Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Melody vs Harmony

Considering you are jamming at a speed that would make Satriani jealous with tons of staccato (impressive enough...sure)...it's hard to tell the emotion conveyed at times.

Far as the part just before 5:20 (the first chord)...I indeed hear the same resolution you do, but don't hear the other chords further along in the progression becoming increasingly tense leading into the next tonic. The "4 chord" (is that what you said?) just sounds random to me, almost like modulating between a bunch of different chords with no real rhyme or reason. The "middle section" sounds scrambled to me as well.
I do agree though, the "superminor second" still sounds very minor despite being "sharp". In fact, I hear some flavors of diminished "feel" coming through despite that diminished is supposedly flatter.
I also indeed hear the major vs. minor contrast around 8:00 despite your using the "same" interval.

However at 12:35...I didn't hear the switch in mood between when used as a scale and an individual interval.

13:30 it seems that, indeed, we have a much higher tolerance for flat/sharp error in melody than harmony.
____________________________________________________

I get the feeling things like speed, length, and loudness of tones played in melodic vs. harmony parts come into play in forming a decision the mind makes if the melody/"implied scale" defines the chord/structure or the held harmony does.
If you hold a note, for example, it may start as taking over as the "tonic"...but if you play a similarly loud or louder melody over it, notes in the melody may well take over, forming another tonic. So the last four to five notes in the melody your mind my try to assemble as a chord that "overrides" your original tonic. And playing a sixth tone may make one of the second to sixth tones in your melody the tonic, dropping the first tone, and so on (kind of like a "queue" of sorts). I'm guessing, what's left in the queue can then be compared to how close it is to a JI chord...one major question is how long a queue (note-wise) can the mind hold?

I get the impression a good way to get to the bottom of some of this is to play enthusiastic monophonic melodies at fast but not blistering pace with fairly legate notes and note what you "guess" the underlying chords/feel should be...and then go back and play the exact same melodies with different notes and then full chords under those melodies trying to alter the emotional context. Try to track what does and does not override the melodic "queue" that makes your mind guess certain chords should be there and overwrites that "monophonic vision" with actual chords.

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 11:33 PM, RR <djtrancendance@...> wrote:
>
> Far as the part just before 5:20 (the first chord)...I indeed hear the
> same resolution you do, but don't hear the other chords further along in the
> progression becoming increasingly tense leading into the next tonic. The "4
> chord" (is that what you said?) just sounds random to me, almost like
> modulating between a bunch of different chords with no real rhyme or
> reason. The "middle section" sounds scrambled to me as well.

For comparison, here's the original

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7G4DciALDs

> 13:30 it seems that, indeed, we have a much higher tolerance for
> flat/sharp error in melody than harmony.

Error from what?

> I get the feeling things like speed, length, and loudness of tones
> played in melodic vs. harmony parts come into play in forming a decision the
> mind makes if the melody/"implied scale" defines the chord/structure or the
> held harmony does.
> If you hold a note, for example, it may start as taking over as the
> "tonic"...but if you play a similarly loud or louder melody over it, notes
> in the melody may well take over, forming another tonic. So the last four
> to five notes in the melody your mind my try to assemble as a chord that
> "overrides" your original tonic. And playing a sixth tone may make one of
> the second to sixth tones in your melody the tonic, dropping the first tone,
> and so on (kind of like a "queue" of sorts). I'm guessing, what's left in
> the queue can then be compared to how close it is to a JI chord...one major
> question is how long a queue (note-wise) can the mind hold?

What's the supposedly fundamental JI minor chord that this is being compared to?

> I get the impression a good way to get to the bottom of some of this is
> to play enthusiastic monophonic melodies at fast but not blistering pace
> with fairly legate notes and note what you "guess" the underlying
> chords/feel should be...and then go back and play the exact same melodies
> with different notes and then full chords under those melodies trying to
> alter the emotional context. Try to track what does and does not override
> the melodic "queue" that makes your mind guess certain chords should be
> there and overwrites that "monophonic vision" with actual chords.

I'm not convinced that JI is at bottom at all.

-Mike

🔗RR <djtrancendance@...>

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 11:56 PM, RR <djtrancendance@...> wrote:
>
> > 13:30 it seems that, indeed, we have a much higher tolerance for
> > flat/sharp error in melody than harmony.
>
> Meaning a chord that sounds "off" (or very detuned) as a chord in
> harmony can be triggered more accurately in melody... That is when implied
> through a melody, it seems quite accurate, as if your mind plays a
> "Just"/un-detuned version of the chord to itself as a sort of
> backing/background.

