TUNING digest 1558

Joe Monzo wrote:

>Also, La Monte Young has studied much about the effects and
>affects of many various primes (in the frequency ratios of the
>tones in his drone-like sound installations) on the nervous
>system. [Perhaps Dave Beardsley or Daniel Wolf could elaborate
>more on this]

Young is indeed our most intrepid explorer of the higher primes.
While he has published some observations about the psychological
effects of in- or out-of-phase tuning, he has been extremely cautious
about attributing specific effects to the individual primes. Indeed,
his reaction to Ben Johnston's associations (i.e. seven with the
blues and with sex, thirteen with death) was one of surprise at
Johnston's naivit�, that complex sensations could be so prosaically
labelled. (For the record, my own response to Johnston was to suggest
that 17 must be associated with taxes) and that any given musical
materials can be articulated in countless ways, and that extramusical
associations are very important. (I believe that Bill Alves has
previously mentioned Balinese Gamelan Angklung, to many westerners
the most cheerful sound imaginable, but terribly sorrowful to the
Balinese themselves due to the association with cremation).

Since Young has presented larger prime relationships in settings of long
durations and without the rigid furnishing of a concert-hall setting, the
perceptions of these relationships has a temporal frame and a spatial
element radically different from traditional music-making. A capacity to
perceive of the prime relationships as irreducible proportions in physical
space is suggested by this work, a reduction to particular sentiments is
not.

I am struck that one confusing aspect of the question of prime affects is
that primes seven to 23 appear near scalar positions in the most familar
tunings which already bear very strong associations (e.g. 11 first appears
close to the augmented fourth). While it is possible that these
associations in the familar tunings are due themselves to proximity to
these very prime ratios, it is probably impossible to determine the
direction of causality. This confusion does, however, suggest that to a
large degree interval affect is independent of the actual intonation.

But isn't it musically interesting in itself to recognize that each prime
can divide the tonal space in a unique way? The compositional challenge of
finding convincing ways of articulating these unique divisions seems
impetus enough to compose with them.