Subject: How do microtonal people hear?

In the case of Partch's music, I have sometimes asked people who have found it out-of-tune to define a bit more what exactly it is that they find out-of-tune. Almost inevitable, they point to moments in the music when Partch is in fact out-of-tune, whether by choice (i.e the score calls for vertical combinations that are not simple diamond-diagonal consonances; Partch was very fond of what he called "inharmonic" tones and once percussion was added, his choice of pitches in practice became extremely free) or by circumstance (either the performance was bad or the recording was less than optimal).

About the negative response to 7-limit music -- do you have any sense of whether the response was due to the quality of the chords themselves, their sonance, or to their strangeness in terms of harmonic functions? Since a distinguishing quality of American vernacular musics is the use of 7th chords as consonances (available on any degree, all the time, no need to resolve) I suspect that it would be the former, but that's just a guess, and perhaps there are alternative explanations.

DJW

> From: "Gene Ward Smith" <gwsmith@svpal.org>
> Subject: How do microtonal people hear?
> > I'm wondering if there is something funny about the way most of us
> hear, which causes us to be able to listen to Harry Partch for the
> first time and immediately think it sounds cool. The reason I'm
> pondering that is that I've accumulated a lot of evidence that 7-limit
> just or near just intonation sounds out of tune to most people. Even
> if you stick to pure, > well-intonated tetrads, the adjectives you get are things like
> "horribly out of tune" and "extremely cacophonic". However, I am
> interested in this kind of music in good measure because it *doesn't*
> sound out of tune to me. >

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Wolf <djwolf@s...> wrote:

> About the negative response to 7-limit music -- do you have any
sense of
> whether the response was due to the quality of the chords themselves,
> their sonance, or to their strangeness in terms of harmonic functions?

That's a good question. The sonance, taken in isolation, should not it
seems to me produce such a pronounces reaction. If the same chords
appeared barbershop-style by way of adaptive JI on a basically 5-limit
meantone substrate, I suspect the reaction would be different. My
approach to 7-limit harmony is full-bore--I may use 11 or higher as
flavoring, but when in the 7-limit I tend to use a lot of natively
7-limit relationships. One piece, Choraled, has a lot of V/I movement,
but even so the reaction is exactly the same. It's possible that if
that is *all* there was, it would be different.

> Since a distinguishing quality of American vernacular musics is the use
> of 7th chords as consonances (available on any degree, all the time, no
> need to resolve) I suspect that it would be the former, but that's just
> a guess, and perhaps there are alternative explanations.

Yes, that's exactly why I found it so surprising and notable that the
reaction to tuning those 7th chords as otonal or utonal chords is so
extremely negative.
> DJW
>
>
> > From: "Gene Ward Smith" <gwsmith@s...>
> > Subject: How do microtonal people hear?
> >
> > I'm wondering if there is something funny about the way most of us
> > hear, which causes us to be able to listen to Harry Partch for the
> > first time and immediately think it sounds cool. The reason I'm
> > pondering that is that I've accumulated a lot of evidence that 7-limit
> > just or near just intonation sounds out of tune to most people. Even
> > if you stick to pure,
> > well-intonated tetrads, the adjectives you get are things like
> > "horribly out of tune" and "extremely cacophonic". However, I am
> > interested in this kind of music in good measure because it *doesn't*
> > sound out of tune to me.
> >
>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Wolf <djwolf@s...> wrote:

> About the negative response to 7-limit music -- do you
> have any sense of whether the response was due to the
> quality of the chords themselves, their sonance, or to
> their strangeness in terms of harmonic functions?
> Since a distinguishing quality of American vernacular
> musics is the use of 7th chords as consonances
> (available on any degree, all the time, no need
> to resolve) I suspect that it would be the former,
> but that's just a guess, and perhaps there are
> alternative explanations.

My own experience with this has to do with an
experiment i did many years ago, in which i made
a MIDI-file of the first section of Erik Satie's
_Sarabande No. 1_ in many different tunings.

This is the first piece i know of which makes
free use of unprepared and unresolved major-7th
and dominant-9th chords -- and its tonal center
keeps shifting ... the opening phrase modulates
from Ab to Bbb:

Abmaj7 Db9 | Gb9 Dbm7 | Cbmaj7 / Bbbmaj7 | Gb9 |

Db9 Gb7 Bbb9 | Ebbmaj7 | Bbb9 Fbmin7 Bbb9 Fbmin7 | Bbb |

On paper i worked out common-chord progressions
with various rational tunings, some in 5-limit
and some in 7-limit. I thought 7-limit tunings
would sound good because of all the juicy extended
chords in this piece -- but i was wrong.

As static entities, the chords in the 7-limit versions
*did* sound really good, but the weird septimal
melodic shifts really did make it seem out-of-tune,
giving me a queasy feeling when i listened to them.

If i can find a spare minute (unlikely), i'll hunt
these down and make a webpage about it. Actually,
what would make sense is to redo them as Tonescape
files, since the Lattice will make it very easy to
see exactly what's causing the queasy feeling.

-monz
http://tonalsoft.com
Tonescape microtonal music software