Towards a new model for microtonal music: The regular temperaments of 22TET (original) (raw)
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Temperaments, tonalities and microtonalities: an introduction
Contemporary Music Review, 2003
James Tenney has argued that the harmonic development of Western art music reached something of an impasse around 1910 and that it was only when composers began to imagine music that went beyond 12-tone equal temperament that our harmonic evolution could continue (Tenney 1984: 75). This issue of Contemporary Music Review is an attempt to document some of the ways in which musicians have contributed to that evolution. Evolution is always complex-difficult to predict, best documented retrospectively-and the development of music that uses microtones is no exception. If this issue has an underlying editorial principle, it is that there is no one true path, either through the history of existing music or into the future of musicians' aspirations, and in compiling it I have deliberately drawn together authors whose views, while mostly complementary, are none the less divergent. In general, I have organized the contents of this volume in such a way that they trace a trajectory from the more broadly historical and theoretical towards the more practical and personal, although a similar trajectory is traced within the course of a number of the individual articles. I have admired Daniel Wolf's work both as composer and theorist ever since we first met at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse in 1990 and his "Alternative Tunings, Alternative Tonalities" offers a characteristically thorough overview of many different microtonal musics. This necessarily overlaps with Bob Gilmore's "Climate Since Harry Partch", in which Gilmore extends the research project which yielded his acclaimed biography of Harry Partch into a consideration of the ways in which Partchian and Partch-like ideas have been explored by subsequent composers, both in America and in Europe. All compositional activity is necessarily contingent on its realization and it is perhaps a paradox that most music using microtones has been written for realization on acoustic instruments designed with 12-tone equal temperament in mind and for performance by musicians trained to play in that temperament. Mieko Kanno, however, is ideally qualified to discuss how performers, and especially string players, deal with the intonational problems that confront them in tonal, atonal and microtonal music, since her own experience as a violinist ranges from performance on period instruments to the spectacularly accomplished interpretation of works such as Ferneyhough's Intermedio alla ciaccona which won her the Kranichsteinerpreis at the 1994 Darmstadt Ferienkurse.
Introduction to Microtonal Music
Microtonal Music in Central and Eastern Europe: Historical Outlines and Current Practices Avtorji Leon Stefanija (ed) Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta Rūta Stanevičiūtė (ed) Litovska akademija za glasbo in gledališče, Vilna, Litva, 2020
This paper discloses a study on microtonal music and its phenomenon is different musical spheres. Based on research of new techniques, it revives hidden layouts of the course of late 19th - early 20th century music development. During this observation and analysis I establish forgotten works and names, less known scores. The research was carried out in Russia, UK, France, Germany and Czech Republic in archives of microtonal leaders. This allowed uniting major centers of microtonal music together and analyzing it in general context. The paper contains five parts. Terminological overview includes discussions on the unification of a joint notion, observing such conceptions as xenharmony, ekmelic, super-chromatic or ultrachromatic, microdimensional, microchromatic and microtonal music. Discussing the phenomenon of microtonal music as a whole, it is necessary to analyze the numerous prerequisites for the idea of splitting sound into micro-components at the beginning of the 20th century, to reveal the general cultural and social processes that have become the impetus for its development and dissemination, and, finally, to pay attention to the parallel experiences of splitting the whole into parts in the second part of the paper. The next observation includes analysis of auditory sensations evolution and physical processes accompanying the century of innovation. The key part of the paper proposes the classification of existing works by systems used in the works. Author introduces basic and applied features with succeeding subdivisions. A short look at marginal culture of composers, who worked in microtonal field, shows some conclusions and reflections on microtonal composers’ destiny and results of their work.
SSIP'08 Proceedings of the 8th conference on Signal, Speech and image processing. ISBN:978-960-6474-008-6
William A. Sethares of the university of Wisconsin in Madison, has developed a quantitative theory of the dissonance from the experimental curves of dissonance/consonance for two sinusoidal sounds of different frequency obtained in the sixties from R. Plomp and W. J. M. Levelt. The theory proposes that the intervals more consonants for a given instrument depend on the structure of his timbre. This document explains how you can capture a correct timbre with a computer then to apply the dissonance algorithm to create a musical microtonal scale with criteria
The Sounds of Music : Science of Musical Scales
Resonance, 2019
Sushan Konar works on stellar compact objects. She also writes popular science articles and maintains a weekly astrophysics-related blog called 'Monday Musings'. Both, human appreciation of music and musical genres, transcend time and space. The universality of musical genres and associated musical scales is intimately linked to the physics of sound and the special characteristics of human acoustic sensitivity. In this series of articles, we examine the science underlying the development of the heptatonic scale, one of the most prevalent scales of the modern musical genres, both western and Indian.
