you two talking about, please?

OK, sorry, let me try. It's a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when
you play a JI chord - you might hear a periodic amplitude fluctuation
or "buzzing" somewhere along the upper register of the chord. It
happens most intensely when the chords are tuned precisely in JI, with
harmonic ratios, with no tempering; however, as Carl pointed out, it
also happens with sines too.

Let's take 8:9:10:11:12.

So start with 8:10 by itself, which is 2:3. You hear a perfect fifth.
Do this with a really harsh, harmonic timbre - let's say the GM reed
organ sound. You might hear a little bit of buzzing, but not much.

Now add the 10, which makes 4:5:6. You might hear a little bit of buzz
creeping in.

Now add the 9 and 11. There's lots of "buzz" now. The buzz is like
this "purring" sound that starts up.

My best guess right now is that it's still related to critical band
effects, and a more precise mathematical explanation of the critical
band in terms of being generated by the Laplace transform of a damped
sinusoid still seems to indicate that this is somewhat the case.

-Mike

🔗genewardsmith <genewardsmith@...>

🔗cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
> >The 17-EDO piece sounds more concordant than either of those.
>
> You and Mike both. If you listen closely, you'll hear the chords
> aren't concordant at all. They're bland. The piece is uniform in
> this fashion. That doesn't make it concordant.

I really don't see your meaning. How are the chords "bland"?

Regardless, I've listened to these etudes hundreds of times, and if I was pressed to describe any of them as "bland", it'd be the 22-EDO one. I don't see how I can listen more closely than I've done in the past.

Also, don't forget that my experience with 17-EDO stretches well beyond listening to that etude. I've compared 17 and 19 extensively in diatonic frameworks, and while 19-EDO sounds significantly better dyadically, there is an odd sort of coherence in 17-EDO played triadically or tetradically that I find lacking in 19-EDO. I can't put my finger on what it could be, though, but I've done randomized listening tests on myself of 7th chords ascending the major scale (with a piano timbre) in 12, 17, 19, 22, 26, and 27-EDO and found both 17 and 19 to be sweeter than any of the others--but for very different reasons. Classical music (especially guitar music) in 17-EDO never sounds wrong, sour, or off to me, despite the fact that it looks like it should, whereas in 19-EDO there is something that always feels a little "weird".

> Yes, the 19-tone etude (and don't forget the Fanfare) have
> contrast. That's because there's something to contrast against.

As someone who's played extensively in both ETs, I really think there's as much contrast in 17 as in 19. It's a very different sort of contrast, yes indeedy, and all told I do like 19 quite a bit more than 17 (mostly because I'm rather averse to neutral chords and find the 19-EDO 5-limit chords *more* xenharmonic than the chords in 17-EDO), but to say that 17-EDO lacks contrast is really dead wrong.

> That was Paul's assessment but I strongly disagree. I love
> the piece but even if you hate it, that the chords are consonant
> is undeniable.

I still say: no more consonant than in the 17-EDO piece.

> >> Or go ahead and write a basic SATB ditty in 11-ET, that sounds
> >> as smooth or harmonious as one in 19. I double DOG dare you.
> >>
> >> Is any of this really open for debate?
> >
> >Is "smooth and harmonious" all there is to music?
>
> Of course not. Give me a break!

Well, then, what is the point of your objection?

-Igs

🔗cityoftheasleep <igliashon@...>

--- In MakeMicroMusic@yahoogroups.com, "genewardsmith" <genewardsmith@...> wrote:
> IMHO what's interesting is harmonic intelligibility. 13-limit isn't smooth, but when it's in good tune it's a hell of a lot more *interesting* than the stuff coughed up by all this "all scales are equally valid" ideology. All tunings are equal reminds me of the all notes are equal ideology of serialism. In both cases, I think "ideology" is the correct word.
>

I daresay it's impossible to make music without *some sort* of ideology. We are of course all entitled to our own, and there really is no accounting for taste, but my own ideology is not without substance. Poetry would be impossible without ambiguity in language, and if art were stripped of ambiguity we would have nothing more than photorealism. It is really the well-constructed contrast and conflict between intelligibility and ambiguity that make for the highest forms of art. Recognizing that in *any* scale, there will be both intelligible harmony and unintelligible, and that these polar opposites will manifest and interact very differently in different tunings--this is the heart of my ideology. Whenever I or others state "all scales are equally valid", it is seldom asked "but valid for what?"

My hunger for bad tunings is meant more as a test to my own principles than a genuine hunger for dissonance or unintelligibility. I truly want to see if there is a scale so bad that I can find nothing to say with it.

-Igs

🔗Michael <djtrancendance@...>

> My best guess right now is that it's still related to critical band
> effects

Simply put...it seems to be what happens when beating rates between multiple
sine waves are exactly the same.
IE if you get sine waves of 100hz 200hz 300hz...the beating happens at 100hz
(200-100 = 100, 300-200 = 100...) so you get this piled-up oscillation at
100hz...in addition to the sound of the root tone at 100hz.

The effect gets "stronger" when you have a full instrument where the first
overtone is at 200hz and the second at 300hz adding to those root tone
harmonics. The lower numbered fractions matter more as the acoustic instruments
have their strongest/loudest overtones at those multiples (mainly 1,2,3,4,5,6).
Basically everything aligns with and adds to everything else so far as amplitude
of overtones with such fractions. Back in the composition world, if I have it
right...this is fairly close to what happens in Barbershop quartet.

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

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

Daniel wrote:

>> American music introduced another powerful tool: rhythm.
>
>Slightly exaggerated.

Of course, it was a short essay. But the basic fact is, in
American music, rhythm (perhaps I should specify: "meter") was
given an importance not seen before in polyphonic music.
Do you really disagree?

>Yes, you have Ives, Nancarrow, Varese, Antheil, Cowell... and
>minimalists.

All of these came after the American music revolution.

>I don't count in African and Latin rhythms, that was also import.

Brazil and so on are in America, after all (choro arriving at
about the same time as early ragtime, probably through parallel
evolution since communication between these areas was limited).

>But try French mannerism of Ars subtilior, Chantilly Codex. You will
>be surprised where European music was 100 years before New World was
>even known officially.

I'm a great fan of the Ars nova (and naturally, of the "smokers").
Meter is quite abstract in these styles. However in the more
popular early dance forms we do hear something closer to rock and
roll (e.g. 15th and 16th century basso ostinato).

>> However, the disruptive 100-year (and counting) trend in the
>> falling cost of music reproduction has gradually caused a falling
>> level of music skill in the public. In 1920, pop stars made
>> money selling sheet music, and people heard it when the young lady
>> of the house performed it on a piano.
>
>I don't think so.

Don't you now!

-Carl