RE: Stretching 88CET

>You establish a conceptual framework for your music that establishes
>9:7s, 11:9s, 7:6s, 7:4s, 10:9s, and such as the basic building
>blocks, instead of 2:1s, 5:4s, 6:5s, 4:3s, and such. Forcing
>yourself to rethink the problem entirely from that perspective,
>rather than using variants on a traditional set of premises, will
>almost certainly cause you to produce entirely different music.
>Making it miss the triple octave as well as the double octave may somewhat
>enhance that different perspective.

I agree. Let me add my two cents. My experience with non-octave scales (and
I'm still playing with them) is that although you can set up functional
harmonic relationships and weird but beautiful melodies without octaves,
once you "modulate" far enough to use an interval which is a near-octave,
that won't sound like a distant harmonic relationship but like an
out-of-tune version of the same note. The fact that we perceive pitch along
a "helix" with the same notes repeating at every octave seems an unalterable
property of our auditory system, and studies such as that of the "tritone
paradox" demonstrate that cultural influences are built upon this framework,
not vice versa. Anyhow, the acoustical octave, as Harry Partch pointed out,
has a larger "sphere of influence" in the pitch continuum than any other
interval (save the unison). Thus if a progression takes us to, say, 81/40,
or even 63/32, the "gravitational pull" of the octave will be very strong
and the implication hard to ignore. Randy Winchester's beautiful
improvisations in the Pierce-Bohlen scale (13th root of 3) show how the
near-octave can be used as a rough consonance, which however is not as
stable as some of the purer-tuned consonances (like 7:1) and tends to
resolve to them.


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I hope the piano technician is applauded as well. It's a lot of
work for a technician to pull it off.

Michael


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