A philosophical question

If you'll all allow me to indulge in some philosophy for a second...

We often discuss on here how much of music cognition is "learned" in
nature and how much is "hard-wired." The central question that we
always approach in these discussions is - what might a chord
progression in Orwell sound like 300 years from now? How do we know
acculturation altered our hearing? So I ask...

If a tonal chord progression is played in the woods, but nobody with
the proper set of internalized rules is around to hear it, is it still
in a key?

Does the concept of "a piece of music" not only mean the information
present in the sound, but also implicitly include an algorithm present
in the observer that extracts said information from the music?

A thought experiment for you all:

Let's say that we played Dvorak's New World Symphony for someone
living in an unknown subterranean culture in, uh, Timbuktu... 400
years ago. Now let's say that, by some utter miracle of coincidence,
it just so happens that Dvorak's New World Symphony is completely
intelligible to them - but in an entirely different way than it is to
us. Let's say that they also have an analogous concept of "key," but
it just so happens to be activated by different things than ours -
instead of V7-I being the signal for the tonic, it's III-i or
something. Or maybe they're used to 16-equal, and so to them this
piece activates their internalized mavila tonal structure, which is
completely different from ours.

But either way, let's say that they find the performance riveting, but
it was in a completely different key than we'd hear it as, and the
function of every single chord was completely different, and also it
activated certain musical features that we have no concept or idea of
- just like as it's likely that many cultures have no concept or idea
of a "key." And also they hear minor chords as needing desperately to
resolve, but coincidentally they always do in a way that satisfies
them.

Was the piece of music they heard the same piece of music that we heard?

There will always be someone who responds to this question with a curt
"Of course, they were listening to the same piece of music, but they
just heard it differently." But those who are used to philosophical
wankery like what I've laid out above will realize that this is
obviously not the point. The point is that you cannot separate the
music from its observer, which is a realization that has had profound
consequences in a number of scientific fields, and it might just be
about time for it to work its way into music theory. Music is a
collection of bits of information, and we have algorithms to extract
that information back out of it. This includes things like learned
factors of what constitutes a "tonic," learned Rothenberg-style
melodic patterns, perhaps more complex behaviors like an awareness of
how this piece relates to other similar pieces, etc. Without such
factors in place we wouldn't be able to derive any information out of
the music at all, or if we did it certainly wouldn't be the same
information that we do now. Therefore -

Therefore when we say that we can come up with a chord progression in
xxxx temperament, and that it might sound "functionally intelligible"
400 years from now - you are absolutely right, and that is also a
zero-entropy statement. Can anyone come up with an example of what
might NOT sound "functionally intelligible" 400 years from now? What
tuning could possibly exist that it is impossible to extract structure
from? What encrypted information could possibly exist that contains no
possible decryption algorithm? If you want to go all the way with it -
EVERY feature that we're looking to "generalize" in music right now is
a bit arbitrary. It's all rooted in psychoacoustics, sure, but the
concept of a "key," of a "chord," of "functional harmony," etc - not
only might a culture 400 years from now like different instantiations
of these concepts than what they're used to, but they might not like
them at all - they might have latched onto novel musical phenomena
that we can't even imagine, which would also be rooted in
psychoacoustics.

I'll put it to rest now and see what your thoughts are about this topic.

-Mike Battaglia

Typo -

I wrote:
> It's all rooted in psychoacoustics, sure, but the
> concept of a "key," of a "chord," of "functional harmony," etc - not
> only might a culture 400 years from now like different instantiations
> of these concepts than what they're used to

That should say "than what WE'RE used to." The point is that not only
might they like different types of harmony, or "functional harmony,"
or whatever, than we do, there might be an entirely new musical
percept that we can't even imagine that could supplant that. I have no
idea what that might be, but keep in mind that if you asked someone
thousands of years ago to imagine what a "tonal center" in music might
be like, they'd have no idea either. The point is the entire theory
thus far makes assumptions about the perceptual characteristics of the
observer, which is fine, but worth being aware of.

I guess a central question I should have asked is - what exactly is
our goal here in studying music theory?

- Is it objective - to try and discover novel types of information
that have never been sent before?
- Is it subjective - to identify ways in which our music decoding
algorithms are underutilizing their full potential?
- Is it to train ourselves to extract information from systems in
which we consciously design the mechanism of extraction?

-Mike

Listeners from only a few hundred years ago would find Dvorak
unbearably dissonant, but I think any listener is likely to hear tonic
etc in the same way,
because its stability or otherwise is deeply rooted in the harmonic
series, which is even more deeply rooted in the primes - surely as
fundamental an object as is possible.

Steve P.

On 17 May 2011, at 10:00, Mike Battaglia wrote:

> Typo -
>
> I wrote:
> > It's all rooted in psychoacoustics, sure, but the
> > concept of a "key," of a "chord," of "functional harmony," etc - not
> > only might a culture 400 years from now like different
> instantiations
> > of these concepts than what they're used to
>
> That should say "than what WE'RE used to." The point is that not only
> might they like different types of harmony, or "functional harmony,"
> or whatever, than we do, there might be an entirely new musical
> percept that we can't even imagine that could supplant that. I have no
> idea what that might be, but keep in mind that if you asked someone
> thousands of years ago to imagine what a "tonal center" in music might
> be like, they'd have no idea either. The point is the entire theory
> thus far makes assumptions about the perceptual characteristics of the
> observer, which is fine, but worth being aware of.
>
> I guess a central question I should have asked is - what exactly is
> our goal here in studying music theory?
>
> - Is it objective - to try and discover novel types of information
> that have never been sent before?
> - Is it subjective - to identify ways in which our music decoding
> algorithms are underutilizing their full potential?
> - Is it to train ourselves to extract information from systems in
> which we consciously design the mechanism of extraction?
>
> -Mike
>
>

Oh, Mike. You know how much I love it when people who haven't studied philosophy academically get all philosophical. Nevertheless, I'll indulge you.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> If a tonal chord progression is played in the woods, but nobody with
> the proper set of internalized rules is around to hear it, is it still
> in a key?

Who's playing the chord progression? If no one's there to observe it, how do we know it's being played?

A (possibly more illuminating) related question to yours: If no one ever heard Beethoven's 5th ever again, would it still be in C minor?

What color is the sky on Venus right now?

> Let's say that we played Dvorak's New World Symphony for someone
> living in an unknown subterranean culture in, uh, Timbuktu... 400
> years ago.
[snip]
> Was the piece of music they heard the same piece of music that we heard?

Why do we need to go to such extreme conditions? Isn't it problematic enough to try to figure out if the Dvorak you hear is the same as the Dvorak I hear?

> The point is that you cannot separate the
> music from its observer, which is a realization that has had profound
> consequences in a number of scientific fields, and it might just be
> about time for it to work its way into music theory.

Science is a lot simpler than music. There really isn't a way to work this in to music theory, because the learned factors that influence musical (and other artistic) perception are so idiosyncratic and so complex that not even the observer is aware of all of them, much less someone observing the observer. And yet at the same time, I'm pretty sure our perceptions are also rather elastic--there's no "one way" even a single person will always hear the same composition. Hell, just the "mood" I'm in when I listen to a piece changes how I perceive it, let alone other factors like noticing new details or zoning out because I have other stuff on my mind. When we perceive a piece of music, we're never "just" perceiving it, so another pertinent question is, how do we draw the line between our "perception" of the music and other concurrent cognitive processes not immediately related to processing the incoming musical stimuli?

> Music is a
> collection of bits of information, and we have algorithms to extract
> that information back out of it. This includes things like learned
> factors of what constitutes a "tonic," learned Rothenberg-style
> melodic patterns, perhaps more complex behaviors like an awareness of
> how this piece relates to other similar pieces, etc. Without such
> factors in place we wouldn't be able to derive any information out of
> the music at all, or if we did it certainly wouldn't be the same
> information that we do now.

Oh, that's not even HALF the picture. We never just "extract" information from a stimulus, we also create information in response to the stimulus. Listening is as much a creative process as it is a consumptive or associative process. But even the associative aspect alone--the way a piece of music triggers memories and touches off other tangential thought processes (like inspiration or other emotional responses)--tells us that we're doing a lot more than just "extracting" information. If we ignore those other factors and focus only on the extraction, we're never going to get a complete picture that makes sense.

>What tuning could possibly exist that it is impossible to extract structure
> from? What encrypted information could possibly exist that contains no
> possible decryption algorithm?

This has less to do with tuning and more to do with composition. It's arguable that the work of some of the atonalists does precisely this (defies decryption). But of course it still triggers associations, and thanks to perceptual feedback, people can still find it meaningful. So I think the answer to your question is that there is *nothing* that, by some virtue of its structure or tuning alone, is utterly immune to the human ability to manufacture meaning. Even random gargling beeps and blorps produced by a computer with no structure and not even a definite tuning will have some meaning to someone.

> If you want to go all the way with it -
> EVERY feature that we're looking to "generalize" in music right now is
> a bit arbitrary. It's all rooted in psychoacoustics, sure, but the
> concept of a "key," of a "chord," of "functional harmony," etc - not
> only might a culture 400 years from now like different instantiations
> of these concepts than what they're used to, but they might not like
> them at all - they might have latched onto novel musical phenomena
> that we can't even imagine, which would also be rooted in
> psychoacoustics.

Psychoacoustics is neat because it explains lots of auditory "illusions" like VFs, combination tones, and maybe periodicity buzz (though that one seems less than settled). But where I think you are leaping to too much of a conclusion is assuming that because we latched on to some particular psychoacoustic phenomenon and correlated it with some semantic content, that that means there's something inherently semantic about that psychoacoustic phenomenon. There's really no reason to suspect the semantic content of music is due to a process any different than the semantic content of language. When you think about it, the phonology of an "o" sound makes it fundamentally different than the phonology of an "e" sound or a "k" sound or an "s" sound, and it's those differences that make it possible for cultures to assign semantic content to different collections of sounds. But there really is no correlation between the phonology of words and their semantic content, so why should we suspect music will work differently?

-Igs

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 7:19 AM, Steve Parker <steve@...> wrote:
>
> Listeners from only a few hundred years ago would find Dvorak unbearably dissonant, but I think any listener is likely to hear tonic etc in the same way,
>
> because its stability or otherwise is deeply rooted in the harmonic series, which is even more deeply rooted in the primes - surely as fundamental an object as is possible.
> Steve P.

Steve, the example I gave was that of a subterranean culture located
underneath Timbuktu a few hundred years ago. It was purely
hypothetical. As for your assertion that stability is rooted in the
harmonic series, the detection of patterns in the harmonic series is a
stochastic process that is strongly influenced by learning.

-Mike

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 11:53 AM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> Oh, Mike. You know how much I love it when people who haven't studied philosophy academically get all philosophical. Nevertheless, I'll indulge you.

Well, we're on a list where people who haven't studied music
academically get all musical... :)

> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> A (possibly more illuminating) related question to yours: If no one ever heard Beethoven's 5th ever again, would it still be in C minor?

OK, so then what is music? What is music theory? What exactly are we
studying? Sounds to me like we're just studying the contemporary
patterns in which human beings are currently conditioned to analyze
sound, and that the entire concept of music is not a truly "timeless"
phenomenon.

Since that is the case, what is "microtonal music" then? What are we
getting at here? It sounds like our goal with the study of microtonal
music is to blow people's minds by giving them something that "works"
that they've never heard before, which is a goal that is rooted in
subjectivity.

If that's the case, then it makes no sense for us to arbitrarily
decide that they then need to learn to hear the music the way we want
them to. Well, we certainly can do that, but the reasoning behind it
is tautological in nature. I'll leave it at this for now and see if
you understand what I'm getting at.

> Why do we need to go to such extreme conditions? Isn't it problematic enough to try to figure out if the Dvorak you hear is the same as the Dvorak I hear?

It is indeed problematic, which is why we need to go to such extreme
conditions. The example above is clearly defined the circumstances
such that the other subject does NOT hear the Dvorak they hear the
same way. Were they listening to the same piece of music?

> > The point is that you cannot separate the
> > music from its observer, which is a realization that has had profound
> > consequences in a number of scientific fields, and it might just be
> > about time for it to work its way into music theory.
>
> Science is a lot simpler than music. There really isn't a way to work this in to music theory, because the learned factors that influence musical (and other artistic) perception are so idiosyncratic and so complex that not even the observer is aware of all of them, much less someone observing the observer.

For your claim that this insight can't be applied to music theory to
be true, it would have to be the case that these learned factors
--cannot-- be made aware of, not just that people aren't generally
aware of them now. I'm not convinced that it's impossible to uncover
what they are. They are, at most, a general "frame" or set of
principles that influences how we cognize sound.

> And yet at the same time, I'm pretty sure our perceptions are also rather elastic--there's no "one way" even a single person will always hear the same composition. Hell, just the "mood" I'm in when I listen to a piece changes how I perceive it, let alone other factors like noticing new details or zoning out because I have other stuff on my mind. When we perceive a piece of music, we're never "just" perceiving it, so another pertinent question is, how do we draw the line between our "perception" of the music and other concurrent cognitive processes not immediately related to processing the incoming musical stimuli?

We draw the line between them at the point where the listening process
generates new information, not just derives information from the
signal. See below.

> Oh, that's not even HALF the picture. We never just "extract" information from a stimulus, we also create information in response to the stimulus. Listening is as much a creative process as it is a consumptive or associative process. But even the associative aspect alone--the way a piece of music triggers memories and touches off other tangential thought processes (like inspiration or other emotional responses)--tells us that we're doing a lot more than just "extracting" information. If we ignore those other factors and focus only on the extraction, we're never going to get a complete picture that makes sense.

The generative component of listening is where I'd draw the line at
the question you asked above. We can generate different holistic
responses to pieces of music, but what we're really doing is
generating different holistic responses to the information that we're
deriving from the music, because we have no idea what "the actual
piece of music" is. There is no piece of music. A Critique Of Pure
Music, that's what this is.

Once we've managed to decipher the information encoded in the music,
the synesthetic or generative response to the information you've
deciphered is another level of variation. Perhaps what is needed is a
greater study into how humans pull patterns out of sound IN GENERAL -
i.e. apply basic principles of pattern recognition to music - then see
which methods predominate in human beings today and exploit them in
underutilized ways for musical purposes.

This is what we're trying to do indirectly with our foray into higher
primes in the harmonic series, right? Trying to find things that
humans can hear without realizing it. But then we corrupt the whole
thing by saying that humans have to learn to hear things the way we
want, which is the opposite of the last sentence.

> >What tuning could possibly exist that it is impossible to extract structure
> > from? What encrypted information could possibly exist that contains no
> > possible decryption algorithm?
>
> This has less to do with tuning and more to do with composition. It's arguable that the work of some of the atonalists does precisely this (defies decryption).

The hell it doesn't! I can decrypt the most atonal work you can throw
at me, given enough exposure. The Rite of Spring, for instance,
although being more "polytonal" than "atonal," was completely
incomprehensible to me, and now I can decrypt the entire bits of it.
Eb7/Emaj now sounds like part of E lydian #2, for example. (But am I
decrypting it "correctly?" lol)

A GOOD WORKING HYPOTHESIS might be that human beings, given repeated
exposure to a stimulus, tend towards the interpretation of that
stimulus that yields the LEAST amount information while still
cognizing as much of the signal as possible. That is to say, from an
information theory standpoint, we tend towards an encoding of the
signal that approaches its entropy. I'm still not sure how to
practically apply this to music theory. I hope I or one of us is smart
enough to turn this into a concrete model.

> But of course it still triggers associations, and thanks to perceptual feedback, people can still find it meaningful. So I think the answer to your question is that there is *nothing* that, by some virtue of its structure or tuning alone, is utterly immune to the human ability to manufacture meaning. Even random gargling beeps and blorps produced by a computer with no structure and not even a definite tuning will have some meaning to someone.

That's the idea. Being as this is the case, I point out again the
previously mentioned contradiction between the two ideals of finding
patterns of sound that humans can already unexpectedly cognize, and
manufacturing patterns of sound along with an instruction manual for
how to cognize them.

> Psychoacoustics is neat because it explains lots of auditory "illusions" like VFs, combination tones, and maybe periodicity buzz (though that one seems less than settled).

LOL, that one is settled, dude. It's settled insofar as some kind of
"critical band" type effect is involved. Attempts to push this off
onto the brain instead of the peripheral auditory system don't get
around the core mathematical issue that it's likely the interactions
within some kind of filterbank that are involved. I have yet to see a
concrete alternative theory proposed.

> But where I think you are leaping to too much of a conclusion is assuming that because we latched on to some particular psychoacoustic phenomenon and correlated it with some semantic content, that that means there's something inherently semantic about that psychoacoustic phenomenon.

??? Where did I ever say that? Psychoacoustics provides us with the
ink that we generate the Rorshach tests with.

> There's really no reason to suspect the semantic content of music is due to a process any different than the semantic content of language. When you think about it, the phonology of an "o" sound makes it fundamentally different than the phonology of an "e" sound or a "k" sound or an "s" sound, and it's those differences that make it possible for cultures to assign semantic content to different collections of sounds. But there really is no correlation between the phonology of words and their semantic content, so why should we suspect music will work differently?

Is the concept of a key related more to the semantic content of a
language or the phonology of a sound?

-Mike

On 17 May 2011, at 18:47, Mike Battaglia wrote:

> As for your assertion that stability is rooted in the
> harmonic series, the detection of patterns in the harmonic series is a
> stochastic process that is strongly influenced by learning.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'stochastic process'? Or in fact by patterns?
The primes are as fundamental as possible and the harmonic series is fundamentally related to that.

Steve

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Steve Parker <steve@...> wrote:
>
> On 17 May 2011, at 18:47, Mike Battaglia wrote:
>
> As for your assertion that stability is rooted in the
> harmonic series, the detection of patterns in the harmonic series is a
> stochastic process that is strongly influenced by learning.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by 'stochastic process'? Or in fact by patterns?
> The primes are as fundamental as possible and the harmonic series is fundamentally related to that.
> Steve

The harmonic series is fundamentally related to the prime numbers, but
both of these concepts are only related to incoming waveforms of sound
through the Fourier transform. The auditory system doesn't have the
benefit of there being some computer to perform a full forward Fourier
transform on the signal, so we've had to evolve various bioengineered
solutions to the problem. Instead, we have a set of evolved features
to help us perform this process of extracting frequencies from the
signal, and then another set of evolved features to help us perform
the process of matching them to an internalized template of the
harmonic series, all of which are stochastic processes. Without these
processes, speaking in terms of primes would be meaningless, because
we'd have no way to tell what frequencies are in the signal, and hence
we wouldn't be able to assign those frequencies numbers for there to
be prime ones of.

Furthermore, perfect frequency resolution would require us performing
the Fourier transform from now until the end of time on the signal,
meaning we'd have no time resolution. So the fact that we have time
resolution blurs our resolution in the frequency domain, introducing
some uncertainty in the signal. Thus we never really know if a prime
is a prime, or a mistuned version of some other prime, etc. This is
compounded by the fact that learned factors can bias us anyway to
change the perspective that we take on stimuli.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> OK, so then what is music? What is music theory? What exactly are we
> studying? Sounds to me like we're just studying the contemporary
> patterns in which human beings are currently conditioned to analyze
> sound, and that the entire concept of music is not a truly "timeless"
> phenomenon.

Well, studying music theory is also a form of conditioning ourselves to hear things the way we're "supposed to." I can't tell you how many bands I've been in where we argued over chord progressions or harmonizations ("that sounds wrong!" "No, your version sounds wrong!"), and where I butted heads with classically-trained people because I thought the "proper" progression/harmonization/voicing sounded unnatural.

> Since that is the case, what is "microtonal music" then? What are we
> getting at here? It sounds like our goal with the study of microtonal
> music is to blow people's minds by giving them something that "works"
> that they've never heard before, which is a goal that is rooted in
> subjectivity.

That sounds more or less correct.

> If that's the case, then it makes no sense for us to arbitrarily
> decide that they then need to learn to hear the music the way we want
> them to. Well, we certainly can do that, but the reasoning behind it
> is tautological in nature. I'll leave it at this for now and see if
> you understand what I'm getting at.

I agree. Of course one of the problems we face is that the more time a person spends with an alternative tuning, the more natural it sounds to them, so progressions that would sound insane to the average listener come to feel totally normal. That's how I feel, anyway.

> It is indeed problematic, which is why we need to go to such extreme
> conditions. The example above is clearly defined the circumstances
> such that the other subject does NOT hear the Dvorak they hear the
> same way. Were they listening to the same piece of music?

Again, are any two people ever listening to the same piece of music? Can you ever listen to the same piece of music twice?

> For your claim that this insight can't be applied to music theory to
> be true, it would have to be the case that these learned factors
> --cannot-- be made aware of, not just that people aren't generally
> aware of them now. I'm not convinced that it's impossible to uncover
> what they are. They are, at most, a general "frame" or set of
> principles that influences how we cognize sound.

Dude, these "learned factors" could be something as random as watching your parents dance to a Frank Sinatra song when you were 4, or a particular song being on the radio in the car when your dad got pulled over with you in the passenger seat when you were 2. I have the vaguest glimmer of a memory of when I was maybe 3 or 4 and I had just learned the word "comfortable" which I thought sounded like "convertible" and whenever I would hear either word I would mentally picture a convertible with big pillowy seats. I mean there are all kinds of crazy random associations that get wired in when you're a small child that ultimately shape the way you process the world as an adult, and they're all important. Do you really think we can figure out enough of them for any one person to understand how that person's musical cognition really works?

