Sethares "Excitalking"

Finally had a chance to listen to this piece by Mr Sethares... Well, hey,
if this is the future of jazz, I'll take two, thank you! Marvelous.

You must have a pack of live aliens in that dark basement. Don't turn on
the lights, dude! You'll be sorry!

Maybe I missed all the discussion of the tuning system for this piece...?

Editorial commentary... If I was going to mess with the mix & balance, I
might lighten up a bit on the drums. Length-wise, it needs to be stretched
out about 60 minutes longer.

So, when does the album come out, and where can I get it? Tower Records?

Rick

Rick McGowan wrote:

>Finally had a chance to listen to this piece by Mr Sethares... Well,
hey,
>if this is the future of jazz, I'll take two, thank you! Marvelous.
>You must have a pack of live aliens in that dark basement. Don't turn on
>the lights, dude! You'll be sorry!

Thanks, though it's a closet and not a basement, and they are
elves and not space aliens. But let's not quibble.

>Maybe I missed all the discussion of the tuning system for this piece...?

Well, I've been refining this adaptive tuning thing for a while,
so I dont think I actually talked about details of the tuning this time
around. The basic idea is to take all the notes that are sounding
at any given time and to retune them so as to maximize a measure
of "sensory consonance," or perhaps more properly to minimize the
"sensory dissonance." For harmonic sounds (like most of those in
"excitalking,"
this comes down something very close to JI, but a JI in which there
are no fixed pitches at all (because the pitches always wiggle around
depending on what else is sounding at the time).

Of course, there are a number of practical details -- and I talk about
some of these in a paper in the J. New Music Research.
I've put a version online at:
http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/paperspdf/adaptun2002.pdf

>Editorial commentary... If I was going to mess with the mix & balance, I
>might lighten up a bit on the drums. Length-wise, it needs to be
stretched
>out about 60 minutes longer.

Seems to be pretty good agreement on lightening the drums.
As for a 60 minute version! Unlikely, though I take it as a
compliment...

>So, when does the album come out, and where can I get it? Tower Records?

Well this piece is too new, but some of my older stuff is on
the first two CDs -
http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/xentone.html
http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/exo.html
and a bunch of mp3 excerpts at:
http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/otherperson/all_mp3s.html

So, you can get them at Amazon, but we're not at the "Tower Records"
level yet....

--Bill Sethares