Pitch bend

Neil Haverstick wrote:

> Haverstick here...I saw a very interesting CD/booklet package at Tower
> Records today...put out by Bart Hopkin of Experimental Musical
> Instruments mag fame, it is a project about just those weird ass
> instruments and folks that he always features in the mag...it looked very
> cool, and I believe I'll go back and get it.

I heard on the radio recently a CD which I'm going to try to find performed by a group I'm also going to find.
The group name is The Empire Brass. They are new to me, but they must be well known because they seem to be
played a lot on the local classical-pop station (KUSC, part of The Broadcast Service of the University of
Southern California). I can't remember the name of the composition but I think it was a piece for 10 brass
instruments by Giovanni [sp?, first or last name?]. It sounded like Renaissance or Early music. The way these
performers tune in to each other as an ensemble is just great. They performed the piece in obvious just
intonation with no vibrato and with the same envelope articulation. Man what a sound. You should hear the
resonance. I'd recommend it to anyone.

> ...there seems to be a lot of unanswered questions about just
> what Indian (and other modally oriented folks} musicians are doing when
> they play...
> ...If they stay
> within the parameters of the harmonically real, ratio based intervals,
> than is it wrong to make certain assumptions about their system?

That may be an assumption right there. Maybe they don't use ratio-based intervals in practice, or maybe they
use them as an aural gestalt (if you will) which is then perverted for expression by playing near but not
right on the ideal ratio-based intervals.

> ...I do know that blues is MIGHTY hard to teach in any "logical" fashion,
> because within a loose framework of 3 chords and the 6 tone blues scale,
> there's a whole lot of room for individual interpretation as to where to
> put a note, for instance, when you bend the 4th up to the 5th...what is
> the FEELING you're trying to communicate, that is the issue, and believe
> me, blues is both profound and microtonal as anything.

Blues was my vector into microtonality as a kid. Blues is a thing.

Your sentence above touches on one of those things which has hit me sporadically over the years and made me
think "there's something heavy here, I really should follow through with this someday", which is to focus on
and expand the whole concept of bending or glissandi or portamento or any other name for moving pitch. Moving
pitch is obviously an important musical element which is understood at the gut level by many people in many
cultures (and even in other mammals; see whale songs, wolf calls, the cat's meow), yet it doesn't seem to have
an accompanying body of theoretical artifacts. (Maybe it does, and I'm just ignorant.) I'd really like to
either find and read, or start creating on my own or with others, attempts at analyzing and formalizing the
use and meaning of moving pitch.

One "problem" about moving pitch, or rather one thing which separates it from elements typically constituting
music notation and music theory, is its non-particulate or non-quantizable nature. Pitches, such as we
consider in 'tuning', are usually taken to be static points along the number-line-like spectrum. Similarly,
rhythms are conceptualizable as involving points or ranges on a time line. Moving pitch enters the world of
curves. Curves can be immediately recognized, and attributed with aesthetic value, but are not as easy to
handle as quantized units.

Some questions which may begin a more serious investigation are:
[] What are some ways in which may we notate moving pitch?
[] Is it possible to formalize the feeling moving pitch imparts?
[] Is it important to consider the fixed-pitch qualities of pitches which the bend passes through (like
bending across scale degrees or from one chord member to another), or does moving pitch make us hear in a
different way? In other words, how does the importance of the local pitch landmarks which the pitch moves
through play against the importance of the change in speed and direction over time?
[] What are the psychological similarities or differences between a melody of discrete pitches and one of
continuous pitch?

I think a beginning answer to at least the first question would be graph-like notation already in use in
virtual-synthesis software for notating volume envelopes and stuff. At least this would give us a
photograph-like way of notating the actual tracking of a pitch through time, even if it would say nothing
about the feeling it imparts or the logical classification of different characters of bends.

An interesting thing to think about in the curve vs. discrete information problem is midi pitch bend
controller. This might be the most commonly available technology for generating quantifiable and reproducible
pitch curves for experimentation, yet it is still fundamentally a series of discrete pitch points through
time, and not truly continuous information.

Matt Nathan


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