Most of the stuff worked for me in harmony as well as melody. You
could hear times when I played chords as well in the piece too,
although I tried to focus more on melody for this.

What I do think does matter in terms of sounding "off" sometimes is
the intonation of the chord if you're using a sound with a harsh
timbre. For something like 16-EDO, that can easily activate a sort of
sensory dissonance, probably related to critical band roughness, that
you avoid by using a more chilled out timbre or by using a more
accurate tuning. This is why I still <3 regular temperament theory,
although I don't think "interval identities" are tied as much to
ratios as I used to.

What really does make things sound "off" no matter what is if I load
up a piano timbre and then then play stuff - and then it sounds off if
I play it melodically OR harmonically, and it sounds off even if I use
more accurate intonation. For some reason, piano just always sounds
off to me unless it's in 12. I'm not sure why.

> >>What's the supposedly fundamental JI minor chord that this is being
> >> compared to?
>
> I'm not comparing it to any specific chord. Just the idea that a stream
> of monophonic notes can strongly imply chords without playing them.
> For example, play the sequence D F A# A monophonically. I hear the
> chords D5 F5 A5 (first three notes) and A#4 F5 A5 (3 notes from one more
> note down the sequence of 4 notes) in my head even though they aren't being
> played, with the second chord only coming in when the A sounds.
> I'm simply wondering what triggers my mind to know when a chord/feel has
> changed in monophonic music...and what structures can overwrite the mind's
> melody->implied-backing-chord sense in music using full/played chords.

Oh yeah dude, absolutely! This is the "APS" thing that we were talking
about in IRC. It's very mysterious, I have no idea how it works, but
it seems to be pretty damn important. I'm still not quite sure how it
relates to ratios either.

> It may, indeed, not come down to JI, but the sense of forming chords in
> my mind from recently played sets of notes in a melody seems to strong to
> ignore.

Totally agree with this. You might check the wiki page on APS's - we
started documenting a bunch of random observations around this concept
and made some open questions. Feel free to note if there's anything in
there that seems off (e.g. you have a counterexample to one of the
questions), or if you have any additional observations. We have
absolutely nothing to guide us at all right now, so we have to start
from scratch!

-Mike

🔗lobawad <lobawad@...>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> I made a YouTube video demoing what I think are some differences
> between musical feelings coming from scales/melody and musical
> feelings coming from harmony
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoNHKx7GEI
>
> I'm curious if anyone understands how to explain what's going on. I'm
> pretty clueless as to what's really going on under the hood, but seems
> like scales are mighty important.
>
> Where's Cameron Bobro?
>
> -Mike
>

Oddly enough I just dropped in the other day for the first time in a long time.

The piece was obviously concieved of with major/minor thinking, and diatonic scale thinking.

(I would not be so sure it was concieved of entirely in 12-tET thinking- I would guess that an important reason why the very little jazz I truly enjoy comes from a handful of older musicians is they don't really think in 12-tET, Ornette Coleman being the prime example.)

So, I think that the piece functions to demonstrate that scalar function can overpower intonation to a great degree. However, I have been working so long outside of anything clearly major/minor that I recognize the major/minorness of your performance only "on paper", and after you explained how you hear the scale as minor, which I did not hear before. There is precious little that sounds major/minor to me, rather, I hear my usual kinds of interpretations, yellow flowers on drooping leaves, arm moves as if picking up a glass, and so on.

As far as functionality, I hear strong functional movement, and would be puzzled as to why others would not.

As far as tonality, I think I hear some different tonics than you do, judging by your comments and demonstration. But, my perceptions seem to differ from yours by fourths/fifths, so that's no big deal, it's easy to swap around dominant-subdominant-tonic in your head.

My ADDA died, but when I get a new one I'll try to do something in a similar scale, as I can get close enough with my battery of clarinet cross fingerings. I think it is necessary to also have a piece composed with the scale in mind as well as this transliteration of yours.

🔗Petr Parízek <petrparizek2000@...>

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> I made a YouTube video demoing what I think are some differences
> between musical feelings coming from scales/melody and musical
> feelings coming from harmony
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoNHKx7GEI

(These comments made before reading any of the comments on facebook. I will pop over there now and read / possibly respond to them.)

Excellent playing and excellent demonstrating! Did you do the percussion with your foot? Why'd you make the video unlisted?

