Re: Music notation software for music with quarter-tones, esp. Turkish music?

At 13:57 8/11/99 -0500, you wrote:
>From: "William S. Annis" <wsannis@execpc.com>
>
>
> >From: Can Akkoc <akkoc@asms.net>
> >
> >> And a shot into the void of this wonderful mailing-list: has
> >>anyone used Sethares's "timbral tuning" with Arab or Turkish maqamat
> >>(or Persian dastgah)? I can't see complex harmonies working well in,
> >>say, maqam saba` -- I don't have a very robust tolerance for
> >>dissonance -- but an adjusted timbre might result in some interesting
> >>experiments: Palestrina meets Simon Shaheen.
> >>
> >>--
> >>William S. Annis wsannis@execpc.com
> >
> >
> >Dear Mr. Annis,
> >
> >In my humble judgement, per my research based on direct measurements made
> >on performances by master musicians, the so called 'scales' in Turkish
music
> >are NOT deterministic/fixed sequences, as in western music.
>
> I agree that a given performer is going to inflect the pitches
>of a given maqam during performance... just as a modern western
>violinist does, for expression.

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We are talking 'inflections' in the order of quarter tones sometimes.
Such deviations go beyond 'expressions' or 'coloring' and become an
integral part of a non-deterministic underlying scale with extremely
intricate structures.

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> >Instead, they
> >are distributions or 'smears' along the pitch axis, where a certain 'note'
> >on the scale associated with the underlying maqam may present itself in a
> >multitude of pitches depending upon where the music is 'coming from' within
> >the past few sounds.
>
> Agreed. Also, a given note, such as saba, is going to occupy
>a different region depending on the maqam in which it appears. This
>is certainly true in Arabic music. This presents a notational
>nightmare of course, because what gets notated as E-quarter-flat in
>maqam rast may be different than the E-quarter-flat in maqam bayati.

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You hit it right on the head. "Region" is the key word here. I presume
you are referring to what I call 'distributions' or 'smears' in my post.
However, what I am beginning to observe is that a given 'note', say
E-quarter-flat, with a certain name "$%^&" varies in pitch not only from
one maqam to another, but within the course of an improvisation in the
same maqam. This is why I am suggesting smears on the pitch axis as
opposed to discrete points, as on fretted or keyboard instruments. The
mystery is getting deeper and more fascinating in my investigations.

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>
> >Therefore, I do not believe a fixed tuning, no matter
> >how intricate, is the answer for Turkish music and possibly other musics.
> >The concept of 'tuning' has to be viewed in a revolutionary manner with a
> >fluid and dynamic structure.
>
> It has been argued that fixed tuning/notation isn't so great
>for recording western music, either. Certainly folk musicians of
>various sorts complain about notational limitations. But Sibelius is
>still going to be a great tool, so long as you have the space to make
>a note someplace that the note saba is the 4-comma version, instead of
>the 5-comma version in the piece you're working on. (I keep abusing
>the note saba, and the maqam... I could be wrong on precise details,
>but I believe I'm making my point clear.)

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For Turkish music what is needed is a software that can 'think' for
making decisions in selecting the right pitch for a given note with
a given name at a given moment during the course of the 'seyir' used
by the performing musician. The software needs to have 'memory' for
processing the sounds the music has visited before getting to 'that'
note in order to determine the correct pitch at 'that' note. If you
know of such software, please let me know.

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> Does your research involve investigations into seyir? I've
>always found that a fascinating approach to structuring melody and
>improvisation, but there's so little material about it in English.
>

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You hit it right on the head again, Thank you. We must be in tune
on the structures of Turkish music. The issue of 'seyir', roughly
the 'sequential order of sounds used during the course of an
improvisation', is taking up just about all my time right now. I
do not know of any mathematical model, or something close to it,
published in English or in Turkish. Currently I am grappling with
this fascinating problem with the hope of constructing a plausible
mathematical characterization that will sort out uncountably many
admissible paths from another set of uncountably in-admissble paths
for each of the 120+ maqams in Turkish music. The kind of mathematic
needed for such characterization may yet be non-existent!

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> Hmm... it just occured to me: an investigation the seyir
>phenomenon wrt to Sethares's research might be interesting, too, but I
>need to think about that some more...
>
>--
>William S. Annis wsannis@execpc.com
>Mi parolas Esperanton - La Internacia Lingvo www.esperanto.org

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Professor Sethares, if you are watching this dialogue, I would be
very much interested in hearing your response. Please come in!

Dr. Can Akkoc
Alabama School of Mathematics and Science
1255 Dauphin Street
Mobile, AL 36604
USA

Phone: (334) 441-2126
Fax: (334) 441-3290
Web: http://199.20.31.100/GIFT/