a suggested early winter microtonal listen

For anyone who might be interested, here's a suggested microtonal
listen for this crisp, early winter Thursday in November...

A good Barbershop Quartet will tend to sing the melody pretty much as
it is on the piano while simultaneously adjusting the accompaniment so
as to always optimize the intuneness of the vertical sonorities. John
deLaubenfels has spent years fine tuning his own software program that
allows for a similar practical adaptive tuning solution for the often
conflicting demands of vertical and horizontal intonation. While John
usually applies his retuning program to single-voice, general MIDI
files from the classical cannon, this short piece of his own, "Dance
Bittersweet", is my personal favorite of his work.

<http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/373/373474.html>

Much like the Hindemith of the late 1920's, Joseph Pehrson is an
extremely prolific, "practical" composer... give him an instrument or
an ensemble, any instrument or ensemble, and he'll give you a piece.
This piece was premiered just this last weekend at the American
festival of microtonal music's annual all day Microthon event. The
guitarist for the premiere and this recording of Pehrson's "Just In
Time" is Wim Hoogewerf, and the tuning is a curious subharmonic tuning
of Wim's own design that was inspired by a bit in Hermann Helmholtz'
classic "On the Sensations of Tone".

<http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/1049/1049481.html>

In a recent post Neil Haverstick wrote, "I have always been somewhat
puzzled why McLaughlin, with his intense interest in Indian music,
never broke away from 12 eq". I think the answer is probably something
simple, say 'some do, some don't'... while I do believe that more and
more will, most simply won't due to the inertia of convenience.

FUN SIZE guitarist Mike Watson is a very McLaughlin inspired
guitarist, and as such he also has some of the same types of interests
in world music. Unlike McLaughlin however, Mike was driven to the
fretless guitar in an attempt to better cop some of the characteristic
nuances of the various world musics he became interested in...

<http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/234/234737.html>
<http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/592/592334.html>

check 'em out!,
--Dan Stearns

Dan Stearns wrote,

>FUN SIZE guitarist Mike Watson is a very McLaughlin inspired
>guitarist, and as such he also has some of the same types of interests
>in world music. Unlike McLaughlin however, Mike was driven to the
>fretless guitar in an attempt to better cop some of the characteristic
>nuances of the various world musics he became interested in...

><http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/234/234737.html>
><http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/592/592334.html>

How does he get the flute timbre out of his guitar???

Paul H. Erlich wrote,

> How does he get the flute timbre out of his guitar???

Yeah, the e-bow and the fretless guitar really are a match made in
heaven! It's just such a great singing woody timbre... you can really
hear this at the end of the first piece and especially the second
piece, a tribute to Djivan Gasparyan, where he's coping the sound of
the duduk...

--Dan Stearns

> How does he get the flute timbre out of his guitar???

I don't know how *he* does it but a flute is one of the easier instruments
to synthesize by any number of means. What I'd like to do is get a guitar
timbre out of a flute :-).
--
M. Edward Borasky
mailto:znmeb@teleport.com
http://www.borasky-research.com

Cold leftover pizza: it's not just for breakfast any more!

Edward Borasky wrote,

> What I'd like to do is get a guitar timbre out of a flute

Well if you mean an acoustic guitar, good luck! But an electric,
that's a whole other can of cheap stomp boxes...

About ten years ago a friend said he had a tape of this band I had to
hear. It turned out to be an awesome power trio in a kind of more
modern sounding Hendrix mode. At first I kept wondering how the hell
the guitar player got all these insanely cool feedback clouds and
really atypical lines... well, as you've probably guessed by now, the
guitar player wasn't a guitar player but a flute player. As soon as he
said this I of course started to notice the microphonic feedback and
some other little telltale sighs, but boy oh boy, it sure was an
awesome guitar sound anyway! Unfortunately, I've forgotten her name
(the flute player), and the bands name as well... any of this ring any
bells with any (Boston area) folks out there?

--Dan Stearns

>> How does he get the flute timbre out of his guitar???
>
>I don't know how *he* does it but a flute is one of the easier instruments
>to synthesize by any number of means. What I'd like to do is get a guitar
>timbre out of a flute :-).

I was just thinking about this the other day. It seems to me, the main
thing that gives plucked string timbres their identity is the attack.
Sounds like a cop-out maybe, since attack has been shown important for
all timbres. Maybe it _is_ that simple -- the instruments which have
succumb to synthesis so far all have simple attacks.

