Patenting Tunings, etc.

I believe the H. in H. Christopher L-H's name stands for Hugh.
The is another researcher named L.-H., but I think he's the son.

Harry Partch once told me that Stockhausen came over and visited
him for an afternoon when the Partch studio was in Petaluma in
the office suite of a former chicken hatchery. K-HS spent the afternoon
with Harry and was particularly intrigued with the harmonic canon, which
he spent some time playing and listening to. This visit would have
taken place in the early 60's, so I think the chance of a direct
influence is quite high, K-HS's claims notwithstanding.

I'm not a lawyer (I have some standards, low as they may be),
but I know that it is/has been possible to patent implementations
of tunings. There are a number of patented 1/4-tone pianos and I
imagine the Archifoon (31-tone generalized keyboard electronic
organ from Holland) and Scalatron were patented. Erv Wilson has
two patents on his keyboard, a generalized pattern suited to the
_"12, 17 and 22-tets"_. William Lyman Young patented a "decatonic
keyboard" for 24-tet.

Certainly, tuning tables may be copyrighted.

Interestingly enough, the 24th root of 3 itself has been patented by
James Heffernan ( No. 15,561, in 1906,in England) under the
title "An Improvement in Musical Instruments." Heffernan was
a "Supervisor of Inland Revenue (it figures, a Tax man) and worked
out a notation and provisional keyboard for this scale. His patent
specification even has an excerpt from "Mozart's Twelfth Mass-Gloria"
in his new notation.

The octave in this tuning spans 15 degrees and has only 1188.72
cents. His system is thus a shrunk 15-tet with a step size of
79.25 cents rather than 80.

I would imagine that by now this patent has lapsed into
the public domain, so I wouldn't hesitate to use it. At best/worst,
a suit for infringement would gain publicity for both parties.

--John


PS: Greg, the more microtonal, xenharmonic, allotonal, etc. music
you can play the better, sorry I can't get your program out here
on the "Left" coast.


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Brian brings up some good points about the practicality of using a large
number of pitches per octave. As I don't usually use more than 12 pitches
per octave myself (nor a seven octave range, for that matter), I'm not in a
position to offer an experienced perspective on most of these issues.
However, there is one of his assertions I would like to respond to:

>As for using multitrack with SMPTE
>sync to create a microtonal compostion
>via multiple passes in the recording
>studio, this is so harrowing and so
>arduous and so difficult that no
>microtonal composer has ever done
>it. Thus it is so complex and so
>tortuous that it is effectively
>impossible.

Well, I can't speak for other composers, but I don't find using SMPTE that
arduous. It sure beats the heck out of FSK or other multitrack sync systems
in use before SMPTE became widely available. And, yes, I wrote a piece in
which I increased the number of available pitches per octave by
multitracking (using FSK no less). It was on the Synclavier, which would
only allow 12 just pitches per octave, and I needed 13. Since I was already
multitracking the piece, it wasn't a big deal to me, and the process was
made easier in that different parts of the piece used different tuning
system subsets.

I admit it would have been more difficult had I been trying to use a large
number of pitches per octave all in a single melody, but sequencers have
made this kind of note-to-note slight of hand accessible, if not
falling-down simple.

Is the process "harrowing" and "arduous"? Well, I guess that depends on the
music, the person, and the equipment, but I don't think it approaches the
difficulties of building your own instruments.

Bill

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^ Bill Alves email: alves@hmc.edu ^
^ Harvey Mudd College URL: http://www2.hmc.edu/~alves/ ^
^ 301 E. Twelfth St. (909)607-4170 (office) ^
^ Claremont CA 91711 USA (909)621-8360 (fax) ^
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^




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Brian M. points out:

> To get more pitches per octave than
> this, you must either [1] reduce the
> range of your instrument from 7 octaves
> down to some smaller ambitus; [2] use
> multitracking with SMPTE sync and
> create multiple MIDI files which break
> up portions of your composition into
> different keyboard ranges, and then
> build up the entire composition out
> of multiple passes via multitrack
> recordings;

Interesting! Therein lies the difference between a fellow with a piano
background (Brian), and, for lack of a better word, a solo-instrument
background (me). In my life, I have played (mostly) viola, bassoon,
classical guitar, and now soprano saxophone, rather than piano, organ, or
harpsichord for example. That being the case, the idea of having the
entire musical pitch range laying out in front of me simultaneously is
alien to me.

Limited range on an instrument is, on the face of it, a limitation, but
in another sense it's something of a liberator in that lack of range on a
single instrument never even would have occured to me as being problematic.
I've just always assumed that if I'm writing something for the entire
musical pitch range, that I'll have to think in terms of a larger ensemble
than a single instrument. Or driving it the other direction, devise the
ensemble that makes sense for a particular impression I'm trying to get
across, and let the range fall as it might for that particular ensemble.

But along the lines of piano overdubbing Brian mentioned, I suppose
there is one fairly natural way to approach that, which is the old "piano
four hands" approach.

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Does it "pay" to say that I am completely in favor of midi and the
improving developments in electronics? Mayumi thinks so.

Johnny Reinhard
American Festival of Microtonal Music
318 East 70th Street, Suite 5FW
New York, New York 10021 USA
(212)517-3550/fax (212) 517-5495
reinhard@ios.com


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