Miscellaneous

(These messages seem to have vanished into an Internet black hole
as far the the Tuning Digest is concerned; my apologies to anyone
who might have received them already.)

With Tim Perkis's permission, I've placed my JiCalc WRITEALL file
copy of his TuneUP scale compilation in the Mills fpt site. TuneUP
was originally written in a dialect of FORTH, but later Mac systems made
it run erratically. I added a few more tunings and made some minor
corrections when I put the scales into an early version of JiCalc (without
comments or Notes). I think many Tuning List readers will find this
set of scales interesting. As most of them have only 12-tones or fewer,
it will be especially useful for synths which limit non-12-tet tunings
to only 12 tones per octave. Most of the scales come from A. J. Ellis's
appendices to Helmholtz's "On the Sensations of Tone," Lou Harrison's
Music Primer (pentatonic scales), and J. Murray Barbour's "Tuning and Temperament" (Greek tetrachordal scales).

Since this file is much shorter than my other JiCalc files, I left it
as an uncompressed and non-encoded ascii file. The files are called
JiCalc_TuneUP and TuneUP_README and are in the software mac directory
with the rest of the JiCalc material.

BTW, Benjamin Denckla has also created a MAX version of this set of
scales with Tim's permission.

Gary raised an interesting question about positive systems and stretched
octaves. Apparently, Bosanquet never considered the possibility that
the octave was not exact in his "General Theory of the Divsion of the
Octave," as he called this section of his book, "Temperament."
But, I see no reason why his concepts could not be extended to cover the
cases of stretched and contracted octaves as well. One could define a
positive fifth as one which generates an interval greater than zero cents
(a positive Pythagorean comma) when a chain of 12 such fifths is reduced
by 7 such octaves. The neutral fifth would then be defined as 7/12 of
the altered octave.

Re Shepard Tones: With considerable difficulty, it is possible to
approximate them on orchestral instruments (there is at least one
extant composition which purports to do so, but I forget the
composer and its name). I am unaware of any successful attempts on
commercial synths, though it should be straightforward with Csound
once the proper envelopes and timbres (spectra consisting only of octave
and suboctave harmonics) are specified.

Has anybody experimented with Phi-tonality, a timbre whose spectrum is
composed of powers and submultiples of the Golden Ratio (1.618034 approx)
and whose first order difference tones are coincident with other members
of the spectrum. See the article by Walter O'Connell in XH15, 1993 and
my "Notes and Comments 15," where I mention related work by David E.
Schroer and Lorne Temes (See also Brian McLaren's and Brink McGoogy's
papers). I think these timbres might be interesting if combined with
Shepard's envelopes (on each partial, of course).

Re "Polyxenharmony," a coinage Ivor would have no doubt appreciated:
Augusto Novaro, a Mexican theorist, instrument designer, teacher and
composer, advocated using 12- and 15-tets together. One might claim
this is really a subset of 60 (the LCM). Owen Jorgensen proposed his 7+5
tuning, in which the white keys are tuned to 7-tet and the black to 5-tet.
Because of the way the pitches are offset, this tuning is a subset of
70-, not 35-tet. Ivor Darreg recorded a guitar improvisation in 31-
and 41-tets by overdubbing a number of years ago.

Brian McLaren and the SAG Xenharmonic Players (a fluid and informally
organized group, to be sure) have performed and recorded with mixtures
of commercial microtonal synth tunings and various ET's and JI's.
(Does anyone know the actual tunings in the TS-10 library?)
Examples from their recent collections "Toward Unknown Regions 1 and 2"
(aka "Webs of Audition 1 and 2") include Pythagorean against 7-limit JI,
Slendro & Pelog vs the 17.19.23.29 hexany, a Tibetan scale against 31-tet,
Carlos's Alpha and Beta together, the Greek Chromatic (in 12?) vs 35-tet
and several examples of (semi-) empirical pitch collections against
various ET's.

I once heard a Cambodian musician play a banjo in 12 with an ensemble
in (nearly) equal-7 at an Indonesian restaurant in Oakland in the late
1980's. (I must admit the clash was more apparent to Larry Polansky than
to me).

I am very interested in seeing what Vyshnegradskii wrote on the subject
of transferring from one tuning to another in the course of a piece.
Darreg wrote on this technique too and composed a multisectional
work in different ET's (Excursion into the Enharmonic), but I am unsure
if he ever used different tunings in the same section seriatim, not
simultaneously

Anyway, if one wants to try "transfer" as a type of variation, it
might be interesting to take a MOS (WF) scale and transform it by varying
the size of its generator. For example one could transform the major mode
from its 22-tet form (4 4 1 4 4 4 1), to its "unrecognizable" counterpart
1 1 4 1 1 1 4 in 13-tet by varying the size of the 5th or 4th. The
transformation could be continuous or discrete; in the latter case a
series of transfers from 12, 19, 7, 16, 9 would be propriety-preserving
as well as less drastic or vertiginous. The scale intervals are
2 2 1 2 2 2 1, 3 3 2 3 3 3 2, 1 1 1 1 1 1 1, 2 2 3 2 2 2 3, and
1 1 2 1 1 1 2.

Re Interval: One might be able to get back issues from Jonathan Glasier
at the Sonic Arts Gallery, 2961 Beech Street, San Diego, CA 92102
(619) 231-3673. I am looking into the possibility of the Glasier's
making Interval available through Frog Peak Music.


--John

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