Anywho, Edward-- I want to put in a request for you to keep us abreast of
all mpeg4 news. Stuff is surely the way of the future.

-Carl

on 11/16/00 1:40 PM, D.Stearns at STEARNS@CAPECOD.NET wrote:

> For anyone who might be interested, here's a suggested microtonal
> listen for this crisp, early winter Thursday in November...

> FUN SIZE guitarist Mike Watson is a very McLaughlin inspired
> guitarist, and as such he also has some of the same types of interests
> in world music. Unlike McLaughlin however, Mike was driven to the
> fretless guitar in an attempt to better cop some of the characteristic
> nuances of the various world musics he became interested in...
>
> <http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/234/234737.html>
> <http://artists.mp3s.com/artist_song/592/592334.html>
>
>

Great stuff, thanks for posting this. I've got recordings of Armenian duduk
player Djavan, etc, he's really got the sound down. eBows are surely a
wonderful thing. I've gotten great results with them on my acoustic
resonator, also it makes a wonderfully erie sound on the fretless banjo.

Seth

--
Seth Austen
please visit me on the web at http://www.sethausten.com
email; seth@sethausten.com

Download a song (mp3) at www.mp3.com/sethausten

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000, Carl Lumma wrote:

> I was just thinking about this the other day. It seems to me, the main
> thing that gives plucked string timbres their identity is the attack.
> Sounds like a cop-out maybe, since attack has been shown important for
> all timbres. Maybe it _is_ that simple -- the instruments which have
> succumb to synthesis so far all have simple attacks.

Yeah, classic psychoacoustics is to take two instruments, say a guitar and
a clarinet, and switch the envelopes while retaining the waveforms. As for
instruments succumbing to synthesis, I'll go out on a limb here and say
they've basically all succumbed, depending on how much compute power one
has available. Mathematician Mark Kac made a film decades ago called "Can
You Hear The Shape of a Drum?" which is about the mathematics of vibrating
bodies. The equations are known and relatively easy to solve numerically,
although requiring gigaflop power in some cases for a real-time result.

> Anywho, Edward-- I want to put in a request for you to keep us abreast of
> all mpeg4 news. Stuff is surely the way of the future.

A good place to start is http://www.saol.net. They have pointers to some
of the leaders in the MPEG-4 SA community. When I get my microtonal stuff
coded I will have it on my web site and I will ask them to link to it.

--
znmeb@teleport.com (M. Edward Borasky) http://www.teleport.com/~znmeb

Need a new trombone? Buy now -- don't let it slide.

Seth Austen wrote,

> eBows are surely a wonderful thing. I've gotten great results with
them on my acoustic resonator, also it makes a wonderfully erie sound
on the fretless banjo.

Yeah, Sounds cool... I had a monster banjo player, Glenn Nelson, in my
band PRIVATEWORLD for a while, and he played an electric banjo with a
whammy bar as well as a fretless banjo! One of the most beautiful
e-bow sounds I've ever heard is Jacques Dudon's aquavina playing on
his piece "Naiades".

--Dan Stearns

I saw Bela Fleck and the Flecktones on Wednesday and they had guest bassoonist Paul
Hanson playing some incredible "guitar solos". Who is this guy -- he was awesome! He would
have stolen the show but another guest was Tuvan musician/singer Kungarol, bringing overtone
singing and throat singing to a new audience . . .

. . . I've never heard a synthesized flute sound as alive and organic as that guitar flute-emulation .
. . thanks again, Dan . . .

>Yeah, classic psychoacoustics is to take two instruments, say a guitar and
>a clarinet, and switch the envelopes while retaining the waveforms.

Sure. An early one reversed the envelope of a piano (on tape) and had it
sounding like an organ.

>As for instruments succumbing to synthesis, I'll go out on a limb here
>and say they've basically all succumbed, depending on how much compute
>power one has available.

Sure, they've all succumb in theory. But I've never heard music made
with a convincing synthetic piano timbre, for example. Even on a
recording, when both must be fed through a speaker -- and the technology
doesn't exist to reproduce the sound of a box of strings in a convincing
way, does it?

And piano is relatively easy. Try cello. The timbre itself may not
be any harder than piano, but the controller technology is a real
challenger, I think.

I hope readers will not take this as a negetive comment... I'm all for
better synths, and I agree they're possible. Let's make some!

>A good place to start is http://www.saol.net. They have pointers to some
>of the leaders in the MPEG-4 SA community. When I get my microtonal stuff
>coded I will have it on my web site and I will ask them to link to it.

Awesome!

-C.