My version of 'Standing Stone' WAS Clock Pitch notation

Hi Monz,

I'd thought of that myself once, but dismissed when I considered the clock-face notion. My idea was to record certain incidents during the day (telescoping 24 hrs into 12, by ignoring the AM/PM business, and to see what intervals musically would result by measuring them on my clock-face tuning notation.

This was an early idea from my early interest in microtones, about 1989 perhaps, could have been earlier.

I had the daft idea that you could use times or angles as a way of writing music into the landscape using standing stones, by aligning groups of stones so that sets of angles would produce chords, and that if certain alignments were read at certain times of the day (each stone would carry a gnomon) actual real chords would result.

The idea was to place sets of stones of a certain type in strategic locations around a region of a country, and the angles and alignments would form the composition, or at least the 'performer' would read the stones and arrive at interval relationships between groups of stones (a triangle has three angles that add up to 180 degrees, which would mean all the intervals of any triangle would correspond to 600 cents in total if added one to the other), or four stones etc, and it would be the performer's job to render them in pitch by reading them at certain times of the day to obtain a chord or chords from which a 'composition' through improvisation would emanate.

i thought it was a brilliant idea, and you could do it with anything, star charts, maps (take landmarks or certain types of thing on a map), or anything, even pictures of any kind. There the selection is arbitrary but perhaps something interesting might come of it.

I'm not so sure these days...

Mark

On Wednesday, February 22, 2006, at 09:16 pm, tuning@yahoogroups.com wrote:

> Woolhouse used the 360 degrees of a circle as his basis
> instead of the 12 hours of a clock, but then similarly
> subdivided those into 60 minutes and 60 seconds, for a
> total of 1,296,000 divisions per octave -- which he
> dismisses as "of no advantage in musical computations".