An addendum to a confession (nerdy scale stuff)

My goodness. It would appear that some folks here are
pretty quick when it comes to horsing around with new scales.
I'm told that I should have put a couple of things in in the course
of my last note about how the innumerate non-ideologue
stumbles across the New World. It honestly didn't occur to me.

As I set it up, the thing my muso pals here call "the gregscale" is
mapped from f-f. It preserves the original way I burned the old
DX7 ROM way back when. If one does that, then there are two
versions of Dan Schmidt's Just Intonational Pelog scale

f-g-a-b-c-d-e (duh)
c-d#-e-f#-g#-a-a# (each pitch being a 3/2 from the above)

You get two Dan Schmidt Slendro scales:

f#-a-a#-c#-e
b-d-e-f#-a

and a third one, sort of*
a#-c#-e-f-a

*the 5 pitch is narrower (1.48 vs. 1.5) and 6 is wider (1.77 vs. 1.75)

Those of you adept in central Javanese practice will note some odd
little features - a pelog 4-5-6 (Slebrak, anyone?) can suddenly veer
off into slendro pathet manyuro 1-2-3 with some ease, and the "embat"
pitches for both tunings uh...aren't there. There are also some interesting
overlays which result from slipping back and forth between the two pelogs
or slendros, given the pitches they share in common (a 5-7-3 in the "f pelog"
is the same as 1-3-6 in the "c pelog". There's a similar relationship among
the two slendros).

And finally, the biggest howler I seem to have managed would appear to
lie in not providing you with a set of 12 JI ratios. Sorry - I was probably
caught up in trying to tell a comforting tale, little realizing that it might
be well received by the numerate types.

1/1-21/20-11/10-9/8-6/5-27/20-7/5-3/2-63/40-8/5-33/20-9/5

Actually, I was really hoping to discover that Harry Partch gave up on
this scheme as brain-dead 50 or so years ago, or that some really smart
woman has written a complete theory text on this dumb little thing that
seems to work for me. If there's anyone who's wound up doing something
similar arrived at by different means, I'd love to hear about it.

Well, isn't this fun? Not a word of praise for Ferneyhough or Cage or
Eric Lyon.

With regards,
Gregory

_
When I pronounce the word Future,/the first syllable already belongs to the
past./When I pronounce the word Silence,/I destroy it./When I pronounce the
word Nothing,/I make something no nonbeing can hold./ (Wislawa Szymborska)
Gregory Taylor, Heurikon Corp.
http://www.msn.fullfeed.com/~gtaylor/home.html



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