The first scale you demo does sound 'minor'. I didn't necessarily hear the 3rd as smaller than expected, but the steps leading to it do sound smaller -- chromatic.

Aside: The Hungarian major tetrachord in 12 sounds 'minor', doesn't it?

When you played the "neutral" scale, it sounded minor. You later say "maybe your perception snaps" -- exactly what happenned to me.

Most of the resolutions came off for me, but the tritone sub didn't sound like a tritone sub at all to me.

When you talk about the 225-cent interval sounding like a 'happy' major second farther up in the scale, I agree. A long time ago I noticed that the 200-cent 2nd in a minor tetrachord in 12-ET sounds 'minor' whereas the 200-cent 2nd in the major tetrachord sounds 'major'. That is, when primed with the corresponding tetrachord, the 2nd alone sounds either major or minor. You get that too? (It's not Rothenberg-ambiguous)

I'd paused to write some of this down before hearing the 'inversion version' at 12:00. It didn't sound terribly minor for whatever reason.

I think the demo would have been more interesting if more than one timbre was exhibited.

That the consonance/dissonance distinction possibly involves scale theory, chord progressions, framing effects (musical context), cultural conditioning, etc etc is extremely widely acknowledged. It's clear there is also a "sensory" (purely psychoacoustic) aspect available to these percepts. This "sensory" aspect is the easiet to study. I also think it's a bit of a necessary condition. Sure, you can probably write a piece that makes 4:5:6 sound dissonant and resolve to a 10:12:15. Somebody could probably make a whole musical career / genre out of doing such things. But it'll never erase the distinction between concordant JI chords and a bunch of notes mashed together. Psychoacoustic consonance is far from the only building block of music, but it *is* a building block. Further, a scale that provides a lot of accurately-tuned JI chords is capable of almost as much dissonance as a scale that doesn't. The reverse isn't true.

I thought all of this was consensus and I'm not sure why you keep emphasizing it. If you agree to stop emphasizing it, I agree to take you more seriously. Ok, you do mention that others have been saying it. You only mention folks on the lists. Pretty much everyone in cognitive psychology and psychoacoustics and even trad. theory acknowledges it! You and I have talked about it dozens of times! As far back as 2008, I think I said it has little to do with intonation and requires very different techniques to study (I also expressed skepticism that it could ever be rigorously understood).

I would love to know who you are 'quoting' at 15:40 about 8/7 controling the perception of '2ndness'. I have never heard anyone make this argument!

You say your goal is to discover new musical feelings. I would suggest using a scale with a different rank-order-matrix than the diatonic scale, and preferably a different number of notes/octave. Primes larger than 5 can help too. But perhaps it will take a large body of music written in another system to really grow these gestalts. I don't know.

Again, interesting and impressive demo. Thanks for making it,

-Carl

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Carl Lumma <carl@...> wrote:
>
> (These comments made before reading any of the comments on facebook. I
> will pop over there now and read / possibly respond to them.)
>
> Excellent playing and excellent demonstrating! Did you do the percussion
> with your foot? Why'd you make the video unlisted?

Yeah, with my foot. I didn't expect it to come out as loud as it did.
I made it unlisted because it's not really a song - I only want songs
on my youtube channel. I'm gonna do some more videos like this that
don't have the 15 minute theory discussion, which I think people will
enjoy more. I'd also like to be more ambitious in the solo - the first
time I did this demo it was for Keenan on IRC, and I was doing a lot
more exotic sounding stuff, like going up a half step and playing out
of key temporarily and resolving back in (what jazz people call
playing "out", like Coltrane or whatever).

At one point I was exploring superimposing machine over the scale.
Keenan's reaction was that it sounded weird and out of key and
disorganized, so I thought I'd temper it down a bit. In fact, there
are a lot of people on XA who seem to hear the whole thing as
disorganized; they don't seem to hear the background structure in the
piece. I think what's going on is analogous to this

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kzaps4oGch1qbn1vmo1_500.jpg

The picture of James Bond on the left is of Pierce Brosnan holding a
gun; the shadow obscures his mouth. On the right, there's another way
to see this in which it looks like he has a very wide mouth - this is
another way of interpreting the picture you see. It's all ambiguous
and at every juncture you tend towards the "most likely
interpretation" of what's going on. Except in this case, some people
don't understand the background structure in this example at all, so
they just hear nonsense.

> The first scale you demo does sound 'minor'. I didn't necessarily hear the
> 3rd as smaller than expected, but the steps leading to it do sound smaller
> -- chromatic.
>
> Aside: The Hungarian major tetrachord in 12 sounds 'minor', doesn't it?