The Sounds of Music : Science of Musical Scales I – Human Perception of Sound
2019
Both, human appreciation of music and musical genres, transcend time and space. The universality of musical genres and associated musical scales is intimately linked to the physics of sound and the special characteristics of human acoustic sensitivity. In this series of articles, we examine the science underlying the development of the heptatonic scale, one of the most prevalent scales of the modern musical genres, both western and Indian.
Weighing several theoretical models on Makam music against pitch-histograms
Ozan Yarman is a Pianist-Composer-Music Theorist born in 1978 in Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. degree in Musicology from the Istanbul Technical University Turkish Music State Conservatory with the unanimous decision of the jury for his dissertation “79tone Tuning & Theory for Turkish Maqam Music” in 2008. Since early 2000, he fortified his Classical/Contemporary Western music background with research into microtonal music and makam theory, insofar as inclining towards producing some unorthodox Turkish and Turko-Western works. He additionally plays Qanun, bowed Tanbur and Ney as an amateur. He is a faculty member of Istanbul University State Conservatory as a full professor under its Musicology Department since 2017. 1 (Note from the Editors:) The editors are using in this article the Turkish terminology for maqām music, with regular plurals when nevertheless in italics. Furthermore, the Turkish ı and i appear identical in the capitalized letters, for consistency with previous pu...
Testing a spectral model of tonal affinity with microtonal melodies and inharmonic spectra
Musicae Scientiae, 2016
Tonal affinity is the perceived goodness of fit of successive tones. It is important because a preference for certain intervals over others would likely influence preferences for, and prevalences of, “higher-order” musical structures such as scales and chord progressions. We hypothesize that two psychoacoustic (spectral) factors—harmonicity and spectral pitch similarity—have an impact on affinity. The harmonicity of a single tone is the extent to which its partials (frequency components) correspond to those of a harmonic complex tone (whose partials are a multiple of a single fundamental frequency). The spectral pitch similarity of two tones is the extent to which they have partials with corresponding, or close, frequencies. To ascertain the unique effect sizes of harmonicity and spectral pitch similarity, we constructed a computational model to numerically quantify them. The model was tested against data obtained from 44 participants who ranked the overall affinity of tones in melodies played in a variety of tunings (some microtonal) with a variety of spectra (some inharmonic). The data indicate the two factors have similar, but independent, effect sizes: in combination, they explain a sizeable portion of the variance in the data (the model-data squared correlation is r2 = .64). Neither harmonicity nor spectral pitch similarity require prior knowledge of musical structure, so they provide a potentially universal bottom-up explanation for tonal affinity. We show how the model—as optimized to these data—can explain scale structures commonly found in music, both historical and contemporary, and we discuss its implications for experimental microtonal and spectral music.
Microtonality in Indian Music: Myth or Reality
Meer, Wim van der and Suvarnalata Rao, Microtonality in Indian Music: Myth or Reality, FRSM, Gwalior 2009, 2009
Microtonality (shruti) is regarded as an essential and core aspect of the raga performance in Indian art music. In fact, musicians invariably refer to and rely on specific intonations as an identifying feature for certain ragas, like the komal Gandhar (flat third) in raga Darbari. In this paper an attempt is made to ascertain the validity of this assumption with an empirical case study of intonation of komal Dha (flat sixth) in five different ragas, viz. Darbari, Bhairavi, Puriya dhanashri, Jaunpuri and Bhairav, performed (one after the other) by the same vocalist. Although our results validate the presence of microtonality in Indian music they provide evidence for flexible intonation, ruling out the notion of pitch as fixed points. The influence of melodic context on pitch is also clear from this study. The present meaning of shruti seems more related to melodic shapes (ornamentation) and melodic context.