New MIDI samples

I added to my web page a new MIDI arrangement of a melody I composed for
"The Starling's Song", a poem originally by Irina Rempt and translated into
my language Jarrda as part of a "translation relay" I was involved in on
another mailing list that I'm on (the conlang list). I've included examples
of different scales for comparison: Paul Erlich's decatonic scale (22-TET),
1/4-comma meantone, just intonation, and the scale I described a few days
ago, built from 388-cent major thirds and 312-cent minor thirds. I'm
tentatively calling it the "starling scale" after this song. I used Graham
Breed's useful Midiconv utility to add the pitch bends to the MIDI files.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/music/marrgarrel.html

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Herman Miller wrote,

>I added to my web page a new MIDI arrangement of a melody I composed for
>"The Starling's Song", a poem originally by Irina Rempt and translated into
>my language Jarrda as part of a "translation relay" I was involved in on
>another mailing list that I'm on (the conlang list). I've included examples
>of different scales for comparison: Paul Erlich's decatonic scale (22-TET),

Sounds lovely. Let me give you my impressions of how the melody itself works
in the various tunings. The scale you used is really a 7-tone one, which is
commonly known as Alhijaz or the fifth mode of harmonic minor. In 22-tET
it's 0 2 7 9 13 15 18 (22) (which happens to be a decatonic subset but
you're not really using the decatonic scale here). One of the really awkward
things about diatonic melodies in 22-tET is the succession of 3/22-oct. and
4/22-oct. "whole steps". Your main melody scrupulously avoids the 3/22-oct.
step (and features the 4/22-oct. step in three places) by using scale degree
7 only in the lower octave and scale degree 6 in the upper octave.
Similarly, your meantone rendition of the scale, C C# E E# G G# A#, avoids
the major second interval in the melody in favor of the three diminished
thirds. Brilliant! I prefer the latter tuning because the E-G# interval is a
nice pure major third, while in the 22-tET scale it's a full degree sharp.
Less of a factor is that scale degree 4 sounds a little flat in the meantone
version but not in the 22-tET version.

The JI version is just like the meantone version, melodically speaking, and
the "starling scale" seems to capture the best melodic and harmonic aspects
of all the other tunings for your piece. Nice work!