4 ms·

Western tonality has some rules. Composers can operate outside of that if they want. With computers, a single composer could make up a new set of rules for ever

Western tonality has some rules. Composers can operate outside of that if they want. With computers, a single composer could make up a new set of rules for every piece. You can turn a drum beat into a note by accelerating the wave form, invent your own scales. It is interesting that even electronic artists tend to operate within the constraints of the western tradition. It is probably a struggle to find an audience once you start doing wacky things. Or maybe it will happen, but has not yet.

d13 9y ago
Electronic artists are limited by the rules programmed into their software, and very few people realize how severely limiting those rules are - they make 99% of the decisions for you. The fundamentals are never questioned, but it's only by questioning those fundamentals that true can innovation happen. If you want a mainstream audience, fine, if not, throw your laptop out the window :)
- icebraining 9y ago
  Or write the software yourself...
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >Electronic artists are limited by the rules programmed into their software, and very few people realize how severely limiting those rules are - they make 99% of the decisions for you. That isn't remotely true. Yes, you can choose to quantize to a 4/4 grid, but that isn't mandatory. You can choose to operate in equal temperament, but it's relatively straightforward to work microtonally in most DAWs, particularly Reaper. Hugely popular instruments like Xfer Serum, ZynAddSubFX and UVI Falcon have full support for microtuning. IMHO, it's far easier to make properly weird music in software than with traditional instruments. You have a vastly greater range of timbral choices, you have total control over intonation and you can program complex polyrhythms that would be far beyond the abilities of most professional musicians. If you really want to go balls-out on the weird, just learn Pure Data - there's literally nothing that it can't do.
mrob 9y ago
Western tonality is a consequence of the biology of human hearing combined with the physics of common Western instruments. The ear converts sound to the frequency domain. If peaks in that spectrum are close together, they're perceived as a single beating sound. If they're far apart, they're perceived as separate sounds. But if they are of intermediate distance, they are perceived as a dissonant noise. Plomp and Levelt investigated this with pairs of sine tones[0], and Sethares generalized it to arbitrary sounds[1]. If you sum the dissonances on the Plomp-Levelt curve of every pair of harmonics from multiple sounds played at once, weighted by the amplitude of those harmonics, you get a good approximation of perceived dissonance. String and wind instruments make sounds with harmonics at (approximately) integer multiples of the fundamental. If you graph the calculated dissonance of frequency intervals of such sounds, the minima will match the intervals of the traditional Western scale. Other instruments, such as tuned percussion, can have prominent harmonics at non-integer multiples of the fundamental. This requires different tuning for maximum consonance. Indonesian classical music, with its extensive use of tuned percussion, is well known for this. You can of course ignore this, but most people like their music to be mostly consonant, and if you arbitrarily change tuning you're very likely to end up with something that's mostly dissonant. [0] http://www.mpi.nl/world/materials/publications/levelt/Plomp_Levelt_Tonal_1965.pdf http://www.mpi.nl/world/materials/publications/levelt/Plomp_... [1] http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf (less formal summary: http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html )
- jdietrich 9y ago
  Just intonation is far more mathematically accurate than equal temperament, but it often sounds badly out of tune to listeners who are acculturated to the latter. 12-TET is a convenient fudge, but it isn't optimal. We have become deeply accustomed to a fairly arbitrary approximation of a somewhat arbitrary set of subdivisions. To complicate matters further, pianos deviate substantially from equal temperament at the extremes of their range. A piano sounds more in tune if the bass notes are tuned slightly flat and the treble notes are tuned slightly sharp, to accommodate for the natural inharmonicity of the strings.
leejo 9y ago
> It is interesting that even electronic artists tend to operate within the constraints of the western tradition. It is probably a struggle to find an audience once you start doing wacky things. Or maybe it will happen, but has not yet. It happened twenty four years ago, they were called Autechre[1]. I'm sure someone was doing it before them. I have a theory that this came out of The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, and electronic music actually benefited from the legislation in the long run, but I won't go into it here[2] & [3] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autechre#Recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autechre#Recording [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Or... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP

d13 9y ago

Electronic artists are limited by the rules programmed into their software, and very few people realize how severely limiting those rules are - they make 99% of the decisions for you. The fundamentals are never questioned, but it's only by questioning those fundamentals that true can innovation happen. If you want a mainstream audience, fine, if not, throw your laptop out the window :)

icebraining 9y ago
Or write the software yourself...
jdietrich 9y ago
>Electronic artists are limited by the rules programmed into their software, and very few people realize how severely limiting those rules are - they make 99% of the decisions for you. That isn't remotely true. Yes, you can choose to quantize to a 4/4 grid, but that isn't mandatory. You can choose to operate in equal temperament, but it's relatively straightforward to work microtonally in most DAWs, particularly Reaper. Hugely popular instruments like Xfer Serum, ZynAddSubFX and UVI Falcon have full support for microtuning. IMHO, it's far easier to make properly weird music in software than with traditional instruments. You have a vastly greater range of timbral choices, you have total control over intonation and you can program complex polyrhythms that would be far beyond the abilities of most professional musicians. If you really want to go balls-out on the weird, just learn Pure Data - there's literally nothing that it can't do.

mrob 9y ago

Western tonality is a consequence of the biology of human hearing combined with the physics of common Western instruments. The ear converts sound to the frequency domain. If peaks in that spectrum are close together, they're perceived as a single beating sound. If they're far apart, they're perceived as separate sounds. But if they are of intermediate distance, they are perceived as a dissonant noise. Plomp and Levelt investigated this with pairs of sine tones[0], and Sethares generalized it to arbitrary sounds[1]. If you sum the dissonances on the Plomp-Levelt curve of every pair of harmonics from multiple sounds played at once, weighted by the amplitude of those harmonics, you get a good approximation of perceived dissonance. String and wind instruments make sounds with harmonics at (approximately) integer multiples of the fundamental. If you graph the calculated dissonance of frequency intervals of such sounds, the minima will match the intervals of the traditional Western scale. Other instruments, such as tuned percussion, can have prominent harmonics at non-integer multiples of the fundamental. This requires different tuning for maximum consonance. Indonesian classical music, with its extensive use of tuned percussion, is well known for this. You can of course ignore this, but most people like their music to be mostly consonant, and if you arbitrarily change tuning you're very likely to end up with something that's mostly dissonant. [0] http://www.mpi.nl/world/materials/publications/levelt/Plomp_Levelt_Tonal_1965.pdf http://www.mpi.nl/world/materials/publications/levelt/Plomp_... [1] http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/paperspdf/consonance.pdf (less formal summary: http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html )

jdietrich 9y ago
Just intonation is far more mathematically accurate than equal temperament, but it often sounds badly out of tune to listeners who are acculturated to the latter. 12-TET is a convenient fudge, but it isn't optimal. We have become deeply accustomed to a fairly arbitrary approximation of a somewhat arbitrary set of subdivisions. To complicate matters further, pianos deviate substantially from equal temperament at the extremes of their range. A piano sounds more in tune if the bass notes are tuned slightly flat and the treble notes are tuned slightly sharp, to accommodate for the natural inharmonicity of the strings.

leejo 9y ago

> It is interesting that even electronic artists tend to operate within the constraints of the western tradition. It is probably a struggle to find an audience once you start doing wacky things. Or maybe it will happen, but has not yet. It happened twenty four years ago, they were called Autechre[1]. I'm sure someone was doing it before them. I have a theory that this came out of The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, and electronic music actually benefited from the legislation in the long run, but I won't go into it here[2] & [3] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autechre#Recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autechre#Recording [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Or... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP