Introductory Post:

I'll try and give some background on my particular musical
experiences and
how they've led me to the particular discoveries that I've managed to
stumble on.

I'm 57 years old, first off. My first musical memories are of my
mother
playing piano in our home. The only things I remember her playing were
Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and Richard Rogers' Slaughter On Tenth
Avenue.

My first big AHA! experience musically was when I heard the Harry
James pop trumpet single Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White in the
mid 1950s. That motivated me to take trumpet lessons for a year to
learn that particular song, but as soon as I accomplished that, I
dropped it. Brass instruments are still my favorite timbre, as my
MIDI files show! :)

My next musical love was the Beach Boys. Then in 1967 I discovered
Frank
Zappa, and through him the classical avante-garde. So my period of
greatest record-collecting and listening occured between 1964 and
1970, and was primarily progressive rock.

I got the film directing bug in 1973 and was involved in that until I
got
disillusioned with it in 1986 or so, and got access to a Macintosh
desktop
compositional setup (Studio Session 6-track/voice composition
software) at Pima Community College West Campus in Tucson, AZ.

So I suddenly had access to compositional facilities, but had no
conceptual background with which to know where to start, so I studied
all of the music theory that I could get my hands on at the
University of AZ Music Library.

For some reason I had an affinity for the writings of Pierre Boulez,
so I was drawn to serialism and the 12-tone technique, but was
disappointed in the results I got using it. So I tried 11 intervals,
8-tones and various scales, but I didn't get anywhere until I read
Allen Forte's Structure of Atonal Music.

I should point out that I have a mechanical engineering and drafting
background and cannot sight-read conventional music notation, so the
abstract approach of Forte didn't bother me that much, and in fact
struck me as more objective than the other people I had been reading.

The most important concept of Forte's was the interval class, and I
immediately decided to use only the six smaller forms of the interval
classes (1,2,3,4,5,6 semitones). I knew there were 720 possible
orderings of those (plus 720 inversions), so I thought that was a
manageable volume of melodies to deal with and I wanted to hear those
720 orderings.

Unfortunately, there are also 64 possible contour orderings for each
of those 720 interval orderings, so I knew I had to try and find a
standard contour ordering so I could objectively compare the
melodies. That's when I played around with orderings until I
discovered my fractal contour choice ordering mini-algorithm.

I later realized that my mini-algorithm could also be used to
design/create alternative tuning systems, so that's why I'm here on
the tuning list.

Bill Flavell