For another point of view: take a 13-year-old girl from Chicago who's grown up on rap and pop music. What do you think she'd make of Dvorak? She'd probably be so bored by it that any considerations about "key" and "functionality" wouldn't even enter the equation.

> We draw the line between them at the point where the listening process
> generates new information, not just derives information from the
> signal. See below.

Easier said than done.

> The generative component of listening is where I'd draw the line at
> the question you asked above. We can generate different holistic
> responses to pieces of music, but what we're really doing is
> generating different holistic responses to the information that we're
> deriving from the music, because we have no idea what "the actual
> piece of music" is. There is no piece of music. A Critique Of Pure
> Music, that's what this is.

Rather, there is a piece of music, but we cannot experience it directly. Read up on the distinction between "phenomenon" and "noumenon" before you go any further with the Kant analogies.

In any case, the information we "decode" from the music is inseparable from the information we generate in response to it, at least so far as cognition is concerned. The encoding of the auditory stimuli into neural impulses is pre-conscious.

> Once we've managed to decipher the information encoded in the music,
> the synesthetic or generative response to the information you've
> deciphered is another level of variation. Perhaps what is needed is a
> greater study into how humans pull patterns out of sound IN GENERAL -
> i.e. apply basic principles of pattern recognition to music - then see
> which methods predominate in human beings today and exploit them in
> underutilized ways for musical purposes.

But this kind of top-down approach is really doing things the "hard way". No one in the history of man has ever needed to understand this stuff in order to make music before, and we don't "need" it now. Why? Because we are all humans, too, meaning we are already "using the software" that you're trying to find/write the manual for.

As Carl so astutely pointed out to me, even humans that ostensibly share the same culture--say, for instance, the denizens of San Francisco--cannot agree on what music "sounds good", even when it's all in the same tuning. Trying to use a maximally-general approach (as you seem to be looking for) is likely to be either unsuccessful or trivially successful. You'd probably have an easier time trying to figure out why some people like heavy metal and others prefer smooth jazz.

> This is what we're trying to do indirectly with our foray into higher
> primes in the harmonic series, right? Trying to find things that
> humans can hear without realizing it. But then we corrupt the whole
> thing by saying that humans have to learn to hear things the way we
> want, which is the opposite of the last sentence.

Really the important thing is to get people to like what they're hearing enough that they want to understand it, and I think that has less to do with tuning and more to do with...dare I say, production values. Elaine Walker's "Love Song" makes BP sound much more intriguing to me than any of those retched solo clarinet pieces. If you put pretty much *any* tuning in a context that is familiar and appealing to a listener, you'll get a positive response. But I've said this before often enough.

> The hell it doesn't! I can decrypt the most atonal work you can throw
> at me, given enough exposure. The Rite of Spring, for instance,
> although being more "polytonal" than "atonal," was completely
> incomprehensible to me, and now I can decrypt the entire bits of it.
> Eb7/Emaj now sounds like part of E lydian #2, for example. (But am I
> decrypting it "correctly?" lol)

How about this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNt6a5xFOnE

> A GOOD WORKING HYPOTHESIS might be that human beings, given repeated
> exposure to a stimulus, tend towards the interpretation of that
> stimulus that yields the LEAST amount information while still
> cognizing as much of the signal as possible. That is to say, from an
> information theory standpoint, we tend towards an encoding of the
> signal that approaches its entropy. I'm still not sure how to
> practically apply this to music theory. I hope I or one of us is smart
> enough to turn this into a concrete model.

I think you'll get to your stated goal of producing microtonal music people like much faster if you just write a bunch of microtonal music that you like.

> That's the idea. Being as this is the case, I point out again the
> previously mentioned contradiction between the two ideals of finding
> patterns of sound that humans can already unexpectedly cognize, and
> manufacturing patterns of sound along with an instruction manual for
> how to cognize them.

So let me put it a different way: if you give people a packet of musical stimuli full of familiar auditory cues where only the tuning is different, they will be quite likely to "unexpectedly cognize" the new stuff. It's all in the framing. The frame IS the manual, in a sense.

> LOL, that one is settled, dude. It's settled insofar as some kind of
> "critical band" type effect is involved. Attempts to push this off
> onto the brain instead of the peripheral auditory system don't get
> around the core mathematical issue that it's likely the interactions
> within some kind of filterbank that are involved. I have yet to see a
> concrete alternative theory proposed.

I'll consider it settled when you and Carl agree.

> ??? Where did I ever say that? Psychoacoustics provides us with the
> ink that we generate the Rorshach tests with.

Uhhhhhhh your whole hypothesis about minorness????

> Is the concept of a key related more to the semantic content of a
> language or the phonology of a sound?

I'd say it's part of the grammar, so it would fall into the semantic category.

-Igs

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 5:25 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> Well, studying music theory is also a form of conditioning ourselves to hear things the way we're "supposed to." I can't tell you how many bands I've been in where we argued over chord progressions or harmonizations ("that sounds wrong!" "No, your version sounds wrong!"), and where I butted heads with classically-trained people because I thought the "proper" progression/harmonization/voicing sounded unnatural.

That sort of feedback loop is what I'm trying to identify as a problem
in music theory. It's inbreeding. It is also, tangentially, a problem
that academic music theory seems to have completely succumbed to,
although rumor has it from Graham that the situation is improving.

> > It is indeed problematic, which is why we need to go to such extreme
> > conditions. The example above is clearly defined the circumstances
> > such that the other subject does NOT hear the Dvorak they hear the
> > same way. Were they listening to the same piece of music?
>
> Again, are any two people ever listening to the same piece of music? Can you ever listen to the same piece of music twice?

OK, this is true, but I'm getting at like a huge overarching schism in
the ways that people can perceive music, to the point where the
concept of a "key" can change from person to person.

> > For your claim that this insight can't be applied to music theory to
> > be true, it would have to be the case that these learned factors
> > --cannot-- be made aware of, not just that people aren't generally
> > aware of them now. I'm not convinced that it's impossible to uncover
> > what they are. They are, at most, a general "frame" or set of
> > principles that influences how we cognize sound.
>
> Dude, these "learned factors" could be something as random as watching your parents dance to a Frank Sinatra song when you were 4, or a particular song being on the radio in the car when your dad got pulled over with you in the passenger seat when you were 2. I have the vaguest glimmer of a memory of when I was maybe 3 or 4 and I had just learned the word "comfortable" which I thought sounded like "convertible" and whenever I would hear either word I would mentally picture a convertible with big pillowy seats. I mean there are all kinds of crazy random associations that get wired in when you're a small child that ultimately shape the way you process the world as an adult, and they're all important. Do you really think we can figure out enough of them for any one person to understand how that person's musical cognition really works?

I don't think that it's necessary to map out the full extent of
someone's psyche in order to improve on our current understanding of
music cognition. I think that we can use the 80/20 rule to map things
out better than we have them mapped out right now.

We could have any approach to microtonal music at all, but the one
that we've picked is to try and find a way to make it sound oddly
intelligible, which is the reason we picked the name "xenharmonic,"
isn't it? And to that effect, the avenue we've chosen to effect that
result is the notion that a large part of this intelligibility has
something to do with the harmonic series, and that a way to extend on
it might be to go up to higher-limit harmonies. We also discovered MOS
scales, looked into some set theory in the form of Rothenberg
propriety, and this is where we're at. I don't think it's perfect. The
tritone hypothesis and the rare interval hypothesis and Rothenberg's
stuff are decent guesses at least partway in the direction I'm looking
for, but no, I don't think it's perfect yet. But you think the only
way to improve on this would be to go to every single individual
person in the world, delve into the nuances of their childhood, and
factor every single piece of that information into the end result?

Perhaps what would satisfy you is a theory for what causes people to
override their existing frame for the sake of a new one. E.g. people
aren't going to be bitching about a tuning violating their sense of
diatonic hearing if it's being played on a 20,000 watt system with a
bitching deadmau5 psychedelic light show behind it on a giant stage
and subwoofers at every corner of the room. They're going to be like
AHHHHHHH THIS IS AWESOME

Stick them in a sterile room with fluorescent lights and listening
examples played on GM timbres and they might not react the same way.

> Rather, there is a piece of music, but we cannot experience it directly. Read up on the distinction between "phenomenon" and "noumenon" before you go any further with the Kant analogies.

Is there such a thing as a "noumenal composition" when you factor in
that the composition was something created by a composer?

> In any case, the information we "decode" from the music is inseparable from the information we generate in response to it, at least so far as cognition is concerned. The encoding of the auditory stimuli into neural impulses is pre-conscious.

Why should it be inseparable? I just separated it: there's the level
by which we frame the music into different tonal centers and chords
with functions, then there's the "meaning" that we derive from the
sequence in which they're arranged, then there are additional layers
of meaning that we derive from how this arrangement might differ from
or resemble the status quo, and then there's the Great Unknown of the
unconscious where you cross-relate whatever meaning you've just
derived to every other experience you've ever had in your life. We
don't need to look at the full intricacies of this process in order to
understand the first two parts of it, nor does the truth that these
parts are coupled together necessitate that we can't divide the
process into stages and look at each one separately.

> But this kind of top-down approach is really doing things the "hard way". No one in the history of man has ever needed to understand this stuff in order to make music before, and we don't "need" it now. Why? Because we are all humans, too, meaning we are already "using the software" that you're trying to find/write the manual for.
>
> As Carl so astutely pointed out to me, even humans that ostensibly share the same culture--say, for instance, the denizens of San Francisco--cannot agree on what music "sounds good", even when it's all in the same tuning. Trying to use a maximally-general approach (as you seem to be looking for) is likely to be either unsuccessful or trivially successful. You'd probably have an easier time trying to figure out why some people like heavy metal and others prefer smooth jazz.

?? What does this have to do with what I wrote? I'm not talking about
a practical approach to music making, which I already have, I'm
talking about gaining a better insight into how music works. I've
always been one to learn the rules, throw them away, then figure out
what you're doing, then write new rules.

> > This is what we're trying to do indirectly with our foray into higher
> > primes in the harmonic series, right? Trying to find things that
> > humans can hear without realizing it. But then we corrupt the whole
> > thing by saying that humans have to learn to hear things the way we
> > want, which is the opposite of the last sentence.
>
> Really the important thing is to get people to like what they're hearing enough that they want to understand it, and I think that has less to do with tuning and more to do with...dare I say, production values. Elaine Walker's "Love Song" makes BP sound much more intriguing to me than any of those retched solo clarinet pieces. If you put pretty much *any* tuning in a context that is familiar and appealing to a listener, you'll get a positive response. But I've said this before often enough.

Elaine Walker's "Love Song" doesn't sound like anything radically
different to me.

> > The hell it doesn't! I can decrypt the most atonal work you can throw
> > at me, given enough exposure. The Rite of Spring, for instance,
> > although being more "polytonal" than "atonal," was completely
> > incomprehensible to me, and now I can decrypt the entire bits of it.
> > Eb7/Emaj now sounds like part of E lydian #2, for example. (But am I
> > decrypting it "correctly?" lol)
>
> How about this one:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNt6a5xFOnE

This is not an "atonal" work in the sense that I thought you meant,
but I am certainly deriving plenty of information out of it.

> > That's the idea. Being as this is the case, I point out again the
> > previously mentioned contradiction between the two ideals of finding
> > patterns of sound that humans can already unexpectedly cognize, and
> > manufacturing patterns of sound along with an instruction manual for
> > how to cognize them.
>
> So let me put it a different way: if you give people a packet of musical stimuli full of familiar auditory cues where only the tuning is different, they will be quite likely to "unexpectedly cognize" the new stuff. It's all in the framing. The frame IS the manual, in a sense.

The initial theory behind much microtonal research was that people
would unexpectedly be able to make sense of higher-limit harmony,
because it uses in an unexpected way the same mechanism that we've
been using to make sense of music so far, which is harmonic series
detection and VF placement and etc. The fact that this doesn't just
seem to instantly work suggests to me that there's more to do to meet
this goal, if that's what the goal is. Your suggestion above, that
this ideal can be reached by simply providing familiar auditory cues
in a different tuning, is the opposite extreme. I'd say that it isn't
unexpected cognition at all, because cognitive awareness of the tuning
isn't something that people generally have much access to when
listening to a piece of music. Rather, it's the cognitive cues that
they're being presented with that they do have access to, so if you
happen to use a certain tuning in such a way to just present those
same cues, then you aren't hitting upon unexpected patterns of
cognition at all.

> > LOL, that one is settled, dude. It's settled insofar as some kind of
> > "critical band" type effect is involved. Attempts to push this off
> > onto the brain instead of the peripheral auditory system don't get
> > around the core mathematical issue that it's likely the interactions
> > within some kind of filterbank that are involved. I have yet to see a
> > concrete alternative theory proposed.
>
> I'll consider it settled when you and Carl agree.

This is not the best way to evaluate the veracity of research.

> > ??? Where did I ever say that? Psychoacoustics provides us with the
> > ink that we generate the Rorshach tests with.
>
> Uhhhhhhh your whole hypothesis about minorness????

I'm convinced at this point that you don't know what my hypothesis
about minorness is, because you seem to misrepresent it in every
conversation that we have. I think that if learned factors get your
"harmonic series detector" to fire in a certain way in response to a
chord, it'll be heard as minor, and if they fire another way, it'll be
heard as major. How exactly does that conflict with anything that I've
written here?

> > Is the concept of a key related more to the semantic content of a
> > language or the phonology of a sound?
>
> I'd say it's part of the grammar, so it would fall into the semantic category.

In what sense is it part of the grammar? The experience of hearing a
tonal center in music is a feeling, not a meaning.

-Mike

> > > LOL, that one is settled, dude. It's settled insofar as
> > > some kind of "critical band" type effect is involved.
> > > Attempts to push this off onto the brain instead of the
> > > peripheral auditory system don't get around the core
> > > mathematical issue that it's likely the interactions
> > > within some kind of filterbank that are involved. I have
> > > yet to see a concrete alternative theory proposed.
> >
> > I'll consider it settled when you and Carl agree.

It most definitely isn't settled. -Carl

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> That sort of feedback loop is what I'm trying to identify as a problem
> in music theory. It's inbreeding. It is also, tangentially, a problem
> that academic music theory seems to have completely succumbed to,
> although rumor has it from Graham that the situation is improving.

You can play plenty of other games with a chessboard and chess pieces aside from basic chess.

> OK, this is true, but I'm getting at like a huge overarching schism in
> the ways that people can perceive music, to the point where the
> concept of a "key" can change from person to person.

Of course it can. It may not even exist in some people.

> I don't think that it's necessary to map out the full extent of
> someone's psyche in order to improve on our current understanding of
> music cognition. I think that we can use the 80/20 rule to map things
> out better than we have them mapped out right now.

Eh, I don't really think in terms of better and worse, just valid and invalid. Maybe that's why we keep butting heads. You're content to improve theory without perfecting it, whereas I'm always going to harp on the imperfections and the exceptions. As a philosopher, it's my sworn duty to point out short-comings and loop-holes in any logical system I encounter.

> But you think the only
> way to improve on this would be to go to every single individual
> person in the world, delve into the nuances of their childhood, and
> factor every single piece of that information into the end result?

Are you so sure it's the theory that needs improving? I haven't run into any problems using loosely-harmonic-based harmonies within MOS structures. The only place I run aground of theory is where the theory says chords that don't well-approximate simple harmonic series relationships will sound bad. I do base my approach on the harmonic series (to an extent), I just allow a lot more leeway for mistuning than most people. It's not the end-all be-all, and the only way to get to an end-all be-all theory would be to do as you say and "factor every single piece of information into the end result."

> Perhaps what would satisfy you is a theory for what causes people to
> override their existing frame for the sake of a new one. E.g. people
> aren't going to be bitching about a tuning violating their sense of
> diatonic hearing if it's being played on a 20,000 watt system with a
> bitching deadmau5 psychedelic light show behind it on a giant stage
> and subwoofers at every corner of the room. They're going to be like
> AHHHHHHH THIS IS AWESOME

That's exactly what I'm saying! Throw in some sexy dancers and some variety of inebriation, and you've got a revolution on your hands.

> Is there such a thing as a "noumenal composition" when you factor in
> that the composition was something created by a composer?

Sure--the composition becomes a noumenon as soon as it leaves the composer's head.

> Why should it be inseparable? I just separated it: there's the level
> by which we frame the music into different tonal centers and chords
> with functions, then there's the "meaning" that we derive from the
> sequence in which they're arranged, then there are additional layers
> of meaning that we derive from how this arrangement might differ from
> or resemble the status quo, and then there's the Great Unknown of the
> unconscious where you cross-relate whatever meaning you've just
> derived to every other experience you've ever had in your life. We
> don't need to look at the full intricacies of this process in order to
> understand the first two parts of it, nor does the truth that these
> parts are coupled together necessitate that we can't divide the
> process into stages and look at each one separately.

Sure, you can separate them, but it's an artificial post-hoc separation. Nobody's mind is perfectly "one track".

> ?? What does this have to do with what I wrote? I'm not talking about
> a practical approach to music making, which I already have, I'm
> talking about gaining a better insight into how music works. I've
> always been one to learn the rules, throw them away, then figure out
> what you're doing, then write new rules.

Well, go right ahead. It's a rabbit hole I'm not too interested in going down. The amount of research and effort it would take to find the meaningful answers to the questions you're asking is way out of my price-range.

> Elaine Walker's "Love Song" doesn't sound like anything radically
> different to me.

And yet, it's in Bohlen-Pierce, a non-octave tuning that looks a lot like a slightly-squashed 8-EDO. That song made me realize that yes, you can do stuff in BP that doesn't sound like the soundtrack to a slide-show of deep-space photographs. Ditto the Charles Carpenter stuff Carl linked to.

> This is not an "atonal" work in the sense that I thought you meant,
> but I am certainly deriving plenty of information out of it.

Well then, to answer your question, I don't think there's any musical situation that is hopelessly and universally indecipherable. This piece has no discernible regularity in pitch or temporal organization, and if you're getting information out of it, well, there you go.

> The initial theory behind much microtonal research was that people
> would unexpectedly be able to make sense of higher-limit harmony,
> because it uses in an unexpected way the same mechanism that we've
> been using to make sense of music so far, which is harmonic series
> detection and VF placement and etc. The fact that this doesn't just
> seem to instantly work suggests to me that there's more to do to meet
> this goal, if that's what the goal is.

Indeed.

> Your suggestion above, that
> this ideal can be reached by simply providing familiar auditory cues
> in a different tuning, is the opposite extreme. I'd say that it isn't
> unexpected cognition at all, because cognitive awareness of the tuning
> isn't something that people generally have much access to when
> listening to a piece of music. Rather, it's the cognitive cues that
> they're being presented with that they do have access to, so if you
> happen to use a certain tuning in such a way to just present those
> same cues, then you aren't hitting upon unexpected patterns of
> cognition at all.

Sounds like your saying that if people hear the tuning and think it sounds weird, we're doing it wrong, but if they don't hear the tuning (regardless of how weird it is), we're also doing it wrong.

> > I'll consider it settled when you and Carl agree.
>
> This is not the best way to evaluate the veracity of research.

When two people I know, smart people who know vastly more about a subject than I do, are in disagreement about said subject, to me that says the evidence is yet inconclusive.

> I'm convinced at this point that you don't know what my hypothesis
> about minorness is, because you seem to misrepresent it in every
> conversation that we have. I think that if learned factors get your
> "harmonic series detector" to fire in a certain way in response to a
> chord, it'll be heard as minor, and if they fire another way, it'll be
> heard as major. How exactly does that conflict with anything that I've
> written here?

As you've articulated it to me, it sounds like you also believe that prior to the advent of influential "learned factors", we made the major/minor distinction based on certain harmonic series features (utonality/otonality, or entropy, or your most recent term, "inharmonicity"). Unless you believe that the initial/pre-cultural assignment of meaning to those qualities was random/arbitrary, it seems like you've been arguing that those harmonic series-related qualities in some way influenced the pre-cultural assignment of meaning. Or am I misinterpreting? Do you believe it would have been possible for some hypothetical culture to do the opposite of us, and assign the "major/happy" quality to utonal/more inharmonic chords, and the "minor/sad" quality to otnal/more harmonic chords? If you do, then we are in agreement. If you don't believe that would be possible, then you're "guilty as charged" of assuming an absolute phonology-semantic correlation.

> > > Is the concept of a key related more to the semantic content of a
> > > language or the phonology of a sound?
> >
> > I'd say it's part of the grammar, so it would fall into the semantic category.
>
> In what sense is it part of the grammar? The experience of hearing a
> tonal center in music is a feeling, not a meaning.

It's a part of the grammar because it determines (for instance) whether a piece is major or minor, and is a product of the relationship over time of the notes in a piece. If you're playing the white keys on a piano, the order you play them in determines whether you hear the key as C major or A minor (or whatever mode you please). This is analogous to the way changing the order of words in a sentence alters the meaning of the sentence.

-Igs

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 6:59 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> > That sort of feedback loop is what I'm trying to identify as a problem
> > in music theory. It's inbreeding. It is also, tangentially, a problem
> > that academic music theory seems to have completely succumbed to,
> > although rumor has it from Graham that the situation is improving.
>
> You can play plenty of other games with a chessboard and chess pieces aside from basic chess.

What's the point of this list then?

> > OK, this is true, but I'm getting at like a huge overarching schism in
> > the ways that people can perceive music, to the point where the
> > concept of a "key" can change from person to person.
>
> Of course it can. It may not even exist in some people.

