mixing 12,19,31

Hello,

I am starting a new Web page dedicated to 12/19/31 scales.

For the moment, its essential content is a "tone circle" that shows
the relationships between those scales and integer ratios.

You can browse it from my home page at:


http://www.ief.u-psud.fr/~thierry/welcome.html


Thierry Rochebois

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James Jeude asked for a short autobiography with regard to unusual tunings.
Sure! I obviously have no shame...

Amusingly I got into unusual tunings under similar circumstances as Mr.
Jeude. I too was in high school (in Clear Lake City down by NASA in Houston),
when a friend told me about the twelfth root of two. For me that was about 20
years ago as well (I graduated from HS in 1979). I then wondered about what
would happen if you use the tenth root of two instead, obviously producing 10TET
tuning.

I decided to explore it through guitars, which was a little bit of a
departure from my upbringing in that I almost entirely listened to and played
classical music, and had very little exposure to classical guitar at the time
(although I learned to play it reasonably well after college). Guitars were
more of a pop music instrument in my mind. Anyway, I figured out how to
calculate fret positions (pretty easy), built an acoustic guitar and bass from
kits and fretted them to 10TET. I then entered the results in the science fair,
the physics of vibrating strings being the scientific connection, and did rather
well.

After that, the fellow who played the "decimal bass" in my 10TET demo tapes
showed me Ivor Darreg's article in Guitar Player magazine about 19-, 22-, and
31-tone guitars. That was the first time I had concrete knowledge of anybody
else having worked at all formally with nontraditional tunings (although in all
fairness 19, 22, and 31 are moderately traditional as microtonal tunings go).
Ivor then connected me up with John Chalmers who was living in Houston then, and
we met over that science fair. John of course is active on the list. It's
kinda wild to think that about 20 years after we first met, he hooked me up to
the list.

For the following year's science fair, I did the same basic idea for some
small flutes, following Boehm's ideas. That resulting science fair project took
me out to the International Fair held that year in Anaheim, coincidentally not
too far from where Ivor lived, in Glendale at the time. That's when I met him,
Erv Wilson, and Glen Prior.

The next year (12th grade), I designed a two-voiced pulse-wave-only digital
synthesizer from about a hundred SSI and MSI chips, and outfit it on a big
wire-wrap board with an unusual controller appropriate for a wide variety of
tunings, interfaced it to a single-board 6502 computer (this was a little before
the Apple II days). It could play in most any tuning of up to 31 notes per
octave.

Despite its intricacy, it only won second place in the regional (Houston
vicinity) fair. The guy who won first place was very good indeed. But that
gave me my professional career direction, working in computers now for Motorola
in Austin, in the group that's working on what the 68000 is evolving into.

But music is still my main fascination in life, and well, you folks have seen
my endless babblings about 88CET tuning... I currently work mostly with an
Ensoniq ASR-10 sequencing from my Mac IIfx running EMagic's "Logic" sequencer.


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