Re: More on 13-tET tuning/timbre/melody -- reply to Jacky

Hello, there, Jacky, and for now let me just thank you for your great
reply, including the explanation of "Cecil Does 13," which I read a
bit about in doing a search last weekend for articles about 13-tET;
now I understand more about the musician you were honoring, and the
humor involved.

Really, 13-tET is incredible, and so is my first novice experience at
customizing a timbre for this tuning. The preset "Piccolo" on the
TX-802 was happily there to get me in the swing of this tuning with
8/13 octave (about 738 cents) having a "concordant 3:2-like" feeling
for me, but my desire for more timbres and the example of people like
you and Bill Sethares has gotten me into the timbre/tuning design
game.

As a rank beginner, over the last two days I used "Algorithm 31" to
design a kind of "organ" with partials such as 3.06 or 6.12, or around
an octave-reduced 736 cents, very close to the 738 cents or so of
13-tET. Sometimes those fifths can sound "as solid as Pythagorean,"
other times a bit ambiguous, and sometimes quite unusual, especially
when the interval doesn't fit into a usual diatonic pattern.

Ah, now we have the element of melody <friendly grin>. There's a
wonderful pentatonic mode of 3-2-3-2-3, or LsLsL as Dan Stearns or
Paul Erlich might say (large-small-large-small-large), which sounds
great with a drone on scale steps 0-8, a "quasi-3:2" concord:

3 2 3 2 3
0 3 5 8 10 13
L s L s L

Anyway, the new organ timbre, however inexpertly set up, goes together
very nicely with the "Piccolo," on which I also tried a few small
adjustments (although as your spectrum analysis showed, the preset
version already seems nicely optimized for intervals in the general
region of 738 cents).

I'd like to get out some of this music, even while I'm learning the
basics of the scale, and finding some new shadings of neo-Gothic
progressions.

By the way, Mary, when listening to the _Xentonality_ CD by Bill
Sethares, I heard a couple of pieces that reminded me a lot of you and
your music, especially the "science fiction" kind of feeling.

I'm making a longer post about 13-tET to the main Tuning List, where I
explain that terms like "fifth" may suggest a pattern of adding
intervals that really doesn't apply; I'm developing an approach for
neo-Gothic style that counts intervals in 13-tET steps. A more
experienced musician suggested to me this important point, which can
have some practical ramifications.

Specifically, if one approaches something like 13-tET mainly in terms
of how it does or doesn't fit some other tuning system or method of
naming intervals, the result can be a "Ripley's Believe It or Not"
that focuses on the "oddities" of the scale rather than its own
patterns. Those patterns can lead to lots of different styles -- do
all the people who play in 12-tET agree on the best style for that
tuning?

Of course, I have my own prejudices -- a scale with an interval around
923 cents (the 10-step interval) tends to draw me in. Incidentally,
there's another scale with an interval very close to that size which I
want to try -- amazingly going back almost 25 years.

Anyway, I love that 13-tET interval at 923 cents, a familiar touch in
a tuning where lots is new and different.

Jacky, thanks for such a generous reply, and for your creative example
and assistance in approaching the designing or customization of
timbres.

Peace and love,

Margo