What's that, C Db E F?

> When you played the "neutral" scale, it sounded minor. You later say
> "maybe your perception snaps" -- exactly what happenned to me.

Some of these things worked for me on watching myself on video, others
didn't. Sometimes one thing would work again, whereas other things
which didn't work would then work. Do you hear it as neutral when I
hit the third at 2:52? I accidentally hit the 300 cent third, but I
liked it because I thought it sounded neutral, so I went up to the
neutral sixth as well. And I mean "neutral" in the sense that it
sounded like it was right in between scale degrees or something.

Also, I've played this scale now a lot, so I can follow it mentally in
a way that's removed some of the distortions that were present when I
was first learning it. Could be an instance of a ROM improving with
training or something.

> Most of the resolutions came off for me, but the tritone sub didn't sound
> like a tritone sub at all to me.

Do you hear a tritone in the melody at 1:14 for instance? It sounds
like it's going C-F#-F, Eb-F-Eb-C-Bb-G-C. Or in general, I try to do
some blues scale stuff.

> When you talk about the 225-cent interval sounding like a 'happy' major
> second farther up in the scale, I agree. A long time ago I noticed that the
> 200-cent 2nd in a minor tetrachord in 12-ET sounds 'minor' whereas the
> 200-cent 2nd in the major tetrachord sounds 'major'. That is, when primed
> with the corresponding tetrachord, the 2nd alone sounds either major or
> minor. You get that too? (It's not Rothenberg-ambiguous)

I hear the ambience of the third coloring the perception of the bare
second in general. The same happens with a bare fifth. However, I
don't hear the second sound "minor" in the same sense that the thing
above sounds like a minor third.

> I'd paused to write some of this down before hearing the 'inversion
> version' at 12:00. It didn't sound terribly minor for whatever reason.

Yeah, I messed that up on camera bad.

> I think the demo would have been more interesting if more than one timbre
> was exhibited.

I could do another one, but I definitely have no time now. I was using
a Washburn guitar sample which made it so I had to be more careful
with fifths and stuff, or else they could be a bit jarring (this
sensation goes away after getting used to it though).

It sounds like crap with piano - almost anything sounds like crap with
a piano timbre except for 12-EDO for me, no matter how accurate it is.

> That the consonance/dissonance distinction possibly involves scale theory,
> chord progressions, framing effects (musical context), cultural
> conditioning, etc etc is extremely widely acknowledged. It's clear there is
> also a "sensory" (purely psychoacoustic) aspect available to these percepts.
> This "sensory" aspect is the easiet to study. I also think it's a bit of a
> necessary condition. Sure, you can probably write a piece that makes 4:5:6
> sound dissonant and resolve to a 10:12:15. Somebody could probably make a
> whole musical career / genre out of doing such things. But it'll never erase
> the distinction between concordant JI chords and a bunch of notes mashed
> together. Psychoacoustic consonance is far from the only building block of
> music, but it *is* a building block. Further, a scale that provides a lot of
> accurately-tuned JI chords is capable of almost as much dissonance as a
> scale that doesn't. The reverse isn't true.

I agree that it's a building block, but I'm not convinced about the
thing you said about accurately tuned JI chords not allowing for as
much dissonance as the contrary. I think there's more than one type of
dissonance, and the sort that you're talking about here is a very
low-level sort of "sensory dissonance" that isn't so much related to
the fact that minor sounds sad and

> I thought all of this was consensus and I'm not sure why you keep
> emphasizing it. If you agree to stop emphasizing it, I agree to take you
> more seriously.

I couldn't honestly care less at this point how seriously you take me.
Maybe if you stop being a jerk, others will take YOU more seriously.
After reading this sentence I'm not going to bother replying to the
rest of your post.

-Mike

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 6:26 AM, lobawad <lobawad@...> wrote:
>
> The piece was obviously concieved of with major/minor thinking, and
> diatonic scale thinking.
>
> (I would not be so sure it was concieved of entirely in 12-tET thinking- I
> would guess that an important reason why the very little jazz I truly enjoy
> comes from a handful of older musicians is they don't really think in
> 12-tET, Ornette Coleman being the prime example.)

Well, it's conceived in Western thinking, whatever it is. The original
is Sonny Rollins here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7G4DciALDs

> So, I think that the piece functions to demonstrate that scalar function
> can overpower intonation to a great degree. However, I have been working so
> long outside of anything clearly major/minor that I recognize the
> major/minorness of your performance only "on paper", and after you explained
> how you hear the scale as minor, which I did not hear before. There is
> precious little that sounds major/minor to me, rather, I hear my usual kinds
> of interpretations, yellow flowers on drooping leaves, arm moves as if
> picking up a glass, and so on.

