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Artifical Intelligent Microtones.

🔗Sarn Richard Ursell <thcdelta@pop.ihug.co.nz>

1/26/1999 11:06:01 PM

Reply to {Sarn Ursell}:

Anything that can be written in standard notation can also be played in 19,
31, or 43 notes per octave if it doesn't rely on enharmonic equivalents
that are characteristic of 12-tet (D#=Eb, for instance). These tunings
correspond roughly to 1/3-comma, 1/4-comma, and 1/5-comma meantone.

Some 12-tet music can be translated to just intonation, but there are often
many possible JI equivalents of a note (e.g., D=9/8 or 10/9, Bb=9/5 or
16/9), and choosing the wrong one may sound very bad (the "wolf fifth"
between 9/8 and 5/3 is 40/27, which is 21.5 cents flat compared with 3/2).
Besides, I think it's more interesting to take advantage of intervals like
7/6 and 11/9 which aren't part of the normal 12-tone vocabulary.

Based on my experiments with 15-tet, 16-tet, and 20-tet, if you want to
use>some of the more exotic scales like these you'll probably want to develop a
separate music theory for each different non-12 scale. There may be
similarities between some scales. The 16 and 23 note scales both contain
"pseudo-diatonic" scales of 5 small steps and 2 large steps, for instance.
Both also have very flat fifths, close to the 40/27 "wolf fifth". So you
could probably use similar rules for both scales, although there would be
subtle differences. 23-equal doesn't have a very good approximation to 7/4,
but 16-equal does.