Ohhh no dude, -I'M- the one who said that. Just because you're a
philosophy major doesn't mean you can take my points and say that
they're your points. That is academic plagiarism!

> > I don't think that it's necessary to map out the full extent of
> > someone's psyche in order to improve on our current understanding of
> > music cognition. I think that we can use the 80/20 rule to map things
> > out better than we have them mapped out right now.
>
> Eh, I don't really think in terms of better and worse, just valid and invalid. Maybe that's why we keep butting heads. You're content to improve theory without perfecting it, whereas I'm always going to harp on the imperfections and the exceptions. As a philosopher, it's my sworn duty to point out short-comings and loop-holes in any logical system I encounter.

I'm content to perfect theory by continually improving it. But there's
not really any loop hole that I've seen you point out so far. In fact,
if you really want to get absurdly deep with it, not only does every
single thing that a person has ever experienced affect their current
experience, but the universe isn't even deterministic. So just because
everything a person has ever experienced affects a person's present
experience doesn't mean that

1) everything they've ever experienced affects their present
experience with the same weight
2) it isn't possible to draw statistical inferences about their
present experience from a subset of their past experiences
3) it isn't possible to take the elements that we aren't modeling and
treat them as obeying a normal curve when taken in an aggregate in a
population

There is nothing "imperfect" about the above.

Specifically, learned cues can affect how the harmonic series detector
in the brain will fire, as I think we're in agreement on now. This is
what I think that learned scalar structures and Rothenberg and etc are
doing; they're biasing how the harmonic series detector will fire in
advance - they are a set of rules that tells you what "roots" and even
individual scale pitches to look for, just as the melody to Frere
Jacques is a set of rules that tells you what "roots" are supposed to
follow one another in the melody. By knowing these rules we can make,
on some level, predictions about what will happen next in a piece of
music. This whole thing about musical enjoyment being about affirming
and violating predictions has been subjected to quite a lot of
research, although I don't know all of the details of it.

There must therefore be some reason that 13-TET sounds particularly
comprehensible although foreign, whereas many other tunings with much
higher accuracy do not. That is, although 13-TET requires a training
period just like any other tuning, I find that the training period is
much shorter than with other tunings - Blackwood's 13-TET etude is a
good example of this. To learn how to COMPOSE in 13-TET is another
story entirely, but in terms of deciphering information it seems to
work well. There is an inherent comprehensibility in the "rules" of
(Blackwood's take on) 13-TET that is easily apprehended. It could be
because these cues, in a sense, "stay out of one another's way" such
that we can see the order in what's going on. Avoiding clutter in the
rules is what I think needs to be studied, as well as gaining a better
understanding of what the rules are. If clutter in the rules is
avoided, then the signal to noise ratio will increase for the
information that we're deriving from the music.

As we have currently no insight into how these cues work short of
Rothenberg's ideas, which don't take harmonic series detection into
account at all, then I say this is as good a starting point as any.

> Are you so sure it's the theory that needs improving? I haven't run into any problems using loosely-harmonic-based harmonies within MOS structures. The only place I run aground of theory is where the theory says chords that don't well-approximate simple harmonic series relationships will sound bad. I do base my approach on the harmonic series (to an extent), I just allow a lot more leeway for mistuning than most people. It's not the end-all be-all, and the only way to get to an end-all be-all theory would be to do as you say and "factor every single piece of information into the end result."

What's the point in sticking to the harmonic series, unless you're
"guilty as charged" of what you accused me of below?

> > Is there such a thing as a "noumenal composition" when you factor in
> > that the composition was something created by a composer?
>
> Sure--the composition becomes a noumenon as soon as it leaves the composer's head.

Is the noumenon the composition itself, or the performance of that composition?

> > We don't need to look at the full intricacies of this process in order to
> > understand the first two parts of it, nor does the truth that these
> > parts are coupled together necessitate that we can't divide the
> > process into stages and look at each one separately.
>
> Sure, you can separate them, but it's an artificial post-hoc separation. Nobody's mind is perfectly "one track".

Piaget's theory of child development splits the continuous process of
child development into discrete "stages," and it's done the world a
lot of good anyway. If you want to make the stages more continuous
than what I modeled above, you could throw a feedback mechanism
between them. Or some research might lead to insight into how
significant they are.

> > Elaine Walker's "Love Song" doesn't sound like anything radically
> > different to me.
>
> And yet, it's in Bohlen-Pierce, a non-octave tuning that looks a lot like a slightly-squashed 8-EDO. That song made me realize that yes, you can do stuff in BP that doesn't sound like the soundtrack to a slide-show of deep-space photographs. Ditto the Charles Carpenter stuff Carl linked to.

Every part of Love Song that I can think of is expressible in
12-equal. In fact, the melody she's singing is loosely based around a
series of modulating pentatonic scales. She sings fifths and fourths.
Are those in BP?

My goal is to find something that sounds "radically different" while
still sounding immediately comprehensible. Love Song does not sound
radically different. The theory that nothing that's radically
different can sound immediately comprehensible is not something I've
seen proven.

> > This is not an "atonal" work in the sense that I thought you meant,
> > but I am certainly deriving plenty of information out of it.
>
> Well then, to answer your question, I don't think there's any musical situation that is hopelessly and universally indecipherable. This piece has no discernible regularity in pitch or temporal organization, and if you're getting information out of it, well, there you go.

You'll figure out whatever regularity there is if you listen to it a
million times. If you had to learn and perform this piece, I guarantee
you figure it out.

> > The initial theory behind much microtonal research was that people
> > would unexpectedly be able to make sense of higher-limit harmony,
> > because it uses in an unexpected way the same mechanism that we've
> > been using to make sense of music so far, which is harmonic series
> > detection and VF placement and etc. The fact that this doesn't just
> > seem to instantly work suggests to me that there's more to do to meet
> > this goal, if that's what the goal is.
>
> Indeed.

LOL, why are you arguing with me above then? I've learned that if I
just say the same in a post like four or five times, you'll generally
agree with it one of those times.

> > Your suggestion above, that
> > this ideal can be reached by simply providing familiar auditory cues
> > in a different tuning, is the opposite extreme. I'd say that it isn't
> > unexpected cognition at all, because cognitive awareness of the tuning
> > isn't something that people generally have much access to when
> > listening to a piece of music. Rather, it's the cognitive cues that
> > they're being presented with that they do have access to, so if you
> > happen to use a certain tuning in such a way to just present those
> > same cues, then you aren't hitting upon unexpected patterns of
> > cognition at all.
>
> Sounds like your saying that if people hear the tuning and think it sounds weird, we're doing it wrong, but if they don't hear the tuning (regardless of how weird it is), we're also doing it wrong.

?? I'm not sure how you consistently derive the opposite meaning from
my sentences.

- If people hear the tuning and think it sounds weird, and we
predicted a different result, then we have failed, because we didn't
succeed in evoking the "familiar" part of "strange and familiar" in
"xenharmonic."
- If people hear a piece of music in a different tuning and don't have
any idea that it's not the tuning they're used to, then we have also
failed, because we didn't succeed in evoking the "strange" part of
"strange and familiar" in "xenharmonic."
- A tuning is a set of limitations, not a set of possibilities.
- If you write a song in BP that sounds like it's in 12-equal, people
have no idea that technically, your choice of tuning prohibits you
from using the octave.
- The fact that they "technically don't know this" isn't a bad thing,
but it does mean that it's cognitively irrelevant; in the Kantian
dichotomy we talked about above, it forms part of the composer's
phenomenal experience of the piece, but is not part of the noumenal
composition.

Keep in mind I'm still unsure that an abstract idea like a
"composition" or a "speech" or a "sentence" can have a noumenal
equivalent at all, but for the sake of argument let's assume so.

> > I'm convinced at this point that you don't know what my hypothesis
> > about minorness is, because you seem to misrepresent it in every
> > conversation that we have. I think that if learned factors get your
> > "harmonic series detector" to fire in a certain way in response to a
> > chord, it'll be heard as minor, and if they fire another way, it'll be
> > heard as major. How exactly does that conflict with anything that I've
> > written here?
>
> As you've articulated it to me, it sounds like you also believe that prior to the advent of influential "learned factors", we made the major/minor distinction based on certain harmonic series features (utonality/otonality, or entropy, or your most recent term, "inharmonicity"). Unless you believe that the initial/pre-cultural assignment of meaning to those qualities was random/arbitrary, it seems like you've been arguing that those harmonic series-related qualities in some way influenced the pre-cultural assignment of meaning. Or am I misinterpreting? Do you believe it would have been possible for some hypothetical culture to do the opposite of us, and assign the "major/happy" quality to utonal/more inharmonic chords, and the "minor/sad" quality to otnal/more harmonic chords? If you do, then we are in agreement. If you don't believe that would be possible, then you're "guilty as charged" of assuming an absolute phonology-semantic correlation.

For like the third or fourth time now, I think
- The experience of "minorness" means that the harmonic series
detector in the brain is operating in a certain, unspecified
configuration
- Learned factors determine whether or not the detector ever reaches
that particular configuration in a certain musical context
- The word "happy" is extremely loaded, because there are plenty of
cases I feel a pleasant sensation of happiness from listening to minor
chords and vice versa for major chords, which can be analyzed almost
100% of the time by modal theory
- For another culture to hear a major chord as minor, they would have
to somehow get the harmonic series detector in the brain to fire and
hear it in whatever way gets them to hear it as minor, perhaps by
hearing the middle note as inharmonic in some sense.

So yes, I think this is possible. When I went to Paul's house, I
started playing a piece on C major on his keyboard, and realized
something was off. The major chords were really flat, so I asked him
if the keyboard was tuned to flattone or something like that. He said
it was tuned to mavila. Suddenly, I realized that the C major chord I
was playing was actually C minor the whole time, e.g. that the E-G was
larger than the C-E, and then there was an impressive and dramatic
shift in my perception from that point on - I didn't hear it as a
really flat major anymore at all, but as a minor. That was a
ridiculous experience.

By the above model of minorness = tonalness, compounded with the
earlier hypothesis that Rothenberg = preattentive F0 bias, that means
that when I heard the minor chord as major, I was hearing that Eb as a
really, really flat E, and hearing the whole thing as a really
distorted 4:5:6, whereas when I heard it as "minor" again, I "let go"
of the middle note and heard it as inharmonic with some kind of more
dissonant relationship to the root. The tactile cue of playing C major
was a "rule" that biased me into the first mode of perception. Is it
possible for another culture to get into the habit of routinely
hearing minor chords as distorted 4:5:6's? Sure, why not! And how
might they guide one another's ears to that result in their tonal
system? I have no idea, that's what we have no information on.

> It's a part of the grammar because it determines (for instance) whether a piece is major or minor, and is a product of the relationship over time of the notes in a piece. If you're playing the white keys on a piano, the order you play them in determines whether you hear the key as C major or A minor (or whatever mode you please). This is analogous to the way changing the order of words in a sentence alters the meaning of the sentence.

I would say that the rules that lead one to figure out a tonal center
are the grammar, but the experience of hearing the tonal center is
not. Meaning that the experience of hearing the tonal center might be
related to psychoacoustics, whereas the rules determine how this
particular psychoacoustic experience might be instantiated.

-Mike

In as much as your answer makes sense,
which is no kind of mathematical sense
(a Fourier transform is a model..),
It is wrong!
The harmonic series is a physical reality, not
an ear-brain construction.
Of course it's always possible to regress
further into schoolboy philosophy, but the
musicological journals are full of that already.

Steve P.

On 17 May 2011, at 20:00, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Steve Parker <steve@...> wrote:
> >
> > On 17 May 2011, at 18:47, Mike Battaglia wrote:
> >
> > As for your assertion that stability is rooted in the
> > harmonic series, the detection of patterns in the harmonic series is a
> > stochastic process that is strongly influenced by learning.
> >
> > I'm not sure what you mean by 'stochastic process'? Or in fact by patterns?
> > The primes are as fundamental as possible and the harmonic series is fundamentally related to that.
> > Steve
>
> The harmonic series is fundamentally related to the prime numbers, but
> both of these concepts are only related to incoming waveforms of sound
> through the Fourier transform. The auditory system doesn't have the
> benefit of there being some computer to perform a full forward Fourier
> transform on the signal, so we've had to evolve various bioengineered
> solutions to the problem. Instead, we have a set of evolved features
> to help us perform this process of extracting frequencies from the
> signal, and then another set of evolved features to help us perform
> the process of matching them to an internalized template of the
> harmonic series, all of which are stochastic processes. Without these
> processes, speaking in terms of primes would be meaningless, because
> we'd have no way to tell what frequencies are in the signal, and hence
> we wouldn't be able to assign those frequencies numbers for there to
> be prime ones of.
>
> Furthermore, perfect frequency resolution would require us performing
> the Fourier transform from now until the end of time on the signal,
> meaning we'd have no time resolution. So the fact that we have time
> resolution blurs our resolution in the frequency domain, introducing
> some uncertainty in the signal. Thus we never really know if a prime
> is a prime, or a mistuned version of some other prime, etc. This is
> compounded by the fact that learned factors can bias us anyway to
> change the perspective that we take on stimuli.
>
> -Mike
>

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 10:10 AM, Steve Parker <steve@...> wrote:
>
> In as much as your answer makes sense,
> which is no kind of mathematical sense
> (a Fourier transform is a model..),
> It is wrong!
> The harmonic series is a physical reality, not
> an ear-brain construction.
> Of course it's always possible to regress
> further into schoolboy philosophy, but the
> musicological journals are full of that already.
> Steve P.

I'm not sure in what abstract sense a Fourier transform is a "model,"
nor was anything I said in my response to you philosophical in nature.
The harmonic series is a physical reality, but it first requires
taking the incoming signal and putting it into the frequency domain,
in a very generalized sense. Or, if you prefer to think outside of the
frequency domain, it requires taking the signal and decomposing it
into constituent elements which are periodic or nearly periodic. The
auditory system accomplishes this feat in a stochastic manner.

The fact that the harmonic series is a mathematical reality doesn't
mean that we have immediate and uncorrupted access to this reality
without having to do some work to apprehend it.

-Mike

Applying the Fourier transform to a signal sampled from a physical system is
using a simple model. Why wouldn't it be? It's an improper integral composed
of sinusoids. There are plenty of other mathematical transforms one might
use, if one were inclined to think in terms of catenaries, troposkeins,
wavelets, Gabor functions, Laplace-Mellin transforms, etc. Whatever approach
one takes, a model has been formed.

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Daniel Nielsen <nielsed@...> wrote:
>
> Applying the Fourier transform to a signal sampled from a physical system is using a simple model. Why wouldn't it be? It's an improper integral composed of sinusoids. There are plenty of other mathematical transforms one might use, if one were inclined to think in terms of catenaries, troposkeins, wavelets, Gabor functions, Laplace-Mellin transforms, etc. Whatever approach one takes, a model has been formed.

OK, fine, call it a model. The point that I'm making is that talking
about "harmonic series" as being "fundamental" implies the improper
application of purely frequency domain-based model to the waveform
going into this ear. This is not the same model that the ear applies,
which is in fact a model that works based off of stochastic processes
and has an element of time resolution to it, thus causing spreading in
the frequency domain. So instead of talking about harmonic series, we
should be talking about fuzzy harmonic series with frequency spreading
(that decay in time), which puts you one better towards what's
actually going on.

Or if you prefer to think from a signal decomposition standpoint,
we're decomposing the signal into localized periodic waveforms, and
the way by which we accomplish this process is stochastic. We are not
decomposing the signal into pure "harmonic series" by any means. The
introduction of this spreading is just one way by which the immediate
apprehension of the periodic components of the signal can be clouded.

So the fact that the "harmonic series" and the "prime numbers" are
important mathematical constructions does not mean that we can just
immediately pick that sort of order out of an incoming signal without
having to resort to the stochastic processes mentioned above, which
obfuscate their clarity. Nor does it mean that they are appropriate to
tout as "fundamental" in this case.

-Mike

PS - since you seem to know an awful lot about signal processing,
would you like to help me work on a fairly challenging project? Ping
me offlist if so.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> > > That sort of feedback loop is what I'm trying to identify as a problem
> > > in music theory. It's inbreeding. It is also, tangentially, a problem
> > > that academic music theory seems to have completely succumbed to,
> > > although rumor has it from Graham that the situation is improving.
> >
> > You can play plenty of other games with a chessboard and chess pieces aside from
> > basic chess.
>
> What's the point of this list then?

My little koan there was supposed to be an analogy that academic music theory is like academic chess theory, but that given a chessboard with no instructions, it's not the case that every person trying to play a game with said chessboard would come up the rules of chess. Which is to say I'm agreeing with you.

> > Of course it can. It may not even exist in some people.
>
> Ohhh no dude, -I'M- the one who said that. Just because you're a
> philosophy major doesn't mean you can take my points and say that
> they're your points. That is academic plagiarism!

Agreement is plagiarism?

> I'm content to perfect theory by continually improving it. But there's
> not really any loop hole that I've seen you point out so far.

Not one you're willing to consider, anyway.

> There is nothing "imperfect" about the above.

Sure there is. No theory is "perfect" until it can, from a set of initial conditions, predict the development of all that is. None of our sciences are perfect yet, although many are still useful.

> Specifically, learned cues can affect how the harmonic series detector
> in the brain will fire, as I think we're in agreement on now. This is
> what I think that learned scalar structures and Rothenberg and etc are
> doing; they're biasing how the harmonic series detector will fire in
> advance - they are a set of rules that tells you what "roots" and even
> individual scale pitches to look for, just as the melody to Frere
> Jacques is a set of rules that tells you what "roots" are supposed to
> follow one another in the melody. By knowing these rules we can make,
> on some level, predictions about what will happen next in a piece of
> music. This whole thing about musical enjoyment being about affirming
> and violating predictions has been subjected to quite a lot of
> research, although I don't know all of the details of it.

I agree with all this, more or less. I think part of the problem here is that you don't understand what I'm actually objecting to, perhaps because I've been ignoring the stuff that I don't object to in my responses (for the most part). Let me see if I can phrase my objection as succinctly as possible:

According to the premises you are advancing, the logical conclusion is that the harmonic series detector is only "detecting" what cultural/learned cues are telling it to detect. Which is to say, it's a passive player in the encoding and/or processing of auditory stimuli, a mere "puppet" of the active player, which would be the cultural/learned "preattentive" stuff. Hence appealing to harmonic series-based properties to explain things like "major" and "minor" doesn't actually explain anything, because the h.s.d. seems perfectly content to ignore any "actual" harmonic series properties if told to do so by cultural cues. IOW it's the cultural cues that have all the explanatory power here. Your example of trying to play C major on Paul's mavila-tuned piano and failing to detect the minorness because the cues were so strong supports this--your h.s.d. was only detecting what the environmental cues told it to. Of course it still sounded out-of-tune (geez, what if he had had an adaptive timbre going on--ooh, that could be a good experiment), so you asked him what was going on with the tuning, and when he told you it was Mavila, that cue told you "oh, these are MINOR chords" and it all snapped into place. If he had had an adaptive timbre going on to minimize the beating, and if he had told you nothing was weird about it, how long do you think it would have taken you to figure out it was Mavila?

I guess what I'm saying is that equating specific "read-outs" of our h.s.d.'s with "perception of minorness" offers no explanatory power unless our h.s.d.'s actually have a significant success rate of accurately perceiving harmonic series-related qualities of chords, *even in the face of confounding factors* like cultural cues. Since the cues strong-arm the h.s.d. the majority of the time, we can safely ignore the h.s.d. and look exclusively at the cues to explain "minorness" and "majorness".

> There must therefore be some reason that 13-TET sounds particularly
> comprehensible although foreign, whereas many other tunings with much
> higher accuracy do not.

I don't think it's the tuning, really. Jon Catler's "Evolution for Guitar and Orchestra" uses higher-limit JI in a truly masterful and comprehensible way, as does at least a few of Dante Rosati's compositions. Kraig Grady has produced some very compelling JI work, and we know how much you loved Monz's "Invisible Haircut". Higher-limit JI can sound really fucking cool in the right hands. Of course, the higher-accuracy regular temperaments are another story...but mostly because they haven't attracted as much compositional attention. I'll bet we *could* get some really awesome sounds out of Magic[10] and Hanson[11] if we had the right person composing in them.

> That is, although 13-TET requires a training
> period just like any other tuning, I find that the training period is
> much shorter than with other tunings - Blackwood's 13-TET etude is a
> good example of this. To learn how to COMPOSE in 13-TET is another
> story entirely, but in terms of deciphering information it seems to
> work well. There is an inherent comprehensibility in the "rules" of
> (Blackwood's take on) 13-TET that is easily apprehended. It could be
> because these cues, in a sense, "stay out of one another's way" such
> that we can see the order in what's going on. Avoiding clutter in the
> rules is what I think needs to be studied, as well as gaining a better
> understanding of what the rules are. If clutter in the rules is
> avoided, then the signal to noise ratio will increase for the
> information that we're deriving from the music.

Figuring out how to do this would be great.

> As we have currently no insight into how these cues work short of
> Rothenberg's ideas, which don't take harmonic series detection into
> account at all, then I say this is as good a starting point as any.

So can we drop the talk of the "harmonic series detector" and start trying to figure out the cues? If so, then I'm on board (at least in spirit).

> What's the point in sticking to the harmonic series, unless you're
> "guilty as charged" of what you accused me of below?

Because it's worked well enough for me thus far. Not that I "stick to it" in a strict or absolute sense at all, it's more that most of what I do with music can be described as "loosely 5- or 7-limit".

> Is the noumenon the composition itself, or the performance of that composition?

Yes. Anything that's NOT a phenomenon is a noumenon.

> Piaget's theory of child development splits the continuous process of
> child development into discrete "stages," and it's done the world a
> lot of good anyway. If you want to make the stages more continuous
> than what I modeled above, you could throw a feedback mechanism
> between them. Or some research might lead to insight into how
> significant they are.

I think it's mainly the attitude I object to. If you were going around saying "this model works pretty well for describing what I want to describe, or at least better than available models", I'd say more power to you. But you talk about your hypotheses as if they have some higher validity beyond being somewhat useful.

> Every part of Love Song that I can think of is expressible in
> 12-equal. In fact, the melody she's singing is loosely based around a
> series of modulating pentatonic scales. She sings fifths and fourths.
> Are those in BP?

Does she? Your ear is better than mine, I just took it at face value that her singing was within BP. If she's just singing 12-TET over some spacey BP chords, then that's not really very cool.

> My goal is to find something that sounds "radically different" while
> still sounding immediately comprehensible. Love Song does not sound
> radically different. The theory that nothing that's radically
> different can sound immediately comprehensible is not something I've
> seen proven.

Well, my thinking was that BP *is* radically different, and if it doesn't *sound* radically different, that just means the composer has done a good job of making it feel natural. I think lots of my own music doesn't sound radically different, but it uses structures and sounds impossible in 12-TET, so I've always taken it as a good sign that it doesn't sound unusual to me or to a lot of naive listeners. Like I found ways to trick people into hearing something totally unusual as if it was totally familiar.

> LOL, why are you arguing with me above then? I've learned that if I
> just say the same in a post like four or five times, you'll generally
> agree with it one of those times.

You're not "restating" anything I've ever disagreed with. I've NEVER, EVER, EVER, disagreed that "higher-limit harmonies don't automatically sound comprehensible". If anything, I've been a most vocal proponent of the idea that extending a common-practice approach into the 11- or 13-limit is usually misguided (at best) because it usually DOES sound incomprehensible (as I have frequently said that I find Gene's music and Graham's music "beyond my ability" to comprehend).

> ?? I'm not sure how you consistently derive the opposite meaning from
> my sentences.

Maybe you just have a knack for obfuscating your own points, or maybe I just have a knack for re-stating my understanding of them very poorly.

> - If people hear the tuning and think it sounds weird, and we
> predicted a different result, then we have failed, because we didn't
> succeed in evoking the "familiar" part of "strange and familiar" in
> "xenharmonic."
> - If people hear a piece of music in a different tuning and don't have
> any idea that it's not the tuning they're used to, then we have also
> failed, because we didn't succeed in evoking the "strange" part of
> "strange and familiar" in "xenharmonic."

I've always taken the "strange and familiar" thing to mean tunings that ARE strange, yet SOUND familiar. I don't think something can really sound both strange and familiar at the same time. Strange and pleasant, strange and intriguing, strange and inspiring, strange and catchy...sure. But by definition "strange" is the antonym of "familiar"!

> - A tuning is a set of limitations, not a set of possibilities.

False dichotomy. It's both.

> - The fact that they "technically don't know this" isn't a bad thing,
> but it does mean that it's cognitively irrelevant; in the Kantian
> dichotomy we talked about above, it forms part of the composer's
> phenomenal experience of the piece, but is not part of the noumenal
> composition.

I'd say it fails to be a part of the phenomenal experience of the listener, but is still part of the noumenal composition.

> By the above model of minorness = tonalness, compounded with the
> earlier hypothesis that Rothenberg = preattentive F0 bias, that means
> that when I heard the minor chord as major, I was hearing that Eb as a
> really, really flat E, and hearing the whole thing as a really
> distorted 4:5:6, whereas when I heard it as "minor" again, I "let go"
> of the middle note and heard it as inharmonic with some kind of more
> dissonant relationship to the root. The tactile cue of playing C major
> was a "rule" that biased me into the first mode of perception. Is it
> possible for another culture to get into the habit of routinely
> hearing minor chords as distorted 4:5:6's? Sure, why not! And how
> might they guide one another's ears to that result in their tonal
> system? I have no idea, that's what we have no information on.

But what I mean is not that they'd hear a minor chord as a distorted 4:5:6; I mean that a minor chord could make their h.s.d. jump exactly the same way ours does, and yet produce an opposite emotional response. Do you believe this is possible (in one word, please)?

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> There must therefore be some reason that 13-TET sounds particularly
> comprehensible although foreign, whereas many other tunings with much
> higher accuracy do not.

What are these high-accuracy tunings which allegedly do not sound comprehensible?

> - If people hear the tuning and think it sounds weird, and we
> predicted a different result, then we have failed, because we didn't
> succeed in evoking the "familiar" part of "strange and familiar" in
> "xenharmonic."

Why do you care if people think something in 22et porcupine sounds weird? Probably some will and some won't.

> Suddenly, I realized that the C major chord I
> was playing was actually C minor the whole time, e.g. that the E-G was
> larger than the C-E, and then there was an impressive and dramatic
> shift in my perception from that point on - I didn't hear it as a
> really flat major anymore at all, but as a minor. That was a
> ridiculous experience.

Ridiculous? Pretty interesting, I would have thought.

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 12:34 PM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> PS - since you seem to know an awful lot about signal processing,
> would you like to help me work on a fairly challenging project? Ping
> me offlist if so.

Also, to clarify, it's tuning related, and something I've posted about
before, and if you'd like to get involved, I think it could lead to
some pretty huge developments around here. It's all loosely related to
this concept of trying to find a quick first-order approximation for
HE.

-Mike

>
> > PS - since you seem to know an awful lot about signal processing,
> > would you like to help me work on a fairly challenging project? Ping
> > me offlist if so.
>
> Also, to clarify, it's tuning related, and something I've posted about
> before, and if you'd like to get involved, I think it could lead to
> some pretty huge developments around here. It's all loosely related to
> this concept of trying to find a quick first-order approximation for
> HE.
>

I definitely would be interested in working with you on this - esp. since
you understand the music theory and parts of the signal processing side
better than I do - BUT cannot commit the time right now. I've been wanting
to test a notion for several weeks now, and I'm also getting this FifePlay
thing (program that processes text messages as audio data) working really
well (not to mention other projects in purgatory). Let me get back to you.
I'm just posting this onlist in case others are interested in pinging you
about this.

I think we're going in circles, and now that I've had more time to
think, so I'm going to restate my thoughts on this.

Our mission statement seems to loosely be to find music that people
think is strange yet oddly familiar, which is the whole point of this
"xenharmonic" thing. Stockhausen is pretty "xenharmonic," but that's
not what we're concerning ourselves with, because it's simply too
different - we're trying to "extend existing music" into other tuning
systems in a sense.

So that indicates that we're trying to find some kind of middle path
between complete and utter infamiliarity and more of the same. However
- this goal is subjective, not objective, because we're making
reference to the concept of "infamiliarity." Or, in other words, we
are not studying noumenal "music," but phenomenal music, and huge
parts of this phenomenal music are influenced by learning.

So in light of that, when we talk about a training period being
required for someone to hear a new tonal system "the right way," a few
things need to be noted

1) We haven't established under what conditions it is -impossible- to
construct a musical event that someone can't hear a certain way with
enough training.
2) It is likely that such conditions don't exist, due to the human
brain's capacity to adapt to extract information from a signal.
3) Thus to state that a certain musical phenomenon can sound like a
certain functional element of a certain larger system 4000 years from
now is a zero-entropy statement.
4) But that's okay, because we were never concerned with things that
people could learn to like 54000 years from now. We were concerned
with things that sounded strange yet familiar.
5) Thus to reach the original goal, we need to figure out how to get
people to hear things the new way. We need to learn how to guide
people's ears to a Pajara tonal system instead of a meantone one, or
whatever it is we're trying to do.
6) I notice that certain scales/tunings/etc seem to be immediately
comprehensible whereas other ones don't, which suggests to me that
there's more to figure out. You seem to agree below
7) If it really turns out that some tonal system simply just requires
decades of training to hear properly, that doesn't mean it's musically
useless, but it's worth knowing that this is the case.

This is thus at odds with the above goal because it isn't going to
sound immediately strange yet familiar. However, that doesn't mean
that we have to pander to the 12-tet crowd as well - but it does mean
that

- This cause would only be served by understanding what exactly this
additional level of order going on under the hood is
- This cause would only be served by understanding how to guide people
towards a new system

One last koan: you can play really warped diatonic-style melodies in
father[8] in 13-tet just by using the whole step as a "whole step," a
half step as a "half step," and so things like whole-whole-half-whole
will sound like C-D-E-F-G even despite that the note you end up at is
the 16/11, not the 3/2, in 13-equal. Is it that this is cheating, or
"unstable," or "wrong," because it signifies us just applying our
warped 12-tet hearing to Father[8], rather than learning to hear
Father[8] the true way? I say - what happens if I write a piece in
Father[8] that deliberately works by using the whole/half
relationships I've described above? Who's to say that a person from a
foreign culture with no exposure to either Father or Meantone wouldn't
need to learn to hear it THAT way?

Some quick comments to your replies below as well. This message has
now reached the length of a tome, so in your reply you might want to
just not reply to anything that you agree with or that is
insignificant.

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 12:37 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> My little koan there was supposed to be an analogy that academic music theory is like academic chess theory, but that given a chessboard with no instructions, it's not the case that every person trying to play a game with said chessboard would come up the rules of chess. Which is to say I'm agreeing with you.

Right, and I think I'm agreeing with you as well, but I'm asking then,
what is the point of this list? We can come up with white noise and
claim that someone will find order in it in 6000 years, but that's not
what we want, really. So I'm asking for a measure of introspection
here. This is what I addressed above.

> > Ohhh no dude, -I'M- the one who said that. Just because you're a
> > philosophy major doesn't mean you can take my points and say that
> > they're your points. That is academic plagiarism!
>
> Agreement is plagiarism?

This was just a joke dude :)

> > I'm content to perfect theory by continually improving it. But there's
> > not really any loop hole that I've seen you point out so far.
>
> Not one you're willing to consider, anyway.

I'm willing to consider anything. The whole point of this post is I've
discovered a loophole in my prior thinking that I am willing to share.

> > There is nothing "imperfect" about the above.
>
> Sure there is. No theory is "perfect" until it can, from a set of initial conditions, predict the development of all that is. None of our sciences are perfect yet, although many are still useful.

This seems like an arbitrary ideal; you have not proven that this has
to be what a perfect theory is. Furthermore, this is an unattainable
goal, as our universe is indeterministic, and as we keep learning
we'll run up against that layer sooner or later, so your theory of
perfectness is imperfect. Lastly, if the goal of a theory is to make
statistical inferences of a probabilistic nature, and it succeeds in
doing so, then it is succeeding in its objective. Quantum mechanics is
a theory of such a nature and we don't have to prove that a
superdeterministic interpretation is correct all at once before
continuing to develop our understanding of what's going on.

> According to the premises you are advancing, the logical conclusion is that the harmonic series detector is only "detecting" what cultural/learned cues are telling it to detect. Which is to say, it's a passive player in the encoding and/or processing of auditory stimuli, a mere "puppet" of the active player, which would be the cultural/learned "preattentive" stuff. Hence appealing to harmonic series-based properties to explain things like "major" and "minor" doesn't actually explain anything, because the h.s.d. seems perfectly content to ignore any "actual" harmonic series properties if told to do so by cultural cues. IOW it's the cultural cues that have all the explanatory power here.

The idea wasn't that H.S.D. stuff has any explanatory power in actual
predictive models. The idea was that when we say minor chords sound
"sad," it's not really that they sound "sad," but that they have a
particular ineffable quality. The particular insight here is that this
quality may be the subjective experience of the HSD firing a certain
way. My hypothesis, which Carl and Parncutt seem to have also
advanced, is that the middle note is inharmonic and slightly intrusive
from a scene analysis perspective (what has been called "low
tonalness"). Again though, this is just a hypothesis, there may be
refinements to this that make more sense.

So again, the main theory is that the actual experience of minorness
is the direct experience of a certain psychoacoustic affect. Learned
cues determine whether or not this happens. The point isn't that bare
psychoacoustics can predict what will or will not sound minor - in
fact, I'm saying that's NOT possible, so although you keep arguing
with your perception of me advancing this point, I'm not advancing it
at all. But bare psychoacoustics, combined with a better perspective
on how these learned cues work, will in fact make such predictions
possible - it could be that we learn how to get the HSD to fire a
certain way and then HE will predict the rest, to simplify a bit.

> Your example of trying to play C major on Paul's mavila-tuned piano and failing to detect the minorness because the cues were so strong supports this--your h.s.d. was only detecting what the environmental cues told it to. Of course it still sounded out-of-tune (geez, what if he had had an adaptive timbre going on--ooh, that could be a good experiment), so you asked him what was going on with the tuning, and when he told you it was Mavila, that cue told you "oh, these are MINOR chords" and it all snapped into place. If he had had an adaptive timbre going on to minimize the beating, and if he had told you nothing was weird about it, how long do you think it would have taken you to figure out it was Mavila?

I don't have any idea, but yes, I agree with where you are going with
this and that's why I put it out there.

> I guess what I'm saying is that equating specific "read-outs" of our h.s.d.'s with "perception of minorness" offers no explanatory power unless our h.s.d.'s actually have a significant success rate of accurately perceiving harmonic series-related qualities of chords, *even in the face of confounding factors* like cultural cues.

An alternate approach is to demystify this whole "cultural cues"
concept by learning specifically what they are and how they interact
with the HSD. They could interact very strongly or very loosely. They
might not interact at all, and this could all be a red herring. But
it's worthwhile as a point of departure, I think.

The whole/half cue I wrote about above is a pretty good cue and a good
starting point.

> Since the cues strong-arm the h.s.d. the majority of the time, we can safely ignore the h.s.d. and look exclusively at the cues to explain "minorness" and "majorness".

OK. But I'd add that I think it's important to not rule the HSD out
entirely. We don't have any idea what the big picture is. Just because
we're moving away from the HSD for a little bit doesn't mean that we
won't see the Grand Unified Theory of Everything in a few months where
it all ties together. The initial hypothesis that I've proposed is
that cultural cues pre-bias the HSD to fire in a certain way. So that
means that if we want to get the HSD to fire in way xxx (10:13:15), we
need to find out how to create a system of cues that is comprehensible
enough to to suggest doing so. It also might mean that many of the
chords that we like now might not be what those chords could sound
like at all in a different circumstance.

> I don't think it's the tuning, really. Jon Catler's "Evolution for Guitar and Orchestra" uses higher-limit JI in a truly masterful and comprehensible way, as does at least a few of Dante Rosati's compositions. Kraig Grady has produced some very compelling JI work, and we know how much you loved Monz's "Invisible Haircut". Higher-limit JI can sound really fucking cool in the right hands. Of course, the higher-accuracy regular temperaments are another story...but mostly because they haven't attracted as much compositional attention. I'll bet we *could* get some really awesome sounds out of Magic[10] and Hanson[11] if we had the right person composing in them.

OK, agreed, it has more to do with compositional technique. But it
also has to do with accepting that harmonic entropy does not preclude
a comprehensible cognitive structure from forming, and that the
comprehensibility of the result structure is really what's important,
not HE.

> > As we have currently no insight into how these cues work short of
> > Rothenberg's ideas, which don't take harmonic series detection into
> > account at all, then I say this is as good a starting point as any.
>
> So can we drop the talk of the "harmonic series detector" and start trying to figure out the cues? If so, then I'm on board (at least in spirit).

That's what I'm proposing, yes. But I want to do more than just study
the existing cues, I want to see what fundamentally these cues "are,"
or else I think we'll be going nowhere. This is why I'm looking for
psychoacoustic correlates to the whole thing. It might just be that
there's more to psychoacoustics than the raw HSD, and we've been
ignoring huge parts of it. Or it might have to do with how higher
cognitive processes influence lower psychoacoustics ones (which would
then be another "false post-hoc separation" as you laid it out
earlier). Or it might have to do with an entirely different cognitive
realm that has nothing to do with psychoacoustics, and appeasing the
HE and Sethares curves just provides some kind of background
pleasantness while the real musical substance has to do with this
unknown cognitive realm.

> > Is the noumenon the composition itself, or the performance of that composition?
>
> Yes. Anything that's NOT a phenomenon is a noumenon.

Can an idea be a noumenon? Because while the performance of a piece of
work has a noumenal vs phenomenal side to it, the composition itself
is an idea. The point is that the notion of "a composition" includes
the learned cues that the composer expects his audience to have, at
least the huge general ones like key concepts and such.

> I think it's mainly the attitude I object to. If you were going around saying "this model works pretty well for describing what I want to describe, or at least better than available models", I'd say more power to you. But you talk about your hypotheses as if they have some higher validity beyond being somewhat useful.

You know what Igs, I came up with this insight after a lot of
meditation on the subejct, and started feeling like I was really onto
something. I have this sense of foreboding about posting stuff like
this on the list, because people

> > Every part of Love Song that I can think of is expressible in
> > 12-equal. In fact, the melody she's singing is loosely based around a
> > series of modulating pentatonic scales. She sings fifths and fourths.
> > Are those in BP?
>
> Does she? Your ear is better than mine, I just took it at face value that her singing was within BP. If she's just singing 12-TET over some spacey BP chords, then that's not really very cool.

Yes. The chords she's playing are also basically just 12-TET chords
that sound really stretched out. The fact that technically, her
instrument can't play other notes that are located an octave apart
from the notes that she's playing isn't anything that the audience
would ever know or care about. I could also just decide to not play
octaves and play the same chords in 12-TET. The chords are intoned
differently, however, which does sound pretty cool.

> Well, my thinking was that BP *is* radically different, and if it doesn't *sound* radically different, that just means the composer has done a good job of making it feel natural. I think lots of my own music doesn't sound radically different, but it uses structures and sounds impossible in 12-TET, so I've always taken it as a good sign that it doesn't sound unusual to me or to a lot of naive listeners. Like I found ways to trick people into hearing something totally unusual as if it was totally familiar.

That isn't what Elaine sounded like she was doing with Love Song. It
wasn't totally unusual what she was doing at all. It sounded like
12-TET chords that were intoned differently, which was a cool effect.
Not that it was a bad song.

> You're not "restating" anything I've ever disagreed with. I've NEVER, EVER, EVER, disagreed that "higher-limit harmonies don't automatically sound comprehensible". If anything, I've been a most vocal proponent of the idea that extending a common-practice approach into the 11- or 13-limit is usually misguided (at best) because it usually DOES sound incomprehensible (as I have frequently said that I find Gene's music and Graham's music "beyond my ability" to comprehend).

I'm obliged to say here that I think that Gene's music is some of the
sickest music ever written. But OK, yes, it's obviously possible to
make a comprehensible system out of higher-limit harmonies. But I'm
starting to think the comprehensibility part is more important than
the concordance part.

> > ?? I'm not sure how you consistently derive the opposite meaning from
> > my sentences.
>
> Maybe you just have a knack for obfuscating your own points, or maybe I just have a knack for re-stating my understanding of them very poorly.

Probably both.

> I've always taken the "strange and familiar" thing to mean tunings that ARE strange, yet SOUND familiar. I don't think something can really sound both strange and familiar at the same time. Strange and pleasant, strange and intriguing, strange and inspiring, strange and catchy...sure. But by definition "strange" is the antonym of "familiar"!

Strange but pleasant and comprehensible, let's go with that.

> But what I mean is not that they'd hear a minor chord as a distorted 4:5:6; I mean that a minor chord could make their h.s.d. jump exactly the same way ours does, and yet produce an opposite emotional response. Do you believe this is possible (in one word, please)?

I don't know. You are asking me if the feeling of minorness really is
the feeling of the HSD firing a certain way. I suggest that it is, but
I don't know. Even if the HSD fires a certain way, it's certainly
possible for a subject to be subjected to years of abuse where they
get zapped with electric shocks when they hear major chords and
rewarded with candy when they hear minor chords, so I guess yes.

-Mike

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 12:43 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > There must therefore be some reason that 13-TET sounds particularly
> > comprehensible although foreign, whereas many other tunings with much
> > higher accuracy do not.
>
> What are these high-accuracy tunings which allegedly do not sound comprehensible?

Porcupine did not sound immediately comprehensible to me until

1) I worked out its MODMOS's, and
2) I came up with the functional excerpts

Now I really "get it," I didn't before. I need to gain a better
understanding of porcupine modal harmony, which is what Petr has been
exploring. That's where I think the xenharmonic meat of the system
really lies.

I don't think that there is anything that can't be turned into a
comprehensible system, but I think that closeness to JI does not
automatically ensure a system's comprehensibility. Something about the
way that Blackwood used 13-equal in his etude really speaks to me, in
a way it's the most xenharmonic piece of music I've ever heard. So
there has to be something that he's doing that makes it so. Your stuff
is also comprehensible to me, but I need to listen to it a lot more to
get the hang of it.

I hear there being lots of order in it, but haven't gotten my head
wrapped around it yet. I think going through the latest wave of comma
pumps you've posted will help me get the hang of it more. However,
when I listen to your stuff, I still end up throwing 12-tet based
relationships over everything, which "break" or shift at a certain
point, which I think is cool. Meanwhile, something about what
Blackwood was doing with 13-tet actually created different
relationships and a whole new system of music, which is now turning
into the discovery of the year for my personal paradigm. So there's
another level of order on top of what we (or at least I) already know.

