A compositional technique

I'm going to elaborate a bit on the thing that I posted as a reply to
Keenan. Let's even just say that we're sticking to rank-2.

1) Pick the temperament of your choice.
2) Pick a reasonably-sized diatonic-sized MOS to use.
3) Pick a reasonably-sized chromatic-sized MOS to use.
4) Play whatever harmony you want, dynamically changing to different
modes and MODMOS's of #2 to accommodate the harmony you want.
5) (MOST IMPORTANT) Play whatever harmony you want, dynamically
changing to different modes and MODMOS's of #3 that you use to
accommodate what you want to do.

What I really like is the effect of #3 combined with #5. This is
because I really just crave the sound of there being clearly defined
regions of interval space that I know can do different musical things
(like sound like 3/2, or whatever). I don't really care if you shift
notes by comma or diesis within those regions for different chords, I
just like to know what those regions are.

For me, if I ever hear a composition that subverts the above process,
I feel disoriented, like I'm listening to a "microtonal" piece. So if
you're just playing what to my ears sound like random otonal chords
that are running amok all over the place, I still might like the
sound, but there's some layer of musical enjoyment that's lost for me.
But if you're playing in porcupine in 22-EDO, for instance, but you
take reasonable care to always emphasize some quasi-equal 15-note set
- even if you sometimes shift notes around in those regions to
accommodate the harmony you want - I can actually hear a very clear
sense of background "scale" at that point, so I'm much happier.

I don't even know if this applies to anyone other than me*, but it
definitely applies to me. My hypothesis is that it's because I'm
basically an idiot, and I need clever cognitive strategies so that my
feeble brain can actually comprehend what's going on at all. Kind of
like how I'm not actually smart enough to imagine 1,234,567 things,
but I have a decent grasp of the number 1,234,567 because its Arabic
numeral representation is easy enough to figure out. I dunno if this
would lead to some holy grail of interval "functions" or "xentonality"
or whatever, but I do think it would be nice to experiment with music
that has a clearly defined set of "notes" as a first pass, even if
they wiggle around a little bit!

Anyway, just a suggestion for the people who are inspired and
composing these days, aka not me right now.

-Mike

*This is a lie

PS: I'm specifically looking forward to experiencing what it's like to
do the above with porcupine[15], or some 15-note Fokker block. It
would be awesome to have 15 separate regions of interval space that I
all know can do these very clearly defined psychoacoustic things,
sometimes requiring some shifts in intonation. My instinctive vision
of it is that it'd be like a more enlightened way of understanding how
your auditory system works, or something.