Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Joe Monzo's "Prime Factor" notation

Hi Joe...

I read with interest (my first read... it will take a few more) your
exposition on-line of your "Prime Factor" notation:

http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/article/article.htm#intro

It's very interesting, and it is related to the prime factor method
of just notation that John Chalmers was trying to explain to me.

Upon first appraisal, though, it seems like a lot for a performer to
learn before they begin a piece. Wouldn't they look at you
"cross-eyed" or at least "cross...??"

Has this all been discussed on the list before?? What are the other
reactions, and, if it HAS been discussed, what are the message post
numbers??

Thanks!!!!!!
___________ ___ __ __ _
Joseph Pehrson

🔗Ed Borasky <znmeb@teleport.com>

Let me weigh in here. First, let's consider music which is meant to be
performed by the composer, or is entirely pre-recorded in some fashion, so
there is no performer as such. In that case, whatever works for the
composer/performer and for the computer or synthesizer is fine with me. Most
of my computer music, when I was writing it, fell into this category, and I
suspect most of what I produce for the next year or so will as well.
Whatever makes it faster and easier for me to go from inspiration to a
finished piece is fair game. Being a mathematician, I tend to prefer
traditional mathematical notation and I use the symbolic math engine Derive
rather heavily for such purposes. BTW, as I've noted to one list member, at
$250 for ordinary folk and $89 for students and faculty, Derive is a major
bargain and those of you who do a lot of math in your composition should
look into it, if you haven't already.

I should note that my past music was mostly "found music", specifically the
sounds produced by computers when they were performing real calculations,
modified using audio tape techniques borrowed from musique concrete. This
was in the early 1970s. My current plans are much more ambitious, given that
I have much more powerful tools to work with than a reel-to-reel
quarter-inch tape recorder and a discarded military missile tracking
computer of mainframe proportions. :-)

However, when you're writing ensemble music, or music for a performer other
than yourself, I think you owe it to the musicians to at least meet them
half way in their own land. That means *readable* conventional musical
notation wherever possible, and *explicit* and *accurate* instructions for
how to produce the sounds you want in cases where conventional notation
fails. So many pieces are performed exactly once and disappear forever
simply because, however great they may sound, they are difficult or
impossible to play without the composer present.

In the case of just intonation, at least for scales involving the
conventional note names A - G plus arbitrary flats and sharps, we already
have the conventional notation to describe what notes are to be played at
what time, for what duration and at what volume. The only parameter we wish
to change is the *frequency* associated with these notes. The task of making
this notation work thus falls to the musical instrument maker in the case of
new instruments and to the performer in the case of the human voice and
conventional instruments.

Once we move into the territory of 19-tone, 43-tone or other scales, though,
there is no common notation, and here, in my opinion, the composer and
musical instrument maker have the obligation to put as much effort into
playability as they put into getting the desired sounds. We are fortunate
indeed to have modern GUI technology, fast computers capable of rendering
arbitrary sounds reproducibly to the nearest 96,000th of a second, signal
processing algorithms of great power and other nifty tools at our disposal.
There really isn't an excuse for a composer to ignore playability any more,
since there is no need to sacrifice anywhere else to achieve it.
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
znmeb@teleport.com
http://www.borasky-research.com/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Pehrson [mailto:josephpehrson@compuserve.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 11:44 AM
> To: tuning@egroups.com
> Subject: [tuning] Joe Monzo's "Prime Factor" notation
>
> Hi Joe...
>
> I read with interest (my first read... it will take a few more) your
> exposition on-line of your "Prime Factor" notation:
>
> http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/article/article.htm#intro
>
> It's very interesting, and it is related to the prime factor method
> of just notation that John Chalmers was trying to explain to me.
>
> Upon first appraisal, though, it seems like a lot for a performer to
> learn before they begin a piece. Wouldn't they look at you
> "cross-eyed" or at least "cross...??"
>
> Has this all been discussed on the list before?? What are the other
> reactions, and, if it HAS been discussed, what are the message post
> numbers??
>
> Thanks!!!!!!
> ___________ ___ __ __ _
> Joseph Pehrson

🔗Joseph Pehrson <josephpehrson@compuserve.com>

--- In tuning@egroups.com, "Ed Borasky" <znmeb@t...> wrote:

http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/12309

>
> I should note that my past music was mostly "found music",
specifically the
> sounds produced by computers when they were performing real
calculations,

This is intriguing. I wish you could put some samples of this up on
John Starrett's Tuning Punks site, or on some other Internet site, if
it's not already.