> > - If people hear the tuning and think it sounds weird, and we
> > predicted a different result, then we have failed, because we didn't
> > succeed in evoking the "familiar" part of "strange and familiar" in
> > "xenharmonic."
>
> Why do you care if people think something in 22et porcupine sounds weird? Probably some will and some won't.

I would like to understand better what makes it sound weird to those
people, how to guide their ear to the new system, and why certain
things seem to be immediately apprehensible whereas others don't.

> > Suddenly, I realized that the C major chord I
> > was playing was actually C minor the whole time, e.g. that the E-G was
> > larger than the C-E, and then there was an impressive and dramatic
> > shift in my perception from that point on - I didn't hear it as a
> > really flat major anymore at all, but as a minor. That was a
> > ridiculous experience.
>
> Ridiculous? Pretty interesting, I would have thought.

Forsooth, I spake in the vernacular of my youth.

-Mike

Well. I've been saying for since I've joined this list and participated in Michael S's discussions of popularize of microtonality is that Blues and Jazz point the way. Melodic incorporation of microtonality into a western context is pretty common place. What we need to do is to find a few great chords and even there Blues often enough holds a neutral (blue notes) as a chord member.

It seems people on this list (understandably). Are bored with my microtoanal blues / rock. However I find lots of acceptance of 17 and now 19 equal in 12 equal circles. It doesn't sound so forgein or repulsive to the audience. So I think that path is a clear direction to follow.

"Our mission statement seems to loosely be to find music that people think is strange yet oddly familiar, which is the whole point of this"xenharmonic" thing. Stockhausen is pretty "xenharmonic," but that'snot what we're concerning ourselves with, because it's simply toodifferent - we're trying to "extend existing music" into other tuningsystems in a sense."

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:11 PM, <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
>
> Well. I've been saying for since I've joined this list and participated in Michael S's discussions of popularize of microtonality is that Blues and Jazz point the way. Melodic incorporation of microtonality into a western context is pretty common place. What we need to do is to find a few great chords and even there Blues often enough holds a neutral (blue notes) as a chord member.
>
> It seems people on this list (understandably). Are bored with my microtoanal blues / rock. However I find lots of acceptance of 17 and now 19 equal in 12 equal circles. It doesn't sound so forgein or repulsive to the audience. So I think that path is a clear direction to follow.

I say go for it. Both of those systems support meantone, so they're
definitely going to sound comprehensible. I would also say that I'm
just on an obsessed mission right now to figure out what exactly about
13-equal is blowing my mind so much.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> > What are these high-accuracy tunings which allegedly do not sound comprehensible?
>
> Porcupine did not sound immediately comprehensible to me until
>
> 1) I worked out its MODMOS's, and
> 2) I came up with the functional excerpts

Night on Porcupine Mountain sounded incomprehensible and non-functional?

http://www.archive.org/download/NightOnPorcupineMountain/Genewardsmithmussorgsky-NightOnPorcupineMountain.mp3

Part of the idea of this was to demonstrate some of the functional possibilities inherent in porcupine by sheer overwhelming force, so if that didn't work for you I didn't completely succeed.

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:46 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> Night on Porcupine Mountain sounded incomprehensible and non-functional?
>
> http://www.archive.org/download/NightOnPorcupineMountain/Genewardsmithmussorgsky-NightOnPorcupineMountain.mp3
>
> Part of the idea of this was to demonstrate some of the functional possibilities inherent in porcupine by sheer overwhelming force, so if that didn't work for you I didn't completely succeed.

It does now, but that's also because I now understand porcupine.
Specifically, I think what it is is that as Western listeners, we're
used to scale movement by things like half steps and whole steps, so
the concept of splitting the 4/3 into three equal ~160 cent sized
intervals was pretty baffling. The fact that there were two whole
tones was also pretty baffling. I think it was because I was trying to
fit the 160 cent motion into a template for 9/8, i.e. hear it as a
nicely resonant and otonal interval. Instead I was hearing something
altogether different entirely. I've started to learn to hear that
interval as a combination of 11/10 and 12/11, but it's another
challenge to separate 10/9 from 9/8 in my head, and hear 10/9 as being
the same as 12/11 and 11/10.

Keep in mind that everything you're trying to accomplish with
porcupine in this example is dependent on having a particular type of
hearing set up that you already have - you can make predictions with
the material because not only did you write it, but you understand
porcupine. To a naive listener, it sounds like bits and pieces of what
they know, but pieced together in an incomprehensible way.

It would be great if we figured out ways to gently guide the ear of a
Western listener towards an understanding of porcupine hearing,
perhaps in some kind of "Overture" format for works that managed to do
so. I think that my "functional excerpt" comma pump example I laid out
in the other thread might be a good way towards doing that - most
other musicians report to me that they can hear the logic inherent in
it, but that they need to take time to work it out and really
understand it. It's a pretty simple concept, really - to gain an
understanding of a new system, first compose some Mozart-style common
practice music in it. Not sure if this is the best or only way to go
about doing it. If I had heard such an overture it might have been
useful to me as a listener undergoing re-acculturation before jumping
into something more challenging like the Mussorgsky work.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> 6) I notice that certain scales/tunings/etc seem to be immediately
> comprehensible whereas other ones don't, which suggests to me that
> there's more to figure out. You seem to agree below

Yep. I believe any system that contains at least one of the strong cues we're used to will sound more initially comprehensible than one that doesn't. I suspect melodic cues might be more important in comprehensibility than harmonic ones. This isn't just about consecutive scale-steps but also things like motion by major 3rds or perfect 5ths, too. I suspect the reason I've never liked Porcupine is because in the MOS's, there are almost no familiar cues anywhere. You can't do a I-IV-V, AND the melodic steps are all right between whole-tone and semitone. At least in Mavila you can play a I-IV-V and if you leave the fifth out it sounds perfectly pedestrian. Scales like Magic[10] and Hanson[11] are similarly devoid of familiar melodic cues. Maybe that explains my preferences? I used to think having pairs of triads that span the same outer interval but flip the middle interval and act as sort of "yin/yang" dualities was important, but you get that in Porcupine and it doesn't seem to help me much.

> 7) If it really turns out that some tonal system simply just requires
> decades of training to hear properly, that doesn't mean it's musically
> useless, but it's worth knowing that this is the case.

I don't think anything would take decades. Give me a few months of forcing me to play ONLY Porcupine and I'm sure I'd naturalize it eventually. But anyway your point is valid. It's harder to get one's head around a 23-note MOS or a 27-note Hobbit than it is around a 7-note or a 10-note MOS, both as listener and composer. Unless you're Gene, in which case the sky's the limit! Or Catler, and his 64-tone JI guitar...I have no idea how he keeps his bearings on that thing, really. It would drive me mad to try to keep track of what note I was actually playing.

> - This cause would only be served by understanding what exactly this
> additional level of order going on under the hood is
> - This cause would only be served by understanding how to guide people
> towards a new system

Well, like I said above--I think it's the case that there are a lot of different cues in "normal" music, and finding systems that preserve the minimal necessary amount of them while introducing any number of new elements is a good way to go.

> This seems like an arbitrary ideal; you have not proven that this has
> to be what a perfect theory is.

How could it be anything else?

> Furthermore, this is an unattainable
> goal, as our universe is indeterministic, and as we keep learning
> we'll run up against that layer sooner or later, so your theory of
> perfectness is imperfect.

No, it's just the universe that is imperfect. Who said perfection had to be attainable?

> Lastly, if the goal of a theory is to make
> statistical inferences of a probabilistic nature, and it succeeds in
> doing so, then it is succeeding in its objective. Quantum mechanics is
> a theory of such a nature and we don't have to prove that a
> superdeterministic interpretation is correct all at once before
> continuing to develop our understanding of what's going on.

Perfection implies improvement is impossible. So long as a theory is less than maximally-accurate in its predictions, there's room for a more accurate theory to come along. If there is no "maximum" of accuracy, then there will ALWAYS be room for a better theory, ergo perfection is impossible. Note that the maximum doesn't have to be 100% accuracy. And in any case no theory is ever "proven". Nothing is ever certain in science, just (increasingly) more confident.

> The idea wasn't that H.S.D. stuff has any explanatory power in actual
> predictive models.

Oh, good then.

> The idea was that when we say minor chords sound
> "sad," it's not really that they sound "sad," but that they have a
> particular ineffable quality.

I hope you mean "chords that are perceived as minor", because your experience on Paul's keyboard effed pretty much all the qualities of a minor chord.

> An alternate approach is to demystify this whole "cultural cues"
> concept by learning specifically what they are and how they interact
> with the HSD. They could interact very strongly or very loosely. They
> might not interact at all, and this could all be a red herring. But
> it's worthwhile as a point of departure, I think.

Tell ya what: figuring out how they interact with the H.S.D. is going to require neuroimaging. At present the role of the H.S.D. in musical perception is so heavily infused with speculation it upsets me to talk about it, because you can't settle speculation with more speculation. Until there is evidence that some area of the brain lights up the same way when it hears a 12-TET major chord as it does when it hears a full harmonic series, and that it lights up the same way when it hears a 12-TET minor chord as it does when it hears a full subharmonic series, I will not be convinced one way or another about the relationship of the H.S.D. to chord quality perception.

Cultural cues, on the other hand, are much easier to manipulate. We just keep doing what many have done before us: analyze familiar music and try to extract regularities that might serve as cues, isolate each of those cues, alter them, and see how that affects musical perception. That we can do, so let's do it.

> OK, agreed, it has more to do with compositional technique. But it
> also has to do with accepting that harmonic entropy does not preclude
> a comprehensible cognitive structure from forming, and that the
> comprehensibility of the result structure is really what's important,
> not HE.

Absolutely, 100% in agreement.

> That's what I'm proposing, yes. But I want to do more than just study
> the existing cues, I want to see what fundamentally these cues "are,"
> or else I think we'll be going nowhere. This is why I'm looking for
> psychoacoustic correlates to the whole thing. It might just be that
> there's more to psychoacoustics than the raw HSD, and we've been
> ignoring huge parts of it. Or it might have to do with how higher
> cognitive processes influence lower psychoacoustics ones (which would
> then be another "false post-hoc separation" as you laid it out
> earlier). Or it might have to do with an entirely different cognitive
> realm that has nothing to do with psychoacoustics, and appeasing the
> HE and Sethares curves just provides some kind of background
> pleasantness while the real musical substance has to do with this
> unknown cognitive realm.

I think the easiest ways to figure out what these cues are is to experiment with removing or altering them until we've stripped them down to their essential properties.

> Can an idea be a noumenon?

No. Ideas are the very essence of phenomena.

> Because while the performance of a piece of
> work has a noumenal vs phenomenal side to it, the composition itself
> is an idea. The point is that the notion of "a composition" includes
> the learned cues that the composer expects his audience to have, at
> least the huge general ones like key concepts and such.

The composition is only an idea if it's in someone's head. Otherwise it's just marks on paper, data on a CD, grooves on a record. Whatever attendant ideas the composition has in someone's head, that's part of its phenomenology.

> You know what Igs, I came up with this insight after a lot of
> meditation on the subejct, and started feeling like I was really onto
> something.

One thing I heard over and over again from chemistry teachers, psych teachers, and philosophy of science teachers is that doing science means constantly doing everything you can to prove yourself wrong. If you fail to prove yourself wrong despite your best efforts, then you might have something with scientific merit. So next time you get that feeling that you're "on to something", I suggest you do what I do when I get the same feeling: try to find exceptions, contradictions, anything that would "burst your bubble".

> Yes. The chords she's playing are also basically just 12-TET chords
> that sound really stretched out. The fact that technically, her
> instrument can't play other notes that are located an octave apart
> from the notes that she's playing isn't anything that the audience
> would ever know or care about. I could also just decide to not play
> octaves and play the same chords in 12-TET. The chords are intoned
> differently, however, which does sound pretty cool.

What about the fact that in BP, there are no whole-tones or semitones? It's not the lack of octaves that throws me with BP, but the lack of familiar melodic patterns. Also, the chords can't move by familiar steps, either, because there's no 3/2 or 4/3 or 5/4. If she's cheating with the melody, that's one thing, but you can't cheat with the chord progressions.

> I'm obliged to say here that I think that Gene's music is some of the
> sickest music ever written.

I agree, but I'm a few decades away from being able to comprehend it fully. ;->

> But OK, yes, it's obviously possible to
> make a comprehensible system out of higher-limit harmonies. But I'm
> starting to think the comprehensibility part is more important than
> the concordance part.

*Ding-ding-ding-ding* We have a winner!

> I don't know. You are asking me if the feeling of minorness really is
> the feeling of the HSD firing a certain way. I suggest that it is, but
> I don't know.

Then until we have a way of experimentally testing, can we agree to leave it at "pending further investigation"?

-Igs

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:05 PM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:46 PM, genewardsmith
> <genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>>
>> Night on Porcupine Mountain sounded incomprehensible and non-functional?
>>
>> http://www.archive.org/download/NightOnPorcupineMountain/Genewardsmithmussorgsky-NightOnPorcupineMountain.mp3
>>
>> Part of the idea of this was to demonstrate some of the functional possibilities inherent in porcupine by sheer overwhelming force, so if that didn't work for you I didn't completely succeed.

Actually, on repeated listen, this is blowing my mind now. I just ran
into something new - if I stop trying to follow the music mentally, I
sometimes end up at these spots where I can't tell if a certain
interval is a "major third" or a "minor third." I realized that rather
than trying to figure it out, which is something that I apparently
have a habit of doing, if I just leave it that way, then I put myself
in this "uncertain frame" for a second and when the chord moves it
starts to flesh out some new, larger order of which this uncertain
minor third was just an unknown part. So now I'm not really sure
what's going on. To be honest I haven't listened to this piece in a
long time and it's currently blowing my mind.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "genewardsmith" <genewardsmith@...> wrote:

> Night on Porcupine Mountain sounded incomprehensible and non-functional?

Actually, it sounds great, I don't think I could tell it was in an unusual tuning at all. But it's clearly written outside the confines of the albitonic-sized MOS's. Porcupine is a temperament where the MOS's are probably more of a liability than an asset.

-Igs

As far as your 13 edo obsession goes I think you have accepted a new
paradigm. I think that is the answer plain and simple.

The other obsession - calling 19 and 17 meantone as a blanket statement I do
not understand.

Chris

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:22 PM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>wrote:

>
>
> I say go for it. Both of those systems support meantone, so they're
> definitely going to sound comprehensible. I would also say that I'm
> just on an obsessed mission right now to figure out what exactly about
> 13-equal is blowing my mind so much.
>
> -Mike
>
>
>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> I say go for it. Both of those systems support meantone, so they're
> definitely going to sound comprehensible. I would also say that I'm
> just on an obsessed mission right now to figure out what exactly about
> 13-equal is blowing my mind so much.

I think you're right about the melodic cues sounding familiar but adding up "wrong"...like how playing 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 still leaves room for another semitone.
Try playing a melody harmonized in parallel 3rds in 13's Father[8], which isn't really Father but actually this unnamed temperament:

http://x31eq.com/cgi-bin/rt.cgi?ets=2ccd_3cd&limit=7

(commas are 28/27 and 4096/3645, by my reckoning anyway, and this connects 13, 18, and 23 among others in the 7-limit).

Parallel 3rds in this scale blow my mind every time.

-Igs

P.S. if no one's named it, can we call it "Uncle" temperament?

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:10 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> > 6) I notice that certain scales/tunings/etc seem to be immediately
> > comprehensible whereas other ones don't, which suggests to me that
> > there's more to figure out. You seem to agree below
>
> Yep. I believe any system that contains at least one of the strong cues we're used to will sound more initially comprehensible than one that doesn't. I suspect melodic cues might be more important in comprehensibility than harmonic ones. This isn't just about consecutive scale-steps but also things like motion by major 3rds or perfect 5ths, too. I suspect the reason I've never liked Porcupine is because in the MOS's, there are almost no familiar cues anywhere. You can't do a I-IV-V

I am obliged to say here that sometimes we need to DITCH the MOS's and
move on. There are three MODMOS's of note here - the one where you
flat the fourth to give you 4/3 instead of 11/8, the one where you
sharpen the 7th to give you 15/8 instead of 11/6, and the one where
you do both, which lands you at a porcupine-tempered JI major scale.
"Sharpening" means movement by 1\22, which is L-s in porcupine[7]. If
you do what I said above, you now have the option to move to the IV
and the V chords, but it just requires modulating the scale that
you're using. This is fine, because it's the same thing that we do
with minor in 12-equal; we have three minor scales and switch between
them as necessary. In fact, we even throw Dorian and Phrygian in there
these days too sometimes.

If you start experimenting with the larger structure of the
JI-tempered porcupine lattice, and start thinking in terms of
generalized structures like I-IV-V, you'll find that 81/80 now equals
25/24, and this equivalence will enable you to modulate around the
lattice in a way that sounds like "common practice" music, except
you'll be able to take advantage of different comma pumps than we're
used to (and the ones we're used to won't work). Go ahead and try it -
use V-I and IV-I resolutions and just move continuously wherever you
want. Use secondary dominants (if you know what those are). Use 16/9
as a dominant 7, which for porcupine is the same as 7/4. You'll see
what I mean. http://soundcloud.com/mikebattagliamusic/functionalporcupineexcerpt

Hooray, but what about modes? Come Together only sounds cool and
detached because it's in Dorian mode. What other ridiculous moods
might be lurking behind the modes of porcupine? I don't know, because
the MOS's behind the modes of porcupine[7] suck. I'm still trying to
work it out. Petr has the concept better than I do.

> AND the melodic steps are all right between whole-tone and semitone. At least in Mavila you can play a I-IV-V and if you leave the fifth out it sounds perfectly pedestrian. Scales like Magic[10] and Hanson[11] are similarly devoid of familiar melodic cues. Maybe that explains my preferences? I used to think having pairs of triads that span the same outer interval but flip the middle interval and act as sort of "yin/yang" dualities was important, but you get that in Porcupine and it doesn't seem to help me much.

I have come to the conclusion that Father[8] is awesome because it
consists only of whole steps and half steps, whereas porcupine has
these weird 160 cent steps that sound very strange on first listen.
Now that I've heard them a million times though, I think they sound
awesome. But we need to find a better way to guide people's 12-tet
ears to hearing these 160 cent steps as natural.

> > 7) If it really turns out that some tonal system simply just requires
> > decades of training to hear properly, that doesn't mean it's musically
> > useless, but it's worth knowing that this is the case.
>
> I don't think anything would take decades. Give me a few months of forcing me to play ONLY Porcupine and I'm sure I'd naturalize it eventually.

I think 2 days of playing with Porcupine and its MODMOS's and you'll
get it. OK, since I keep dropping this cryptic "MODMOS" reference,
I'll let you in on the secret: for porcupine[7] in 22-equal, the
alteration of ANY single note in the scale by 1\22 will lead you to a
MODMOS of porcupine[7] that is proper. I think alterations to any two
notes will also lead to a proper MOS. However, since we're currently
reconsidering the entire concept of propriety, for now I'd say just
alter any note you want and let your ears guide you. So basically the
rule is

- Start with porcupine[7]
- The base major mode is Lssssss
- Sharp or flat any note you want
- This means if you want to play something sounding like 1/1 - 9/8 -
5/4 - 4/3, just flatten that 4th degree by 1\22 and JUST DO IT. Don't
worry about sticking to the MOS
- You will immediately "get" porcupine because there's nothing to get,
it's just music and you can now do whatever you want, but have the
added option of playing porcupine 3ED4/3 licks whenever you want

> But anyway your point is valid. It's harder to get one's head around a 23-note MOS or a 27-note Hobbit than it is around a 7-note or a 10-note MOS, both as listener and composer. Unless you're Gene, in which case the sky's the limit! Or Catler, and his 64-tone JI guitar...I have no idea how he keeps his bearings on that thing, really. It would drive me mad to try to keep track of what note I was actually playing.

I think that wrapping ones head around a 23-note MOS might just mean
wrapping ones head around a 7-note MOS and then also learning a set of
rules for how to modulate chromatically outside of that MOS.

> > - This cause would only be served by understanding what exactly this
> > additional level of order going on under the hood is
> > - This cause would only be served by understanding how to guide people
> > towards a new system
>
> Well, like I said above--I think it's the case that there are a lot of different cues in "normal" music, and finding systems that preserve the minimal necessary amount of them while introducing any number of new elements is a good way to go.

And also learning how to get people to hear porcupine as natural in
some kind of Overture fashion. What do you think of
http://soundcloud.com/mikebattagliamusic/functionalporcupineexcerpt?

> > This seems like an arbitrary ideal; you have not proven that this has
> > to be what a perfect theory is.
>
> How could it be anything else?

I don't know, what does "perfect" mean? You are invoking this concept
as an objection to a direction I suggest that folks round here
consider. You seem to be objecting to the development of a more
accurate but perhaps indeterministic theory because it's imperfect,
and it's imperfect because it's indeterministic, and only things that
are deterministic can be perfect because perfect can't be anything
else. I don't understand.

> > Furthermore, this is an unattainable
> > goal, as our universe is indeterministic, and as we keep learning
> > we'll run up against that layer sooner or later, so your theory of
> > perfectness is imperfect.
>
> No, it's just the universe that is imperfect. Who said perfection had to be attainable?

I actually think that the indeterministic element of the universe
makes it perfect.

> > Lastly, if the goal of a theory is to make
> > statistical inferences of a probabilistic nature, and it succeeds in
> > doing so, then it is succeeding in its objective. Quantum mechanics is
> > a theory of such a nature and we don't have to prove that a
> > superdeterministic interpretation is correct all at once before
> > continuing to develop our understanding of what's going on.
>
> Perfection implies improvement is impossible. So long as a theory is less than maximally-accurate in its predictions, there's room for a more accurate theory to come along. If there is no "maximum" of accuracy, then there will ALWAYS be room for a better theory, ergo perfection is impossible. Note that the maximum doesn't have to be 100% accuracy. And in any case no theory is ever "proven". Nothing is ever certain in science, just (increasingly) more confident.

OK, so I'm saying let's make things more confident. You're saying that
you're not down unless we can actually make it perfect, but by your
above reasoning it can't be perfect, so you want something that as per
what you just said above couldn't possibly exist. So I'm confused.

> > The idea wasn't that H.S.D. stuff has any explanatory power in actual
> > predictive models.
>
> Oh, good then.

But HSD stuff + learned factor stuff might well have explanatory power
in a way that just learned factor stuff might now.

> > The idea was that when we say minor chords sound
> > "sad," it's not really that they sound "sad," but that they have a
> > particular ineffable quality.
>
> I hope you mean "chords that are perceived as minor", because your experience on Paul's keyboard effed pretty much all the qualities of a minor chord.

Yes, I mean "minorness" in the sense of the end perception being what
we'd typically call "minor." There is no noumenal minor chord, but
there is a noumenal phenomenon that may produce the phenomenon of
minorness. Or rather the noumenal minor chord is related to the
phenomenon of minorness only through the statistical probability that
said phenomenon will be produced in a population of listeners.

> > An alternate approach is to demystify this whole "cultural cues"
> > concept by learning specifically what they are and how they interact
> > with the HSD. They could interact very strongly or very loosely. They
> > might not interact at all, and this could all be a red herring. But
> > it's worthwhile as a point of departure, I think.
>
> Tell ya what: figuring out how they interact with the H.S.D. is going to require neuroimaging.

I think some really cleverly devised examples might also be able to do
it. Stay tuned for a listening test coming up. It's just a puzzle to
have to solve. Also, let's come back to the neuroimaging subject in a
few years and see if I can swing the hookup :)

But hey, some of these studies I linked you to actually HAVE
neuroimaging in them, so that might work out.

> Cultural cues, on the other hand, are much easier to manipulate. We just keep doing what many have done before us: analyze familiar music and try to extract regularities that might serve as cues, isolate each of those cues, alter them, and see how that affects musical perception. That we can do, so let's do it.

OK. For starters, father temperament is made up of whole steps and
half steps, and two whole steps makes a major third, and a whole step
plus a half step makes a minor third. That seems to be important, and
I can bias which interval in father[8] sounds like a "fifth" based on
that. For example, doing w-w-h-w up from the root sounds like I'm
tracing out a major scale, despite that the note I end on is the ~650
cent interval. And then doing w-h-w-h DOWN from the octave up from the
root sounds like I'm ending on the tritone from the root, despite that
it's the same note that I laid out above. I'll come up with some
13-tet improvs on my iPhone to demo these concepts.

> I think the easiest ways to figure out what these cues are is to experiment with removing or altering them until we've stripped them down to their essential properties.

It seems to me to have to do with a learned system of logic that tells
the HSD how to fire. Two whole steps puts you at a major third. The
way my fingers fit on a keyboard has to do with this system of logic
as well, and one of the neuroimaging studies I linked you to showed
that when the lips of trumpet players were stimulated, something about
the topological representation of notes in the brain were activated. I
didn't have the link to the fulltext of that study so if your
university has the hookup for you, maybe you can find it.

> > Can an idea be a noumenon?
>
> No. Ideas are the very essence of phenomena.

Then there is no such thing as a phenomenal composition, just a
phenomenal performance of it. And furthermore, a composition also
includes the cues that the listener is supposed to use to decode the
composition to extract information. This discussion has moved on so
much since I first introduced this point I don't remember why this was
significant any more.

> > You know what Igs, I came up with this insight after a lot of
> > meditation on the subejct, and started feeling like I was really onto
> > something.
>
> One thing I heard over and over again from chemistry teachers, psych teachers, and philosophy of science teachers is that doing science means constantly doing everything you can to prove yourself wrong. If you fail to prove yourself wrong despite your best efforts, then you might have something with scientific merit. So next time you get that feeling that you're "on to something", I suggest you do what I do when I get the same feeling: try to find exceptions, contradictions, anything that would "burst your bubble".

I still haven't found anything contradicting the core idea behind what
I've laid out here, although my position has evolved somewhat due to
your feedback. But I'm not even sure what I've stumbled on yet, much
less the final synthesis of it into a concrete statement. That's why I
posted my thoughts on it so far here for critical feedback.

> What about the fact that in BP, there are no whole-tones or semitones? It's not the lack of octaves that throws me with BP, but the lack of familiar melodic patterns. Also, the chords can't move by familiar steps, either, because there's no 3/2 or 4/3 or 5/4. If she's cheating with the melody, that's one thing, but you can't cheat with the chord progressions.

My brain puts a whole-tone/semitone background behind everything she
plays, and she never plays anything that violates that perception. The
fact that her choice of instrument doesn't enable her to play those
things isn't something that would be apparent to a listener.

> > I'm obliged to say here that I think that Gene's music is some of the
> > sickest music ever written.
>
> I agree, but I'm a few decades away from being able to comprehend it fully. ;->

I'm also obliged to say here that "sick" means "good," just like
"ridiculous" means "interesting. Again have I spake in the vernacular
of my youth.

> > I don't know. You are asking me if the feeling of minorness really is
> > the feeling of the HSD firing a certain way. I suggest that it is, but
> > I don't know.
>
> Then until we have a way of experimentally testing, can we agree to leave it at "pending further investigation"?

Stay tuned...

-Mike

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:49 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> I think you're right about the melodic cues sounding familiar but adding up "wrong"...like how playing 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 still leaves room for another semitone.
> Try playing a melody harmonized in parallel 3rds in 13's Father[8], which isn't really Father but actually this unnamed temperament:
>
> http://x31eq.com/cgi-bin/rt.cgi?ets=2ccd_3cd&limit=7
>
> (commas are 28/27 and 4096/3645, by my reckoning anyway, and this connects 13, 18, and 23 among others in the 7-limit).
>
> Parallel 3rds in this scale blow my mind every time.
>
> -Igs
>
> P.S. if no one's named it, can we call it "Uncle" temperament?

Yeah, you I think suggested the mapping in my response to this here

http://launch.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/tuning/message/96071

It's also 5&18, which is here

http://x31eq.com/cgi-bin/rt.cgi?ets=5_18&limit=7

We can call it Uncle. I was going to suggest calling it Godfather
temperament and then the 8192/6561 temperament
(http://launch.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/tuning/message/96087)
Stepfather, but I don't care too much either way. The 8192/6561
temperament really only works with sine waves anyway.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:

> Try playing a melody harmonized in parallel 3rds in 13's Father[8], which isn't really Father but actually this unnamed temperament:
>
> http://x31eq.com/cgi-bin/rt.cgi?ets=2ccd_3cd&limit=7
>
> (commas are 28/27 and 4096/3645, by my reckoning anyway, and this connects 13, 18, and 23 among others in the 7-limit).

{28/27, 256/245} is simpler. Or even {28/27, 1728/1715}. And in terms of patent vals, you can just call uncle 5&18. Discussed previously here:

/tuning/topicId_96071.html#96087

Does anyone know a name for 256/245? Since 12-et tempers it out it really needs to be listed.

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 6:50 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "cityoftheasleep" <igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> > Try playing a melody harmonized in parallel 3rds in 13's Father[8], which isn't really Father but actually this unnamed temperament:
> >
> > http://x31eq.com/cgi-bin/rt.cgi?ets=2ccd_3cd&limit=7
> >
> > (commas are 28/27 and 4096/3645, by my reckoning anyway, and this connects 13, 18, and 23 among others in the 7-limit).
>
> {28/27, 256/245} is simpler. Or even {28/27, 1728/1715}. And in terms of patent vals, you can just call uncle 5&18. Discussed previously here:
>
> /tuning/topicId_96071.html#96087
>
> Does anyone know a name for 256/245? Since 12-et tempers it out it really needs to be listed.

So it looks like 256/245 equates 9/8 * 9/8 with 5/4. I can't imagine
what use that would have in a temperament where 64/63 doesn't vanish.
What other temperaments besides dominant eliminate it? I guess it
suggests that 64/63 either vanishes or gets reversed.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> > Does anyone know a name for 256/245? Since 12-et tempers it out it really needs to be listed.
>
> So it looks like 256/245 equates 9/8 * 9/8 with 5/4.

Nah. It equates 8/7 * 8/7 with 5/4.

I can't imagine
> what use that would have in a temperament where 64/63 doesn't vanish.

Eh? We were just discussing uncle, were we not?

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 7:01 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > > Does anyone know a name for 256/245? Since 12-et tempers it out it really needs to be listed.
> >
> > So it looks like 256/245 equates 9/8 * 9/8 with 5/4.
>
> Nah. It equates 8/7 * 8/7 with 5/4.

Er, yes, that's what I meant. Losing... sleep... agh

> I can't imagine
> > what use that would have in a temperament where 64/63 doesn't vanish.
>
> Eh? We were just discussing uncle, were we not?

I guess it has uses in temperaments where 64/63 vanishes or are reversed.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "genewardsmith" <genewardsmith@...> wrote:
> {28/27, 256/245} is simpler. Or even {28/27, 1728/1715}. And in terms of patent vals, you > can just call uncle 5&18. Discussed previously here:

Thanks, Gene! I knew you'd have a simpler solution.

-Igs

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
>
> As far as your 13 edo obsession goes I think you have accepted a new paradigm. I think that is the answer plain and simple.
>
> The other obsession - calling 19 and 17 meantone as a blanket statement I do not understand.

What do you mean calling them meantone as a blanket statement? What do
you mean "obsession?" I said that both of those systems support
meantone, and indeed they do.

-Mike

> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 4:22 PM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I say go for it. Both of those systems support meantone, so they're
>> definitely going to sound comprehensible. I would also say that I'm
>> just on an obsessed mission right now to figure out what exactly about
>> 13-equal is blowing my mind so much.
>>
>> -Mike

You said you wanted to popularize microtonal music I have serious doubts
that 13 edo is going to sweep the world in a tuning revolution - and that's
not even mentioning the triskaidekaphobia that is surely invoked in the
West. Additionally you appear to reject wanting to do the obvious (and in
fact occurring) solution out of hand - i.e. extending and building on 12 by
adding extra strategic notes.

As to this meantone "obsession" - you keep referring to all things 17 and 19
as "meantone" in a way that seems to me to be derogatory - as if meantone
music is cheap and a waste of time. As if meantone is the homeless wino of
the tuning world wrapped in newspaper living under the 12th street overpass.
I don't think it is.

Chris

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 7:59 AM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > As far as your 13 edo obsession goes I think you have accepted a new
> paradigm. I think that is the answer plain and simple.
> >
> > The other obsession - calling 19 and 17 meantone as a blanket statement I
> do not understand.
>
> What do you mean calling them meantone as a blanket statement? What do
> you mean "obsession?" I said that both of those systems support
> meantone, and indeed they do.
>
> -Mike
>
>
>

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 8:57 AM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
>
> You said you wanted to popularize microtonal music I have serious doubts that 13 edo is going to sweep the world in a  tuning revolution - and that's not even mentioning the triskaidekaphobia that is surely invoked in the West.  Additionally you appear to reject wanting to do the obvious (and in fact  occurring) solution out of hand - i.e. extending and building on 12 by adding extra strategic notes.

I don't think that the One True Way to popularize microtonal music is
to go with extended meantone tunings, no. I think that it is -a-
useful way to go, and you are welcome to explore it. After spending
some time and money on a 31-equal guitar, I decided that additional
mojo was likely to be found elsewhere.

> As to this meantone "obsession" - you keep referring to all things 17 and 19 as "meantone" in a way that seems to me to be derogatory - as if meantone music is cheap and a waste of time. As if meantone is the homeless wino of the tuning world wrapped in newspaper living under the 12th street overpass. I don't think it is.

I don't know what you're talking about. You're reading too much into
this. The optimal vals for 17-equal and 19-equal temper out 81/80, so
they support meantone. I'm not sure how homeless people or wine got
involved here. You must be thinking of the other Michael, because I'm
the one who was repeatedly telling you to get a 19-equal axe a few
months ago.

-Mike

Winos got involved since it seems that meantone is uncool compared to
porcupine etc. But I will admit I'm pretty tuning ignorant.

I'm curious as to if you looked at the post about the temporary fret
improvement - compared to what I did a few weeks back this is much more
playable.
The strings do not need to be 1/2" off the fret board. And this morning I
got the cable ties I installed last night to lay completely flat on the fret
board.
Probably a hair drier would speed that process up.

Chris

> I don't know what you're talking about. You're reading too much into
> this. The optimal vals for 17-equal and 19-equal temper out 81/80, so
> they support meantone. I'm not sure how homeless people or wine got
> involved here. You must be thinking of the other Michael, because I'm
> the one who was repeatedly telling you to get a 19-equal axe a few
> months ago.
>
> -Mike
>
>
>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
> >
> > As far as your 13 edo obsession goes I think you have accepted a new paradigm. I think that is the answer plain and simple.
> >
> > The other obsession - calling 19 and 17 meantone as a blanket statement I do not understand.
>
> What do you mean calling them meantone as a blanket statement? What do
> you mean "obsession?" I said that both of those systems support
> meantone, and indeed they do.

For some values of "support". Does 36 support meantone, using its fifth of 29\36 and its major third of 44\36?

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 12:33 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
> > >
> > > As far as your 13 edo obsession goes I think you have accepted a new paradigm. I think that is the answer plain and simple.
> > >
> > > The other obsession - calling 19 and 17 meantone as a blanket statement I do not understand.
> >
> > What do you mean calling them meantone as a blanket statement? What do
> > you mean "obsession?" I said that both of those systems support
> > meantone, and indeed they do.
>
> For some values of "support". Does 36 support meantone, using its fifth of 29\36 and its major third of 44\36?

<36 65 116 | -4 4 -1> = 36*-4 + 65*4 + 116*-1 = 0

Looks like yes.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> I don't know what you're talking about. You're reading too much into
> this. The optimal vals for 17-equal and 19-equal temper out 81/80, so
> they support meantone.

Um, yeah? 5-limit 17edo, to the extent it even exists, has the patent val, tempering out 25/24, and the 17c val, tempering out 81/80. I'm not sure who promoted 17c to optimal or why.

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 12:41 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > I don't know what you're talking about. You're reading too much into
> > this. The optimal vals for 17-equal and 19-equal temper out 81/80, so
> > they support meantone.
>
> Um, yeah? 5-limit 17edo, to the extent it even exists, has the patent val, tempering out 25/24, and the 17c val, tempering out 81/80. I'm not sure who promoted 17c to optimal or why.

It has the lowest TE error. It's also how Chris seems to be using
17-equal. It's also how I like to use 17-equal. It's also how George
Secor used 17-equal in his paper. It's also how most people seem to
intuitively use 17-equal. So that's somewhere between one and five
reasons.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> > For some values of "support". Does 36 support meantone, using its fifth of 29\36 and its major third of 44\36?
>
> <36 65 116 | -4 4 -1> = 36*-4 + 65*4 + 116*-1 = 0
>
> Looks like yes.

And the result even sounds like music! Check out the music examples at the bottom of the 36edo page:

http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/36edo#Music

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> > Um, yeah? 5-limit 17edo, to the extent it even exists, has the patent val, tempering out 25/24, and the 17c val, tempering out 81/80. I'm not sure who promoted 17c to optimal or why.
>
> It has the lowest TE error. It's also how Chris seems to be using
> 17-equal. It's also how I like to use 17-equal. It's also how George
> Secor used 17-equal in his paper. It's also how most people seem to
> intuitively use 17-equal. So that's somewhere between one and five
> reasons.

And the reason the third should be counted as an approximate 5/4 is?

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "genewardsmith" <genewardsmith@...> wrote:

> And the result even sounds like music! Check out the music examples at the bottom of the 36edo page:
>
> http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/36edo#Music

I'm still waiting for an explanation of how to embed the Yahoo player; Yahoo's instructions don't seem to work.

Gene wrote:
> And the result even sounds like music! Check out the music examples at the bottom of the 36edo page:
>
> http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/36edo#Music

I am so woefully confused right now.

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 12:56 PM,
genewardsmith<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> > It has the lowest TE error. It's also how Chris seems to be using
> > 17-equal. It's also how I like to use 17-equal. It's also how George
> > Secor used 17-equal in his paper. It's also how most people seem to
> > intuitively use 17-equal. So that's somewhere between one and five
> > reasons.
>
> And the reason the third should be counted as an approximate 5/4 is?

The 17-tet "supermajor triad" sounds more like 4:5:6 to me than the
17-tet "neutral triad." In the context of a 17-tet 4:7:9 triad, it
would be counted differently. The fact that you don't get the nice
pleasant "periodicity" buzz effect doesn't mean that 4:5:6 isn't
involved.

-Mike

Looks like someone else discovered this besides me.

Ok, to do it to one page on the wiki

1. click "edit this page" (I'm doing the 24 edo page)
2. click "Widget" on the editing tool bar
3. click "Other HTML" (towards the bottom of the pop up
4. paste in the Yahoo media player code
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://webplayer.yahooapis.com/player.js
"></script>
this is from here: http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/
5. click "save" on widget pop up
6. click "save" on editing tool bar

Now you should see little arrows by every linked mp3 file and youtube video
also you should see an overlaid pastel arrow in the lower left of your
browser.

That is all there is to it.

It is possible someone can edit the wiki template and embed the yahoo media
play auto-magically for the entire site.
I'm not up to that right now.

Chris

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:04 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@sbcglobal.net>wrote:

>
>
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "genewardsmith" <genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> > And the result even sounds like music! Check out the music examples at
> the bottom of the 36edo page:
> >
> > http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/36edo#Music
>
> I'm still waiting for an explanation of how to embed the Yahoo player;
> Yahoo's instructions don't seem to work.
>
>
>

Coming back to this again:

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 5:10 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> > You know what Igs, I came up with this insight after a lot of
> > meditation on the subejct, and started feeling like I was really onto
> > something.
>
> One thing I heard over and over again from chemistry teachers, psych teachers, and philosophy of science teachers is that doing science means constantly doing everything you can to prove yourself wrong. If you fail to prove yourself wrong despite your best efforts, then you might have something with scientific merit. So next time you get that feeling that you're "on to something", I suggest you do what I do when I get the same feeling: try to find exceptions, contradictions, anything that would "burst your bubble".

You said something like this in the email prior as well, that this new
notion isn't anything different from what people have been saying, or
that the idea behind it isn't rooted in an advancement of the
paradigm. So here's basically the whole thing summed up in five
succinct bullet points:

1) "Xenharmonic" music is a relative, subjective, phenomenal term that
describes a particular musical experience that we're trying to evoke
in a certain observer; the experience of having seen a little bit more
of the universe or however you want to think of it.

2) "Xenharmonic" music isn't going to be "xenharmonic" at all in a few
hundred years when we're all used to it. "Xenharmonic" music isn't
"xenharmonic" unless someone actually perceives it as xenharmonic.

3) The claim that someone can get used to a certain tonal system if
one just stops bitching about it might be true, but then again so is
the claim that one can get used to 13-equal and beating and high-error
tunings if they get over the periodicity buzz crack habit.

4) BUT, neither of the above claims have anything to do with anything.
They tautologically indicate the -potential- xenharmonicness of a
system for an observer. All they say that it may be possible for an
observer to experience a certain phenomenon differently than they do
now, WHICH ISN'T SAYING ANYTHING AT ALL AND PUTS US BACK AT SQUARE
ONE. We still haven't explained how to create the xenharmonic feeling
in that observer, which was the whole point of this entire field of
study to begin with, so we've gotten nowhere.

5) Read again: We still haven't explained how to create the
xenharmonic feeling in that observer, which was the whole point of
this entire field of study to begin with, so we've gotten nowhere.
Thus to advance the study of "xenharmonic" music, we'd have to learn
how to guide people to hearing things in a different way.

If you're telling me that this is something that people have been
saying all along, or that this train of thought isn't rooted in any
sort of insight, I don't know what to tell you. I don't think it's
necessary to be so overbearingly modest that we have to pretend that
nobody can have insights into things. If I'm just the last one to
figure this out then alright.

-Mike

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
>
> Winos got involved since it seems that meantone is uncool compared to porcupine etc.  But I will admit I'm pretty tuning ignorant.

I think 19 is awesome because you have meantone but then you also have
negri, hanson, all of these other systems as well. I don't think
there's anything wrong with meantone. I'm holding out for a way to get
people to experience radically new gestalts. I want "new modes," if
you will. I have no idea how to accomplish this objective, just a few
initial ideas that look promising.

> I'm curious as to if you looked at the post about the temporary fret improvement - compared to what I did a few weeks back this is much more playable.
> The strings do not need to be 1/2" off the fret board. And this morning I got the cable ties I installed last night to lay completely flat on the fret board.
> Probably a hair drier would speed that process up.

I didn't see that, can you link me to it again? We should talk more
about the mold idea too.

-Mike

Here is my blog post from last night - picture, explanation, and musical
example.

http://chrisvaisvil.com/?p=871

I just bought 200 more of these cable ties. They are that good. And the
price was reduced - $0.79 per package of 20. So that is 4 cents a tie. Not a
lot to risk.