Doesn't surprise me.

> As far as functionality, I hear strong functional movement, and would be
> puzzled as to why others would not.

They don't seem to hear the background structure of what's going on, I guess.

Thanks for your comments!

-Mike

🔗Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>

🔗Carl Lumma <carl@...>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoNHKx7GEI

--- Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> Yeah, with my foot. I didn't expect it to come out as loud
> as it did.

Well, it sounded good.

> I made it unlisted because it's not really a song - I only
> want songs on my youtube channel.

Understandable. Maybe make a separate channel for
theory talks? I know you like the spontaneity of IRC,
but youtube is a fantastic platform and I'm just
thinking of all the exposure you (and microtonality)
could get.

> http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kzaps4oGch1qbn1vmo1_500.jpg
>
> The picture of James Bond on the left is of Pierce Brosnan
> holding a gun; the shadow obscures his mouth. On the right,
> there's another way to see this in which it looks like he has
> a very wide mouth - this is another way of interpreting the
> picture you see. It's all ambiguous and at every juncture
> you tend towards the "most likely interpretation" of what's
> going on.

Absolutely.

> Except in this case, some people don't understand
> the background structure in this example at all, so they
> just hear nonsense.

You mean the machine case?

> > Aside: The Hungarian major tetrachord in 12 sounds 'minor',
> > doesn't it?
>
> What's that, C Db E F?

Yep!

> Sometimes one thing would work again, whereas other things
> which didn't work would then work.

Yes, by no means do I intend my comments as some permanent
record of my innate perceptions or anything.

> Do you hear it as neutral when I hit the third at 2:52? I
> accidentally hit the 300 cent third, but I liked it because
> I thought it sounded neutral, so I went up to the neutral
> sixth as well. And I mean "neutral" in the sense that it
> sounded like it was right in between scale degrees or something.

I went back to listen to it. It's brief but it sounds more
neutral there, yep. You're coming down to it so I don't
get the tonic to compare just there.

> > Most of the resolutions came off for me, but the tritone
> > sub didn't sound like a tritone sub at all to me.
>
> Do you hear a tritone in the melody at 1:14 for instance?
> It sounds like it's going C-F#-F, Eb-F-Eb-C-Bb-G-C. Or in
> general, I try to do some blues scale stuff.

Nope.

> > That is, when primed
> > with the corresponding tetrachord, the 2nd alone sounds
> > either major or minor. You get that too? (It's not
> > Rothenberg-ambiguous)
>
> I hear the ambience of the third coloring the perception of
> the bare second in general. The same happens with a bare fifth.
> However, I don't hear the second sound "minor" in the same
> sense that the thing above sounds like a minor third.

Hm. I also get it in the bare fifth. To me I think it's
the same thing as the 225-cent interval here. The
Rothenberg ambiguity may help (I've sometimes suggested
ambiguous intervals might be portals for melodic modulation),
I'm not sure.

> > I think the demo would have been more interesting if more
> > than one timbre was exhibited.
>
> I could do another one, but I definitely have no time now.

Just a general comment.

> It sounds like crap with piano - almost anything sounds like
> crap with a piano timbre except for 12-EDO for me, no matter
> how accurate it is.

Really? I love me some JI piano. I hated it at first, but
that only lasted a month or something.

> Maybe if you stop being a jerk, others will take YOU more seriously.
> After reading this sentence I'm not going to bother replying to the
> rest of your post.

Very well then. I'm responding to your claims. When you
claim people are saying things they're not, even after they
say they aren't *you're* being a jerk. I am sorry if I
offended here though. I'm trying hard not to. I actually
thought you'd appreciate this part. :(

-Carl

🔗Billy <billygard@...>

I definitely enjoyed your video, particulary because I was able to understand some of the microeze terminology you used, such as sub-minor and super-major. When I try to talk to my friends about those things, all I get is "OOOOOOkay." or something to that effect.

I thought it interesting that your black keys are in groups of three and four, rather than two and three. Is it in 16-tet?

How did you come up with a keyboard like that? Is it a model that allows for removal and rearranging of keys so you can put them together in a different way, to form the three-four black-key pattern?

There is more in that video that I could have absorbed in one viewing so I have it marked for future watching.

Billy