Pet Theories

Michael,

I do not know if I am unique or not - I don't have any pet theories
for tuning and/or composing music. What I do have is a set of
tendencies - a collection of items I tend to use more often then
others - that defines my particular musical voice. And since I've been
working as a chemist for quite sometime as well as doing the Charles
Ives midnight oil composition technique I find that theories stay in
the lab and away from art.

Its one man's opinion here.

This may seem random but in the spirit of Margo's post here is an
olive branch ---0

Chris

>
>     Pet theories, I swear...we all have them to some extent (hey, this is an art, after all), but all the better of us to realize which of our theories are pet theories and have the discipline not to utterly exclude other points of view or even vaguely credit them as intelligent.
>     A side note, it's great after all this bashing to have a few people, some who haven't spoken up in ages, come out of the woodwork and speak up for open-mindedness on this list.  That and having the balls to oppose the previously prevailing attitude of "the reason this list lacks valuable information...is because the academic standards are not strict enough" Puritanism that so often gets tossed around here.

Chris>"What I do have is a set of tendencies - a collection of items I tend to
use more often then others - that defines my particular musical voice."
Well, then I'd argue they become your "Pet Theories" in terms of composition
(more likely than Tuning). Not to say you tell other people to use them...but
that those are the ones you find useful for yourself, "even" if you have huge
respect for other methods that simply don't work as well for your composing.

I guess you could say my point (still) is everyone has some degree of "Pet
Theories", things they tend to gravitate to in any sort of art that no one can
proven is "better" because there are always a good deal of people who, in all
honesty, think it's worse. And some people have a very useful ability to say
"Yes, I favor this but, not, that does not mean something I don't favor can't be
incredibly valuable to a fair amount of other people and should be 'allowed to
be appreciated' regardless ". Come to think of it, Margo seems to carry such a
positive attitude.

Hi Michael,

I guess I'm still hung up on the word "theory" based upon my
scientific background. In that field a theory is a testable
explanation of how something works. And with the choices I make in
composition the word "work" does not apply but the phrases "pleases
me" does. Thus I see two different goals for what I call theory and
what I call my compositional tendencies.

I truly feel "music theory" is an unfortunate misnomer and I didn't
fully understand how bad of one until I joined this list. Music
archeology or music language strikes closer to home in my opinion
because you can't really test anything new - you can only explain or
demonstrate what has already happened.

Chris

>     I guess you could say my point (still) is everyone has some degree of "Pet Theories", things they tend to gravitate to in any sort of art that no one can proven is "better" because there are always a good deal of people who, in all honesty, think it's worse.  And some people have a very useful ability to say "Yes, I favor this but, not, that does not mean something I don't favor can't be incredibly valuable to a fair amount of other people and should be 'allowed to be appreciated' regardless ".  Come to think of it, Margo seems to carry such a positive attitude.

Chris>"I guess I'm still hung up on the word "theory" based upon my scientific
background. In that field a theory is a testable explanation of how something
works."

Ah, ok. But, in the case, is not it true that showing something works
through math alone is not truly a "test", but doing so in such a way that you
can showing to results in physical reality in easily recognizable form (IE sound
or motion) is? I start to get the feeling that, in music, the only "real"
theories would be the ones that could be tested in sound and then recognized by
listeners as representing what they say they represent very well. IE if a chord
is made out in music theory to be a potential resting point or point of tension,
musicians should be easily able to use it as such and get a positive response
from a fair share (if not a clear majority) of listeners in a real-world
double-blind listening test.

>"Music archeology or music language strikes closer to home in my opinion because
>you can't really test anything new - you can only explain or demonstrate what
>has already happened."
Funny thing to me is, in music, I often find it in reverse IE I can hear a
phenomenon in many cases but not explain it in, say, mathematical form (at least
immediately). Would you assuming (for the way most people on the list use the
term "music theory") that you need to have a result in recognizable sonic format
first, one in mathematical format first, that it does not really count until
both have happened/been done, or something else entirely?

On 11/6/2010 3:20 PM, Chris Vaisvil wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> I guess I'm still hung up on the word "theory" based upon my
> scientific background. In that field a theory is a testable
> explanation of how something works. And with the choices I make in
> composition the word "work" does not apply but the phrases "pleases
> me" does. Thus I see two different goals for what I call theory and
> what I call my compositional tendencies.
>
> I truly feel "music theory" is an unfortunate misnomer and I didn't
> fully understand how bad of one until I joined this list. Music
> archeology or music language strikes closer to home in my opinion
> because you can't really test anything new - you can only explain or
> demonstrate what has already happened.
>
> Chris

There's a difference between "a theory" (as used in science) and "theory" (as distinct from practice). Much like the difference between "a glass" (which can hold water) and "glass" (which is used among other things to make windows).