Chris

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:42 PM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...>wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > Winos got involved since it seems that meantone is uncool compared to
> porcupine etc. But I will admit I'm pretty tuning ignorant.
>
> I think 19 is awesome because you have meantone but then you also have
> negri, hanson, all of these other systems as well. I don't think
> there's anything wrong with meantone. I'm holding out for a way to get
> people to experience radically new gestalts. I want "new modes," if
> you will. I have no idea how to accomplish this objective, just a few
> initial ideas that look promising.
>
>
> > I'm curious as to if you looked at the post about the temporary fret
> improvement - compared to what I did a few weeks back this is much more
> playable.
> > The strings do not need to be 1/2" off the fret board. And this morning I
> got the cable ties I installed last night to lay completely flat on the fret
> board.
> > Probably a hair drier would speed that process up.
>
> I didn't see that, can you link me to it again? We should talk more
> about the mold idea too.
>
> -Mike
>
>

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
>
> Here is my blog post from last night - picture, explanation, and musical example.
>
> http://chrisvaisvil.com/?p=871
>
> I just bought 200 more of these cable ties. They are that good. And the price was reduced - $0.79 per package of 20. So that is 4 cents a tie. Not a lot to risk.

Oh nice, so it works, eh? Maybe there's a way to cut out notches in
the neck for each putting on and removal later?

PS, nice example - you might want to think about 7/4 on there as well,
so when you play dominant 7 chords, you can get the super crunchy
version.

-Mike

Why would you need notches in the neck? (perplexed look)

Right now I'm finishing putting on frets to Kraig Grady's Centaur A Cap 7
tuning.
So a 7th is in there.

What will be a trip is experimenting with different open tunings.

Chris

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 2:00 PM, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > Here is my blog post from last night - picture, explanation, and musical
> example.
> >
> > http://chrisvaisvil.com/?p=871
> >
> > I just bought 200 more of these cable ties. They are that good. And the
> price was reduced - $0.79 per package of 20. So that is 4 cents a tie. Not a
> lot to risk.
>
> Oh nice, so it works, eh? Maybe there's a way to cut out notches in
> the neck for each putting on and removal later?
>
> PS, nice example - you might want to think about 7/4 on there as well,
> so when you play dominant 7 chords, you can get the super crunchy
> version.
>
> -Mike
>
>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> 5) Read again: We still haven't explained how to create the
> xenharmonic feeling in that observer, which was the whole point of
> this entire field of study to begin with, so we've gotten nowhere.
> Thus to advance the study of "xenharmonic" music, we'd have to learn
> how to guide people to hearing things in a different way.

This is at the core of everything just about every microtonal theorist has ever done. You name me a theorist and I will show you why they thought their approach would work insofar as getting people to hear something that sounds "xenharmonic" (i.e. strange and new but pleasant and intriguing, rather than alienating and gross). Their levels of success have varied, but they all had "good reasons" and shared the same objective that the rest of us do.

I don't think we've gotten nowhere. There's been lots of xenharmonic music that's turned various people on. It's turned you on, it's turned me on, it's turned Carl and Gene and Chris and Jake and Graham and Paul on (etc., etc., ad infinitum). And you know damn well why we haven't succeeded on a grander scale and it's because none of us microtonalists have gotten a mind-blowing stage act together and hit the road with it. Harry Partch probably came the closest to that and whaddaya know, he's probably had more influence in the wider musical world than all the other microtonal theorists put together. PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY LEARNING ABOUT HIM IN LARGE UNIVERSITIES, even if it's only in brief and not in any depth. I actually have friends that majored in music in a few different Universities of California (the big public university chain in CA), and they've all heard of Partch--and pretty much ONLY Partch, as far as microtonalists go. Oddly enough, I don't actually like any of his music that I've heard, either, but performances of his works on all those crazy instruments with all the narrative drama etc. sure do draw a crowd.

Much like the other Michael, I suspect you're getting too hung up on the theoretical side of it. Not to say that theory is irrelevant, but its importance in "getting people to hear xenharmonic music and like it" has been vastly overstated. I know you know this, too, so I don't see why you're making such a big deal about the theory side of it. The most important thing is just to find some tunings that YOU really like and feel comfortable with, because they will guide YOU to making your most awesome music, music that makes you feel excited and alive that you can pour your heart and soul (or whatever) into it and go crazy with it and infect some people close to you with your enthusiasm and get a project together and maybe get a little snowball effect going. Because at the end of the day, music is supposed to be about enjoying ourselves. I think that gets forgotten a lot.

-Igs

Amen.

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 2:18 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
Because at the end of the day, music is supposed to be about enjoying
ourselves. I think that gets forgotten a lot.

-Igs

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 2:18 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> > 5) Read again: We still haven't explained how to create the
> > xenharmonic feeling in that observer, which was the whole point of
> > this entire field of study to begin with, so we've gotten nowhere.
> > Thus to advance the study of "xenharmonic" music, we'd have to learn
> > how to guide people to hearing things in a different way.
>
> This is at the core of everything just about every microtonal theorist has ever done. You name me a theorist and I will show you why they thought their approach would work insofar as getting people to hear something that sounds "xenharmonic" (i.e. strange and new but pleasant and intriguing, rather than alienating and gross). Their levels of success have varied, but they all had "good reasons" and shared the same objective that the rest of us do.
> I don't think we've gotten nowhere.

I didn't mean that the theory of microtonal music has gotten us
nowhere in general, I meant that statement #3 in my bullet points
specifically gets us nowhere. I clearly have enough respect for Paul,
Gene, Graham, Wilson, Fokker, etc's work that I keep touting it
everywhere.

And where did I ever say that they didn't share the same objective? I
said that coming up with a musical phenomenon and advancing the claim
that "you have to learn to hear it as xenharmonic" does not advance
that objective. OK, you have to also learn to hear birdsong as
xenharmonic too, and also the background noises in a machining shop.
What use does this statement have? How the hell do I learn to hear
them as xenharmonic music? If learning dominates the entire process
then that casts a pall on everything unless we start learning about
learning.

This is what I identified as an insight. I don't think I've heard it
said before. In fact, I don't think any theorist has even tackled this
issue before, it's just the next thing to look at. But if it makes you
happy, I'll word future insights like this: hey gee whiz, this is a
thought that someone else had much smarter than me must have had, but
maybe didn't, but either way I was thinking about it, or maybe I
unconsciously in my head plagiarized the idea from someone else, but
maybe, you know, the statement that people can learn to hear things
differently doesn't help us figure out how, which is, you know, core
to the whole xenharmonic ideal, um

> There's been lots of xenharmonic music that's turned various people on. It's turned you on, it's turned me on, it's turned Carl and Gene and Chris and Jake and Graham and Paul on (etc., etc., ad infinitum). And you know damn well why we haven't succeeded on a grander scale and it's because none of us microtonalists have gotten a mind-blowing stage act together and hit the road with it.

There is more than one way to succeed. We can be successful with the
theory we have if we hit the road and just start playing. There is
also utility to be derived in continually developing it. These are not
mutually exclusive ideals. I'd be happy to do them at the same time.

There are plenty of musicians creating transcendent works out there
with the "imperfect" 12-tet based theory that they have. 99% of my
favorite music, in fact, has been written with this imperfect theory.
The fact that I joined this list suggests that there's something else
I'm also interested in.

> Much like the other Michael, I suspect you're getting too hung up on the theoretical side of it. Not to say that theory is irrelevant, but its importance in "getting people to hear xenharmonic music and like it" has been vastly overstated. I know you know this, too, so I don't see why you're making such a big deal about the theory side of it.

Jesus dude, you're a philosophy major. Why are you harping on me about
getting too hung up on theory? You should know very well why I'm
interested in the theory side of it. I want to understand how to hit
at new sounds. All the practice in the world isn't going to help me
figure that out if I'm stuck in a box of preconceptions. Revising my
own internal theory helps me get over those preconceptions. Posting
about it on a message board can help other people do so as well.

> The most important thing is just to find some tunings that YOU really like and feel comfortable with, because they will guide YOU to making your most awesome music, music that makes you feel excited and alive that you can pour your heart and soul (or whatever) into it and go crazy with it and infect some people close to you with your enthusiasm and get a project together and maybe get a little snowball effect going. Because at the end of the day, music is supposed to be about enjoying ourselves. I think that gets forgotten a lot.

I enjoy finding patterns in music that facilitate doing all of the
above, and attribute the level of success I've attained so far as a
musician to my ability to do that.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Chris Vaisvil <chrisvaisvil@...> wrote:
>
> Looks like someone else discovered this besides me.
>
> Ok, to do it to one page on the wiki

Thanks!

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> I didn't mean that the theory of microtonal music has gotten us
> nowhere in general, I meant that statement #3 in my bullet points
> specifically gets us nowhere. I clearly have enough respect for Paul,
> Gene, Graham, Wilson, Fokker, etc's work that I keep touting it
> everywhere.

And what I mean is that I don't think anyone (except maybe Carl) has ever made "statement #3", at least not until after they heard the music their theories produced and then used that statement as an "excuse". But the point is, no one has (to my knowledge) tried to advance a tuning that is not in some way based on the idea that it should, out of the box, sound "xenharmonic" in the sense that you use the word.

> This is what I identified as an insight. I don't think I've heard it
> said before. In fact, I don't think any theorist has even tackled this
> issue before, it's just the next thing to look at.

I think it *has* been had before, but most people consider it so basic they don't bother mentioning it. No one *wants* to produce tunings that sound like weird crap until you've "learned to internalize them" after decades of study. Or if anyone does want this, I haven't seen them mentioned anywhere.

> There is more than one way to succeed. We can be successful with the
> theory we have if we hit the road and just start playing. There is
> also utility to be derived in continually developing it. These are not
> mutually exclusive ideals. I'd be happy to do them at the same time.

I'm sure you are, but I think the theory has a tendency to become a bit of a tar pit, especially for argumentative types like you and me. I'm not trying to shoot you down, I'm just trying to keep it in perspective...as much for myself as for you.

> Jesus dude, you're a philosophy major. Why are you harping on me about
> getting too hung up on theory? You should know very well why I'm
> interested in the theory side of it. I want to understand how to hit
> at new sounds. All the practice in the world isn't going to help me
> figure that out if I'm stuck in a box of preconceptions. Revising my
> own internal theory helps me get over those preconceptions. Posting
> about it on a message board can help other people do so as well.

The only thing that ever helped me get over my preconceptions was to systematically isolate them and then defy them as heavily as possible and see what happens. It hasn't led me to any new theories, but it has led me to saying "yes" where almost every other existent theory says "no". Oddly I'm starting to come full-circle and thinking it's time to look at Hanson and Magic and Porcupine again and see if I can't do something neat with them (shitty MOS's and all) since I've clearly developed a prejudice against them. Insofar as theory tells us what *won't* work, I'm not too interested in it. I want to believe that everything is good for something.

> I enjoy finding patterns in music that facilitate doing all of the
> above, and attribute the level of success I've attained so far as a
> musician to my ability to do that.

Finding patterns is one thing, generalizing from those patterns into higher levels of abstraction is another.

-Igs

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 3:29 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > I didn't mean that the theory of microtonal music has gotten us
> > nowhere in general, I meant that statement #3 in my bullet points
> > specifically gets us nowhere. I clearly have enough respect for Paul,
> > Gene, Graham, Wilson, Fokker, etc's work that I keep touting it
> > everywhere.
>
> And what I mean is that I don't think anyone (except maybe Carl) has ever made "statement #3", at least not until after they heard the music their theories produced and then used that statement as an "excuse". But the point is, no one has (to my knowledge) tried to advance a tuning that is not in some way based on the idea that it should, out of the box, sound "xenharmonic" in the sense that you use the word.

Paul has made this statement about Pajara, that we'll learn to hear it
as a radically different tonal system with enough exposure. I don't
think so. On the other hand, Kalle posted an interesting example that
he claims he hears as signaling the tonic in an unexpected way in
Pajara[10] SPM in 22-equal, and I asked him more about it, but haven't
gotten a response yet. If that's how it works, then I want to use this
as a test case to see how I'm hearing it now, see how he's hearing it,
see what ear training exercises I need to do to learn to hear it the
new way, and see if there's a dramatic shift in my perception of the
music.

Either way, none of these theories explain the immediate appeal of
Keemun[7] or the near-immediate appeal of Father[8], nor explain why
they don't seem to require training periods as radical as porcupine[7]
did. The notion that it's because Father[8] has "half steps and whole
steps," whatever that means, seems to be related. It's the same reason
that you liked Blackwood in 20-equal more than 15-equal - because it
has clear "whole" steps. But the fact that you liked the 20-equal
Blackwood more than the 15-equal one, and other things like that, are
what still signifies to me that the HSD might be at work. It also
signifies that looking for more scales with "half steps" and "whole
steps" might be a good way to go. Make of that what you will.

> > This is what I identified as an insight. I don't think I've heard it
> > said before. In fact, I don't think any theorist has even tackled this
> > issue before, it's just the next thing to look at.
>
> I think it *has* been had before, but most people consider it so basic they don't bother mentioning it. No one *wants* to produce tunings that sound like weird crap until you've "learned to internalize them" after decades of study. Or if anyone does want this, I haven't seen them mentioned anywhere.

*What* exactly is this basic insight that everyone has had? What part
of what I'm outlining is basic? We are talking about the nuances of
the interaction between cognitive and psychoacoustic factors in the
perception of music. What about all of this is so basic that everyone
knows it, but refuses to say it because it's so apparently obvious,
and I'm just coming up to it now? Where exactly are all of these
successful scales that don't sound like weird crap until you've
learned to internalize them? What was the point of the Pajara paper?

> > There is more than one way to succeed. We can be successful with the
> > theory we have if we hit the road and just start playing. There is
> > also utility to be derived in continually developing it. These are not
> > mutually exclusive ideals. I'd be happy to do them at the same time.
>
> I'm sure you are, but I think the theory has a tendency to become a bit of a tar pit, especially for argumentative types like you and me. I'm not trying to shoot you down, I'm just trying to keep it in perspective...as much for myself as for you.

I was happy enough balancing the theory with listening examples, but
I'm just way too busy to do it now. When I need a break from work I
post here. My life is up in the air at the moment, I'm afraid.

> > Jesus dude, you're a philosophy major. Why are you harping on me about
> > getting too hung up on theory? You should know very well why I'm
> > interested in the theory side of it. I want to understand how to hit
> > at new sounds. All the practice in the world isn't going to help me
> > figure that out if I'm stuck in a box of preconceptions. Revising my
> > own internal theory helps me get over those preconceptions. Posting
> > about it on a message board can help other people do so as well.
>
> The only thing that ever helped me get over my preconceptions was to systematically isolate them and then defy them as heavily as possible and see what happens. It hasn't led me to any new theories, but it has led me to saying "yes" where almost every other existent theory says "no". Oddly I'm starting to come full-circle and thinking it's time to look at Hanson and Magic and Porcupine again and see if I can't do something neat with them (shitty MOS's and all) since I've clearly developed a prejudice against them. Insofar as theory tells us what *won't* work, I'm not too interested in it. I want to believe that everything is good for something.

What about finding patterns in what works, and then making use of
musical techniques that the pattern predicts, but that for some reason
people aren't doing?

I highly recommend looking at Porcupine by using the MODMOS approach I
laid out in my last email. I also highly recommend looking at Magic
and Hanson by just looking at the tempered JI lattice instead of
sticking strictly to the MOS's per se.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> Gene wrote:
> > And the result even sounds like music! Check out the music examples at the bottom of the 36edo page:
> >
> > http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/36edo#Music
>
> I am so woefully confused right now.

Is this all we are going to get out of you?

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 4:30 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
> >
> > Gene wrote:
> > > And the result even sounds like music! Check out the music examples at the bottom of the 36edo page:
> > >
> > > http://xenharmonic.wikispaces.com/36edo#Music
> >
> > I am so woefully confused right now.
>
> Is this all we are going to get out of you?

I don't know what you want out of me, so I might as well dump everything I know:

1) I get that the "meantone" example you gave implies absurd mappings
for 3 and 5
2) I don't think that 17c is as absurd a mapping as the one you gave
3) I see there are pieces of music on that page by composers named
Herman Klein, Joe Hayseed, Ivan Bratt
4) I have never heard of these composers and suspect that they might
be your pseudonyms
5) I don't know in what sense they "used" the mapping you suggested above
6) The music does, in fact, sound cool, and also it sounds like music,
and I liked it

I swear officer, I don't know anything else!

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> Paul has made this statement about Pajara, that we'll learn to hear it
> as a radically different tonal system with enough exposure. I don't
> think so.

Really?? That's disappointing, and demonstrates a poor understanding of cognitive psychology.

> Either way, none of these theories explain the immediate appeal of
> Keemun[7] or the near-immediate appeal of Father[8], nor explain why
> they don't seem to require training periods as radical as porcupine[7]
> did.

But you forget--these systems DON'T have immediate appeal to everyone, or even a significant proportion of microtonalists who encounter them. It's pretty much just you and me who've expressed anything like "immediate appeal" of Father/Uncle[8]. And Keemun[7] has less than immediate appeal to me. In other cases, Chris has found immediate appeal in just about every tuning he's tried, and Gene has found immediate appeal in tunings that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole (and vice-versa). Carl seems to like what seems to me a random sampling of different types of tunings...his favorite of Blackwood's etudes is the 15 one, which to this day sounds atrociously out of tune to me (to ME of all people!!!). The only microtonalist I can think of that's taken an interest in Father or Mavila beside you and me is Herman Miller, and incidentally he's quite fond of 15-EDO too...but that makes three of us out of how many?

I guess I'm just saying be careful how much you generalize, because I think there's a fairly silent majority that doesn't share our preferences.

> The notion that it's because Father[8] has "half steps and whole
> steps," whatever that means, seems to be related. It's the same reason
> that you liked Blackwood in 20-equal more than 15-equal - because it
> has clear "whole" steps. But the fact that you liked the 20-equal
> Blackwood more than the 15-equal one, and other things like that, are
> what still signifies to me that the HSD might be at work. It also
> signifies that looking for more scales with "half steps" and "whole
> steps" might be a good way to go. Make of that what you will.

These days I prefer 15 because I think the half-steps are clearer than in 20. The 60-cent half step seems to make it harder to improvise in 20-EDO. Also FWIW I like the 1L+7s MOS scale a LOT in 23-EDO, much more than in 22. Make of THAT what you will.

> *What* exactly is this basic insight that everyone has had?

That a scale should sound "natural" and "pleasant" and not require a long acclimation period, but still introduce some new elements. Different theories of what will accomplish this are ubiquitous in the microtonal "literature". Some of them (like BP, or Yasser's "12-of-19") were well-founded but utter failures in this regard. Others--like the Armodue folks or the Pentadecaphonic people--had some sketchy justifications but did produce scales that seem pretty intelligible.

> Where exactly are all of these successful scales that don't sound like weird crap until
> you've learned to internalize them?

You've mentioned several yourself! Pajara doesn't sound weird (it sounds too normal, in fact), Blackwood[10], Uncle[8], Negri[10], even Mavila[7] seems to work gangbusters on most of my friends...Michael S. LOVED my 16-EDO Mavila track on MOaIL, even. 7-EDO, and/or 14-EDO Semaphore[9] are others that I think could be good contenders based on my experience, and then there's 17-EDO Mohajira[7]. Whoever came up with these sure must have been on the right track. Badness seems more or less to be a pretty good guideline, I think.

> I was happy enough balancing the theory with listening examples, but
> I'm just way too busy to do it now. When I need a break from work I
> post here. My life is up in the air at the moment, I'm afraid.

Excellent--being up in the air makes it easier to hit more distant targets. I hope you land somewhere fertile!

> What about finding patterns in what works, and then making use of
> musical techniques that the pattern predicts, but that for some reason
> people aren't doing?

Whatever works!

> I highly recommend looking at Porcupine by using the MODMOS approach I
> laid out in my last email. I also highly recommend looking at Magic
> and Hanson by just looking at the tempered JI lattice instead of
> sticking strictly to the MOS's per se.

Starting with the lattices is always a good idea, and makes it easy to break down into good MODMOS's.

-Igs

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 5:20 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> > Paul has made this statement about Pajara, that we'll learn to hear it
> > as a radically different tonal system with enough exposure. I don't
> > think so.
>
> Really?? That's disappointing, and demonstrates a poor understanding of cognitive psychology.

It should be noted that he said that to me in private conversation,
that there is this "decatonic hearing" that one has to learn to build
in addition to the normal "diatonic" hearing. You might want to ask
him to clarify. But, in my experience, I think that this might be
possible - that it's possible to build some kind of system of
decatonic hearing that provides, in some subtle way, a different
musical experience from the diatonic one. The difference might well be
dramatic, for all I know. Kalle claims to have heard a Pajara chord
progression that sounded totally random to me signal a tonic. But I
can't just sit here and hold out for Pajara to suddenly click in
differently when Keemun[7] snaps in right away. And I don't know why
one should be easy and one should be hard, nor do I know how to write
music in Pajara that enables people in western mindsets to start
"reprogramming themselves" right off the bat.

> > Either way, none of these theories explain the immediate appeal of
> > Keemun[7] or the near-immediate appeal of Father[8], nor explain why
> > they don't seem to require training periods as radical as porcupine[7]
> > did.
>
> But you forget--these systems DON'T have immediate appeal to everyone, or even a significant proportion of microtonalists who encounter them. It's pretty much just you and me who've expressed anything like "immediate appeal" of Father/Uncle[8]. And Keemun[7] has less than immediate appeal to me.

