How I stumbled into non12TET (a confession)

I read with some interest the recent note from my demi-neighbor
Miekal And about the extent to which what's posted here seems a
bit removed from the way that he does business. Of course, one
might simply point out that I'm probably one of the worst of those
folks, dwelling as I'm wont to do on matters of theory and that sort
of thing. Moreover, Neil Haverstick's exhortations for us to just get
down to business and Find Da Gruv seems somewhat in the same vein -
calls for spending time on Praxis as well as Theory. I applaud this
new direction, and think it's worth pursuing.

Since I cannot possibly shake my non12TET tail feathers with anything
like the skill of Doctah Neil, I'll do my part by coming clean in another
way - recounting the sordid tale of my flight from 12TET. Said story
reveals much about my decided *lack* of mathematical or theoretical
savvy, but demonstrates that all I was ever trying to do was to make
some noise I liked. I hope you find it entertaining and instructive and
encouraging.

We start with me at Cornell while my beloved was finishing her
Ph.D. I'm learning to play central Javanese gamelan and having a
wonderful time. So I think, "How come I don't try doing this on one
of my synths?" Luckily, I'm at a school full of engineers, and on
an Internet full of bright folks. Some of my acquaintance decide that
it might be innerstin' to figure out how a DX7 assigns pitches on a
keyboard (imagine my good fortune. This is '82, '83, and all there
is is the DX7), and they do it. "Okay Greg - give us a scale and we'll
burn you a new keyboard PROM." Suddenly, your dense narrator has
access to a tunable keyboard. Part one is pure serendipity.

It was Carter Scholz (to whom I raise my foaming glass and utter
words of praise. I owe ya, Carter) who first introduced me to Daniel
Schmidt's Just Intonational variants of Javanese tunings back when
an acquaintance was helping me to reverse-engineer stuff. I'd initially
started by using the tunings from the gamelan I perform with at Cornell
and some stuff from Colin MacPhee, but ran into the same problem
that sent Bill Sethares on his grand quest - lots of my hard-won
programming of timbres sounded like complete nonsense with the new
tunings. Since what Carter had shown me stuck close to the overtone
series, I figured things would be a bit easier. Besides, I liked how "sweet"
his slendro scale was.

The original ROM I burned simply put the Pelog scale on the white
keys (from F-F) and the Slendro scale on Black (F#-F#).

It worked great, and let me get around monkeying around with ratios and stuff
and just *play.* So I guess I confess to not being much of a theorist.

The final bit of it happened on a train. When my beloved got a Fulbright
and we moved to the Netherlands in 1989-90, I became a Sonologist, and
wound up riding the train between Utrecht and Den Haag nearly every
day. One of the books I'd taken along to work my way through was "Karawitan:
Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan." I thought then that it was about
time that I tried to get a sense of the way that the Javanese thought of their
own traditions (besides - a bunch of my teachers had translations and
articles in the book). One of the interesting ideas that I kept circling
around in the book was the notion of how one "transposes" between
various Javanese pathet, and I found myself thinking about the extent
to which it might be possible to look at making a kind of transpositional
version of my scale. So, I did the stupidest and simplest thing; I got out
my notebook on the train and took the Slendro scale from Dan Schmidt's
Just Intonational variant and figured the frequencies by using each of the
other pitches besides 1/1 as the first note for the series of ratios. It wasn't
pretty - with some "tempering", you can produce something that seems
to work rather well to the ear. But that's another story. Since I'm nearly
innumerate and exceedingly stupid, that took me pretty much the whole
way from Gouda and Woerden back home.

But the next afternoon, I tried the same thing with the Pelog scale, and
found something that worked beautifully. When I took Dan's Pelog

1/1 - 11/10 - 6/5 - 7/5 - 3/2 - 8/5 - 9/5

and cranked out a new set of pitches using the same ratios starting on the
3/2, all kinds of stuff started to drop out (that is, I wound up with
frequencies that were octaves of the 7 tones I already had). I've still got
the piece of graph paper from that train ride somewhere, full of places
where I scratched out the doubled notes. I wound up with (drum roll)
12 NOTES which gave me two Schmidt Pelog scales a perfect fifth apart.
"Oh, cool," I thought. I got off the train, ran home, fired up JICalc on
my Mac Plus, and typed in the new scale (from F=600)

600-630-660-675-720-810-840-900-945-960-990-1080

(I'll let y'all do that on your own)

And all kinds of cool stuff started dropping out once I started stepping
through the intervals on transpose. The thing that made me happiest was
that I'd managed to get a Schmidt *Slendro* scale outta putting the two
Pelogs together - two of 'em, actually. It's the scale that's been on my
keyboards since that very day, and the one I've pretty much exclusively
for my own pleasure. The genesis of the thing was impossibly mundane
and dumb, but it gave me what at the time seemed a kewl set of options.
After that, I started making music and pretty much forgot about it.

I include this little tale to encourage those of you who may be flummoxed
by the squad of witty and numerate folks here. Not all of us are quite
that bright or sufficiently prescient that we can see where we're going.
I'm certainly not one of those people - I was just some dork on a Dutch
train with a copy of Partch and some Javanese source readings and graph
paper. No revolution, no agenda. I just wanted to mess about with the
Javanese music I studied and loved (and wasn't gifted with the intelligence
that allowed Bill Sethares to discover a whole bunch of neat stuff in the
course of wondering about how to come up with good timbres for *his*
stuff). I confess here before the assembled masses just *how* I wound
up with my silly little "personal" scale that's brought me so much
pleasure. So take heart - I'll bet that I'm not the only person who
fell into all this while whacking about in the brush searching for
something else.

And now, back to the theoretical scrimmaging already in progress.

With regards,
Gregory

_
I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one,
paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only
maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard
Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI



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