Often it's true that music theory seeks to explain music that's already been written, but that music in turn may be based on other aspects of music theory. Take the harmonic progression at the end of my Mizarian Porcupine Overture: I knew you could tile copies of 15-ET on a plane (essentially using it as a periodicity block), so I made a cyclical chord progression that made use of that feature. As it turned out, 22-ET supported the same progression, which led to the discovery of what we now call porcupine temperament.

Wouldn't that be a musical analogy instead of a theory?

I imagine there are a large number of analogous progressions /
melodies / scale constructions common to many tunings. I've made use
of a pentatonic type construction in 17 edo. I think it is more akin
to - I can make this chair out of Oak - or this slightly different
chair out of Walnut. Its still basically a chair, functions and looks
like a chair. Perhaps I'm just not far enough in my studies to see the
"theory" in the music theory in the sense you describe.

Chris

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 8:21 PM, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
Take the harmonic progression at the end of my Mizarian
> Porcupine Overture: I knew you could tile copies of 15-ET on a plane
> (essentially using it as a periodicity block), so I made a cyclical
> chord progression that made use of that feature. As it turned out, 22-ET
> supported the same progression, which led to the discovery of what we
> now call porcupine temperament.
>

On 11/7/2010 10:04 PM, Chris Vaisvil wrote:
> Wouldn't that be a musical analogy instead of a theory?

I don't understand the question. What I did was take ideas from music theory and apply them in practice. Then this chord progression I used was found to be more generally useful, and inspired a new bit of music theory. I can't make sense of the phrase "a theory" in this situation. Again, this is "theory" as distinct from "practice", not "a theory" as in a scientific explanation. Two different meanings for the same word.

> I imagine there are a large number of analogous progressions /
> melodies / scale constructions common to many tunings. I've made use
> of a pentatonic type construction in 17 edo. I think it is more akin
> to - I can make this chair out of Oak - or this slightly different
> chair out of Walnut. Its still basically a chair, functions and looks
> like a chair. Perhaps I'm just not far enough in my studies to see the
> "theory" in the music theory in the sense you describe.

I don't know what a "musical analogy" might be, but I'm guessing that it would fall under the general category of music theory, which is more or less a collection of abstract generalizations about how music is put together. The thing that 15- and 22-ET have in common that allows this progression to work is that the comma 250/243 vanishes. That's also why it doesn't work in 12-ET. You'd think you might be able to extend the analogy to work with 12-ET, but it ends up changing keys in an endless climb, rather than being a closed cycle. So I don't think the idea of "musical analogy" is very helpful here.

> Chris
>
> On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 8:21 PM, Herman Miller<hmiller@...> wrote:
>>
> Take the harmonic progression at the end of my Mizarian
>> Porcupine Overture: I knew you could tile copies of 15-ET on a plane
>> (essentially using it as a periodicity block), so I made a cyclical
>> chord progression that made use of that feature. As it turned out, 22-ET
>> supported the same progression, which led to the discovery of what we
>> now call porcupine temperament.

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
>
> Wouldn't that be a musical analogy instead of a theory?
>
> I imagine there are a large number of analogous progressions /
> melodies / scale constructions common to many tunings. I've made use
> of a pentatonic type construction in 17 edo. I think it is more akin
> to - I can make this chair out of Oak - or this slightly different
> chair out of Walnut. Its still basically a chair, functions and looks
> like a chair. Perhaps I'm just not far enough in my studies to see the
> "theory" in the music theory in the sense you describe.
>
> Chris

What Herman meant by the 15-22 similarity, I assume, is that there was
a pattern found in what tunings work for that chord progression. There
is no corresponding analogy in 12-equal, for example. And the pattern
is that any tuning that eliminates 250/243 works. And if 250/243 is
eliminated, that means that the tuning equates 10/9 (a minor whole
tone) and 27/25 (a 5-limit diatonic semitone + a syntonic comma). This
means that it equates a 5-limit chromatic semitone and the syntonic
comma. So then they just assigned the name "porcupine" to the above
temperament, which 15 and 22 equal both support.

But you raise another good point, which is that sometimes similarities
exist even between temperaments - the 17-equal pentatonic minor scale,
for example, sounds pretty similar to 12-equal's, 19-equal's, and
22-equal's, and even 27-equal's, but in some of these the minor third
makes more sense as 6/5 and in other ones it makes more sense as 7/6.
This means that some of them temper out 64/63, and the others temper
out 81/80, but the "analogy" still holds in a sense.

Why this is is still a matter of open debate and the discussion
generally revolves around how psychoacoustic and cultural factors
interact with one another. Rothenberg's ideas have been somewhat
influential in this regard.

-Mike