Try Keemun[7] in 22-equal with three generators going up and three
generators going down. It should sound like the diminished scale in
12-equal - e.g. C D Eb F F# G# A B - except the B puts you back at C
again. Machine:Diatonic::Keemun:Diminished. Furthermore, there's a
4:7:11 right over the tonic of this triad. Almost every 12-tet person
I've played this scale for has liked it immediately. I actually like
it better than the 12-equal diminished scale, it's way cooler. A few
of my friends expressed the same sentiments without me telling them.
Don't worry about chords or modulating, I'm just talking about the
bare quality of the scale.

This list is a subpopulation that is trying to listen for a certain
thing. We can't expect listening tests based on Father[8] in this list
to hold outside of it.

> In other cases, Chris has found immediate appeal in just about every tuning he's tried, and Gene has found immediate appeal in tunings that I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole (and vice-versa). Carl seems to like what seems to me a random sampling of different types of tunings...his favorite of Blackwood's etudes is the 15 one, which to this day sounds atrociously out of tune to me (to ME of all people!!!). The only microtonalist I can think of that's taken an interest in Father or Mavila beside you and me is Herman Miller, and incidentally he's quite fond of 15-EDO too...but that makes three of us out of how many?

We are again talking about microtonalists that are all listening for a
certain thing. I hated 13-EDO and I hated father until I heard
Blackwood's 13-tet etude, which I had never paid attention to until a
few days ago.

> I guess I'm just saying be careful how much you generalize, because I think there's a fairly silent majority that doesn't share our preferences.

I'm really just using these as examples, but Keemun[7] caught on with
my friends pretty quickly. I don't know how Father will blow over yet.
I have noticed a clear correlation between musical training and
tendency to hate microtonal stuff. Especially jazz musicians who can
run circles around 12-tet in their heads and then find that all of the
familiar pathways no longer work. On the other hand, less trained
musicians (or non-musicians) are already used to not playing as much
in their heads, and they tend to like things more.

> > *What* exactly is this basic insight that everyone has had?
>
> That a scale should sound "natural" and "pleasant" and not require a long acclimation period, but still introduce some new elements. Different theories of what will accomplish this are ubiquitous in the microtonal "literature". Some of them (like BP, or Yasser's "12-of-19") were well-founded but utter failures in this regard. Others--like the Armodue folks or the Pentadecaphonic people--had some sketchy justifications but did produce scales that seem pretty intelligible.

Well, clearly everyone hasn't had this insight, because the whole
point of the Pajara paper is that Pajara is supposed to be some kind
of 7-limit evolution of hearing, and it's not. Then, when I ask about
this, I get handwaving about building up some kind of "decatonic
hearing" or something, and that this process could potentially take
lots of time, since I've spent 23 years of life internalizing
"diatonic hearing" and it's hard to get away from it and yada yada.
Perhaps it's just that we've already had our hearing evolve to the
point where it doesn't sound like anything new, since we've been using
tritone subs for 100+ years now.

> > Where exactly are all of these successful scales that don't sound like weird crap until
> > you've learned to internalize them?
>
> You've mentioned several yourself! Pajara doesn't sound weird (it sounds too normal, in fact), Blackwood[10], Uncle[8], Negri[10], even Mavila[7] seems to work gangbusters on most of my friends...Michael S. LOVED my 16-EDO Mavila track on MOaIL, even. 7-EDO, and/or 14-EDO Semaphore[9] are others that I think could be good contenders based on my experience, and then there's 17-EDO Mohajira[7]. Whoever came up with these sure must have been on the right track. Badness seems more or less to be a pretty good guideline, I think.

Father is one of the baddest tunings there is. Mavila is pretty bad.
Uncle is really bad. Blackwood is pretty bad. Mohajira, on the other
hand, is way less bad. Semaphore is pretty bad. Orwell is great, but
the 9-note MOS contains two 6:7:9 triads that are a 7/6 away. Big
deal.

Badness factors in complexity and error. Since you don't care so much
about error, I don't see why badness matters. Complexity I can see
mattering. So perhaps complexity is what is important, since the
concept of "error" is one of those things that's subject to learned
factors. But complexity determines how many different harmonic
components can be connected in crazy different ways in a tuning's MOS.
So maybe that's what we're looking at here.

-Mike

> It's pretty much just you and me who've expressed anything like
> "immediate appeal" of Father/Uncle[8].

Igs, do you have any samples of Father/Uncle that you like that I
could listen to? Just to get a feel for it? I know it tempers a
crazy-big comma, and the scale sounds weird to me, but I haven't heard
anything that someone actually wrote and liked before.

> Michael S. LOVED my 16-EDO Mavila track on MOaIL, even.

Is that "The Frostburn of Egoism"? I'm assuming by the way you labeled
things that it is, but I figured I'd check.

Thanks,
Jake

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Jake Freivald <jdfreivald@...> wrote:
>
> > It's pretty much just you and me who've expressed anything like
> > "immediate appeal" of Father/Uncle[8].
>
> Igs, do you have any samples of Father/Uncle that you like that I
> could listen to? Just to get a feel for it? I know it tempers a
> crazy-big comma, and the scale sounds weird to me, but I haven't heard
> anything that someone actually wrote and liked before.

Check out Blackwood's 13-tet Etude - best thing in 13-equal I've ever
heard, ever. I'm going to go back and listen to MOIL again now that my
ears have evolved a lot.

-Mike

> Check out Blackwood's 13-tet Etude - best thing in 13-equal I've ever
> heard, ever. I'm going to go back and listen to MOIL again now that my
> ears have evolved a lot.

Thanks, Mike. Is it available online, or do I have to buy an album?

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Jake Freivald <jdfreivald@...> wrote:

> Igs, do you have any samples of Father/Uncle that you like that I
> could listen to? Just to get a feel for it? I know it tempers a
> crazy-big comma, and the scale sounds weird to me, but I haven't heard
> anything that someone actually wrote and liked before.

My own tracks: "Radio Road on San Bruno Mountain" on Open Space, "Into the Gloam" and "Exchanging a Star Cluster" on Xenning. There's another coming up on my next album. Some of David J. Finnamore's music based on Wilson's golden horagrams use this temperament (more or less), I'll find links if I can.

> Is that "The Frostburn of Egoism"? I'm assuming by the way you labeled
> things that it is, but I figured I'd check.

No, it's Track 1, "Illegible Red Ink".

-Igs

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> 5) I don't know in what sense they "used" the mapping you suggested above

Joe Hayseed used to be Joseph Haydn until I Used the Mapping on the poor guy. Same sort of thing with the other two. So, it's meantone?

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 5:51 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:
>
> > 5) I don't know in what sense they "used" the mapping you suggested above
>
> Joe Hayseed used to be Joseph Haydn until I Used the Mapping on the poor guy. Same sort of thing with the other two. So, it's meantone?

1) Are you making the point here that my perception of a "major third"
and 5/4 are not the same thing?
2) How are you just dynamically remapping Haydn like that? Can you
dynamically remap pieces to mavila? This is what I was asking about in
the other thread:

/tuning/topicId_99227.html#99227

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> 1) Are you making the point here that my perception of a "major third"
> and 5/4 are not the same thing?

I'm making the point that what counts as a 5/4 in a tuning of an abstract regular temperament may not be anything like 5/4, and in fact might force you to hear it as something else entirely.

> 2) How are you just dynamically remapping Haydn like that? Can you
> dynamically remap pieces to mavila?

I'm not sure what you mean by "dynamically". It's easy to map meantone to mavila, though.

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 6:05 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> > 1) Are you making the point here that my perception of a "major third"
> > and 5/4 are not the same thing?
>
> I'm making the point that what counts as a 5/4 in a tuning of an abstract regular temperament may not be anything like 5/4, and in fact might force you to hear it as something else entirely.

OK, but I hear the 6\17 in 17-equal as a major third, and 4\17 in
17-equal as a minor third, and 5\17 in 17-equal as a neutral third.
Make of that what you will. Furthermore, the "major triad" by this
logic to me sounds like... a major triad, except with the third a bit
sharp. The sharpness of the third is a little bit weird sometimes at
first, but I easily get used to it. I don't hear it as a radically new
thing. It also doesn't bother me that, technically, 5\17 rounds closer
to 5/4, because when placed in the context of a chord the other notes
influence how a dyad will sound so as to make rounding almost useless.

http://www.addletters.com/pictures/bart-simpson-generator/bart-simpson-generator.php?line=I+will+just+pick+a+val+and+stop+worrying+about+consistency.

> > 2) How are you just dynamically remapping Haydn like that? Can you
> > dynamically remap pieces to mavila?
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "dynamically". It's easy to map meantone to mavila, though.

Did you see what I was getting at in the thread I linked to? Is that
kind of mapping possible with the tools that you have?

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> Try Keemun[7] in 22-equal with three generators going up and three
> generators going down.

Isn't Keemun in 22 identical to Keemun in 11? Large minor 3rd generator?

> I actually like
> it better than the 12-equal diminished scale, it's way cooler. A few
> of my friends expressed the same sentiments without me telling them.
> Don't worry about chords or modulating, I'm just talking about the
> bare quality of the scale.

Try it in 18-EDO. I like it a lot there too. Sort of like "anti-Dicot".

> This list is a subpopulation that is trying to listen for a certain
> thing. We can't expect listening tests based on Father[8] in this list
> to hold outside of it.

Perhaps not.

> We are again talking about microtonalists that are all listening for a
> certain thing. I hated 13-EDO and I hated father until I heard
> Blackwood's 13-tet etude, which I had never paid attention to until a
> few days ago.

Funny how that works, no? You hate a scale until you hear someone do something really cool with it and suddenly your whole world is different.

> I have noticed a clear correlation between musical training and
> tendency to hate microtonal stuff. Especially jazz musicians who can
> run circles around 12-tet in their heads and then find that all of the
> familiar pathways no longer work. On the other hand, less trained
> musicians (or non-musicians) are already used to not playing as much
> in their heads, and they tend to like things more.

Absolutely! 100% agree. Really skilled musicians often feel like they're going back to the beginning, especially with the larger EDOs. But I've had people who aren't very skilled embrace 22 or 31 ecstatically, just go to town with them and have a blast without caring what's going on under the hood. Funny how that works. Come to think about it, I once dated a girl with no musical training at all, but I caught her whistling along with the melody from one of my 14-EDO pieces once--perfectly tracking the pitch, on first listen no less!

> Well, clearly everyone hasn't had this insight, because the whole
> point of the Pajara paper is that Pajara is supposed to be some kind
> of 7-limit evolution of hearing, and it's not. Then, when I ask about
> this, I get handwaving about building up some kind of "decatonic
> hearing" or something, and that this process could potentially take
> lots of time, since I've spent 23 years of life internalizing
> "diatonic hearing" and it's hard to get away from it and yada yada.

Like I said, that explanation almost certainly came *after* Paul played around with Pajara a bit and realized his hypothesis was not corroborated by his experience. I somehow doubt Paul would have pursued Pajara so avidly if he knew from the get-go the results would seem immediately pedestrian instead of ground-breaking. I think that the recognition of the attraction of familiarity and "change deafness" that it entails is fairly recent.

> Father is one of the baddest tunings there is.

Are you kidding? Its simplicity is unmatched anywhere. +1g is a 3/2, -1g is a 5/4.

> Mavila is pretty bad.

But it's also very simple. Simpler than Meantone in the 5-limit, since -3g is 5 rather than +4g.

> Uncle is really bad.

Okay, true.

> Blackwood is pretty bad.

It still made Paul's shortlist.

> Mohajira, on the other hand, is way less bad.

And very low-entropy, according to Keenan's calculations on tuning-math. Of the regular temperaments, it's also one of the few that seems to be found "in the wild".

> Semaphore is pretty bad.

It's hard to find a 9-note MOS with a larger number of consonant triads.

> Orwell is great, but the 9-note MOS contains two 6:7:9 triads that are a 7/6 away. Big
> deal.

Orwell was one of my early favorites. It's a lot like Keemun in terms of sounding like a diminished scale, but in this case it's got one more semitone instead of one less. It was the only non-diatonic MOS in 31-EDO I liked at the time that I was playing in 31-EDO.

As everyone knows, I *heavily* favor simplicity over accuracy, and it's sounding like you're coming around to that way, too.

-Igs

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 6:28 PM, cityoftheasleep
<igliashon@...> wrote:
>
> > Try Keemun[7] in 22-equal with three generators going up and three
> > generators going down.
>
> Isn't Keemun in 22 identical to Keemun in 11? Large minor 3rd generator?
//
> Try it in 18-EDO. I like it a lot there too. Sort of like "anti-Dicot".

Yes, whoops, sorry. The 15-equal version is good too, despite being improper.

> > We are again talking about microtonalists that are all listening for a
> > certain thing. I hated 13-EDO and I hated father until I heard
> > Blackwood's 13-tet etude, which I had never paid attention to until a
> > few days ago.
>
> Funny how that works, no? You hate a scale until you hear someone do something really cool with it and suddenly your whole world is different.

I think you mean

Funny how that works, no? You hate a scale until you hear someone use
it in a way that doesn't present garbled cognitive cues so that you
can actually follow what's going on and suddenly your whole world is
different.

> > I have noticed a clear correlation between musical training and
> > tendency to hate microtonal stuff. Especially jazz musicians who can
> > run circles around 12-tet in their heads and then find that all of the
> > familiar pathways no longer work. On the other hand, less trained
> > musicians (or non-musicians) are already used to not playing as much
> > in their heads, and they tend to like things more.
>
> Absolutely! 100% agree. Really skilled musicians often feel like they're going back to the beginning, especially with the larger EDOs. But I've had people who aren't very skilled embrace 22 or 31 ecstatically, just go to town with them and have a blast without caring what's going on under the hood. Funny how that works. Come to think about it, I once dated a girl with no musical training at all, but I caught her whistling along with the melody from one of my 14-EDO pieces once--perfectly tracking the pitch, on first listen no less!

I have a friend who's a med student and he was singing Sevish's
"Sean's Bits" in 13-equal. He actually would sing the fifth sharp too,
just sharp enough to be between perfect fifth and minor sixth. He
actually managed to hit the proper blend of fifthness and sixthness
too, he had trained himself to do it.

> > Well, clearly everyone hasn't had this insight, because the whole
> > point of the Pajara paper is that Pajara is supposed to be some kind
> > of 7-limit evolution of hearing, and it's not. Then, when I ask about
> > this, I get handwaving about building up some kind of "decatonic
> > hearing" or something, and that this process could potentially take
> > lots of time, since I've spent 23 years of life internalizing
> > "diatonic hearing" and it's hard to get away from it and yada yada.
>
> Like I said, that explanation almost certainly came *after* Paul played around with Pajara a bit and realized his hypothesis was not corroborated by his experience. I somehow doubt Paul would have pursued Pajara so avidly if he knew from the get-go the results would seem immediately pedestrian instead of ground-breaking. I think that the recognition of the attraction of familiarity and "change deafness" that it entails is fairly recent.

The irony for me is that the 5-limit version of Pajara blows my mind
utterly. Check out Petr's comma pump for it on the xenwiki. Now THAT
really does sound like an "alternate tonal system", where you have
these two strong tonal centers that are a tritone apart, but somehow
"fit together." It's provided me with a new musical technique to use
in 12-equal. But for some reason the 7-limit version of Pajara just
sounds like the music I'm used to, like jazz standards or what not,
except instead of throwing chord extensions wherever I want, I'm now
supposed to stick to this scale. Maybe I'm missing the point.

> > Father is one of the baddest tunings there is.
>
> Are you kidding? Its simplicity is unmatched anywhere. +1g is a 3/2, -1g is a 5/4.

Badness takes into account error. So you mean complexity then. Then
yes, I agree.

> > Semaphore is pretty bad.
>
> It's hard to find a 9-note MOS with a larger number of consonant triads.

The 10-note omnitetrachordal version is my favorite. Go to 24-equal,
play a meantone pentatonic scale, and then duplicate it 1\24 up.
That's your 10-note scale. She's a winner. You can do it in 19-equal
too.

> > Orwell is great, but the 9-note MOS contains two 6:7:9 triads that are a 7/6 away. Big
> > deal.
>
> Orwell was one of my early favorites. It's a lot like Keemun in terms of sounding like a diminished scale, but in this case it's got one more semitone instead of one less. It was the only non-diatonic MOS in 31-EDO I liked at the time that I was playing in 31-EDO.

OK, that's true, it is cool. But it's not really consonant sounding.
It doesn't sound like happy, bright, etc music. In fact, most scales
where the generator isn't something like 3/2 end up sounding really
sinister and what not. Which is fine, if that's what you want. It also
means that the melody and the harmony don't have to come from the same
scale.

> As everyone knows, I *heavily* favor simplicity over accuracy, and it's sounding like you're coming around to that way, too.

I've been around that way for a long time. Since Knowsur's album came
out. Just pick decent timbres and get over the periodicity buzz
addiction.

It also signifies to me that since the trick to getting high-error
temperaments to "work" is to pick a decent timbre for it, that the big
concern here is Sethares's notion of dissonance. HE seems to be
irreparably broken right now. Or if it's not, I have no idea why or
what it matters for anymore. Either

1) learned cues play a factor into the HE equation, making the actual
HE model useless, or
2) we're describing a level above and beyond psychoacoustics, at which
point HE is just another background thing. Something to try and
account for to appease the auditory system so we can communicate
information without much biological protest, similar to the thing
about timbre above

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> > I'm not sure what you mean by "dynamically". It's easy to map meantone to mavila, though.
>
> Did you see what I was getting at in the thread I linked to? Is that
> kind of mapping possible with the tools that you have?

Of course. Were you around when I debuted Mysterious Mush? That not only mapped meantone to mavila, it played the mavila using spectrum-adjusted csound instruments so that it wouldn't drive you nuts. If people insist on using things like 13 through 16 edos maybe they should also do that.

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 8:22 PM, genewardsmith
<genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
> Of course. Were you around when I debuted Mysterious Mush? That not only mapped meantone to mavila, it played the mavila using spectrum-adjusted csound instruments so that it wouldn't drive you nuts. If people insist on using things like 13 through 16 edos maybe they should also do that.

No. You already did this? Is further innovation on these lists
impossible? Are all ideas that I could possibly have already taken
care of?

PS: can I hear the results? Is it that you retuned an existing work to
Mavila? If I sent you a MIDI file of a piece, say Fur Elise or
something, could you remap it in the same way? And most importantly,
how the heck did you manage to remap things so quickly? I assume
you're just going from 12-equal back to meantone and then flipping the
tuning, but if that's what you're doing, how do you handle the 128/125
problem?

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> PS: can I hear the results?

I looked for it, but didn't find it.

> Is it that you retuned an existing work to
> Mavila?

The Mysterious Barricades by Francois Couperin.

> If I sent you a MIDI file of a piece, say Fur Elise or
> something, could you remap it in the same way?

It would be more interesting for someone else to do it.

> And most importantly,
> how the heck did you manage to remap things so quickly?

Quickly? This was years ago.

I assume
> you're just going from 12-equal back to meantone and then flipping the
> tuning, but if that's what you're doing, how do you handle the 128/125
> problem?

In this case, I picked a piece that didn't have the problem, but you can work with things that do.

On May 19, 2011, at 9:11 PM, "genewardsmith" <genewardsmith@...>
wrote:

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> If I sent you a MIDI file of a piece, say Fur Elise or
> something, could you remap it in the same way?

It would be more interesting for someone else to do it.

OK, I'll do it. Might a Lilypond score enable us to do so?

I assume
> you're just going from 12-equal back to meantone and then flipping the
> tuning, but if that's what you're doing, how do you handle the 128/125
> problem?

In this case, I picked a piece that didn't have the problem, but you can
work with things that do.

By picking 9-ET, blech.

What piece do you think would be good to do? It should be something people
know, something pretty "diatonic," and definitely not something that tempers
128/125. 648/625 vanishing might be alright. It would also be nice to do
something with prominent meantone comma pumps in it, which as you remember I
think are important for setting up tonality.

Any ideas? I was thinking Fur Elise, but I don't know if there are many
comma pumps in it. It would also be nice to do something in minor so it
comes out major, so as to avoid the perception that mavila always has to be
this sad, "minor" tuning.

-Mike

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> OK, I'll do it. Might a Lilypond score enable us to do so?

Don't ask me. The lazy way to do it would be to start with something pretty strictly in meantone and retune a midi file using Scala.

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, "genewardsmith" <genewardsmith@...> wrote:
>
>
> --- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@> wrote:
>
> > OK, I'll do it. Might a Lilypond score enable us to do so?
>
> Don't ask me. The lazy way to do it would be to start with something pretty strictly in meantone and retune a midi file using Scala.
>

If you feel more ambitious, take something not too far from meantone, and save a midi file of it as a Scala seq file using P31 notation. Now work with this seq file, adjusting enharmonic equivalences until you've got a satisfactory 31-et version of the piece. This you then remap to mavila. I'd suggest the lazy approach to start out with, and it doesn't mean you are confined to retuning music from the 15-17th centuries. Scrutinize what chords your piece is using and find something which will work.

Mike Battaglia <battaglia01@...> wrote:

> OK, I'll do it. Might a Lilypond score enable us to do so?

A Lilypond file would allow you to retune from meantone to
mavila, yes. There are problems with chords. You'd either
need to separate them into independent voices or write a
program to convert pitch bends into MTS messages.

Graham