Now here is also a possible solution for Paul Erlich's "number
crunching" tuning exercises. Maybe the computer is ALREADY "making
music" and we don't realize it! :) :)

_____________ ____ __ __
Joseph Pehrson

🔗Ed Borasky <znmeb@teleport.com>

If I can find the tapes and a quarter-inch reel-to-reel recorder, I will put
the pieces up somewhere on the web. The piece in question was actually
composed of more than just "found music", in that some of the sounds were
captured during the idle loops while tapes were rewinding, and these were
actually deliberately coded to make the musical sounds that they did. Other
sounds in the piece were captured with an AM radio in the vicinity of a card
reader.

For those of you who are interested in this type of music, it's a little
more difficult to do these days than it was for a number of reasons. First,
they don't tie speakers to the high-order bits of registers any more.
Second, computers are so fast these days and emit so little RF compared to
their dinosaur ancestors that it is difficult to get audio frequency signals
from them. The most interesting sound I've heard recently from a working
computer was the sounds made by an extremely slow off-board floppy disk
drive attached to an HP-100LX palmtop PC. Sadly, those two machines are no
longer among the living. Perhaps my new Sony Spressa CD-RW is slow enough to
make some interesting music on its own, in addition to capturing the output
of my synthesis efforts. :-)

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
znmeb@teleport.com
http://www.borasky-research.com/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Pehrson [mailto:josephpehrson@compuserve.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 5:48 PM
> To: tuning@egroups.com
> Subject: [tuning] but the computer WAS making music!
>
>
>
> --- In tuning@egroups.com, "Ed Borasky" <znmeb@t...> wrote:
>
> http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/12309
>
> >
> > I should note that my past music was mostly "found music",
> specifically the
> > sounds produced by computers when they were performing real
> calculations,
>
> This is intriguing. I wish you could put some samples of this up on
> John Starrett's Tuning Punks site, or on some other Internet site, if
> it's not already.
>
> Now here is also a possible solution for Paul Erlich's "number
> crunching" tuning exercises. Maybe the computer is ALREADY "making
> music" and we don't realize it! :) :)
>
> _____________ ____ __ __
> Joseph Pehrson
>
>
>
>
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🔗Joseph Pehrson <josephpehrson@compuserve.com>

🔗Monz <MONZ@JUNO.COM>

> [Joseph Pehrson]
> http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/12306
>
> Hi Joe...
>
> I read with interest (my first read... it will take a few more)
> your exposition on-line of your "Prime Factor" notation:
>
> http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/article/article.htm#intro
>
> It's very interesting, and it is related to the prime factor method
> of just notation that John Chalmers was trying to explain to me.

Thanks for the compliments, Joe.

> Upon first appraisal, though, it seems like a lot for a performer
> to learn before they begin a piece. Wouldn't they look at you
> "cross-eyed" or at least "cross...??"

Probably. As I said yesterday, I've been creating my music
entirely on the computer since I developed this notation, so
I really can't offer any 'practical' data myself.

The entire reason I decided to go with prime-factor is that
it correlates regular staff-notation, with which I would assume
any decent performer is already familiar, with a familiarity
of the lattice relationships of the pitches.

And - the main impetus for inventing it in the first place - it
specifies the same relationships as ratios, without all the big
numbers that you get when you expand from a simple JI set of
pitches into the complex kinds of rational tunings I like to study
and use.

So understanding the lattice is almost definitely a prerequisite
for being able to use prime-factor notation with ease; I say
'almost', because there *are* some folks out there who are
comfortable just reading numbers... not me - I always prefer to
graph the data.

> Has this all been discussed on the list before?? What are the
> other reactions, and, if it HAS been discussed, what are the
> message post numbers??

AFAIK, there hasn't really been any thorough discussion of this
on the List. Graham Breed stands out in my mind as someone who
uses prime-factor notation all the time; he simply presents
the numbers as they would appear in matrix tables, without the
musical staff-notation. See his website for numerous examples.

I certainly didn't originate the idea - altho I *thought* I did
at the time (around 1993). From what I can tell, Fokker was the
first music-theorist to really make use of prime-factor notation,
and the idea stems back to Euler. See my Euler webpage:

http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/euler/euler-en.htm

To tie together all my ideas about this notation, take a look
at the following definitions from my Dictionary

http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/prime.htm
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/factor.htm
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/finity.htm
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/lattice.htm
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/affect.htm
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/period.htm
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/sonance.htm
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/dict/euler.htm

Incidentally, you[ve mentioned Mandelbaum several times the last
few days. His thesis has a lot of info on the development of
this idea; had I been familiar with it earlier I could have
saved myself a lot of work 'reinventing the wheel'.

Hope that helps.

-monz
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html