6 ms·

I've had lots of fun experimenting with JI, but I think you're greatly understating the difficulty of using a scale like that for conventional music! Basic chor

by kmill 6y ago

I've had lots of fun experimenting with JI, but I think you're greatly understating the difficulty of using a scale like that for conventional music! Basic chords (like ii) are horribly out of tune due to the syntonic comma, and while you can retune things as you go (like a singer or string player would), it takes a lot of finesse -- the IV ii V I progression is tricky, and if you're not careful you create a comma pump, transposing things down just a little bit by the end. In practice, 5/4 major thirds are at the very low end of acceptible major thirds, with the Pythagorean 81/64 at the top. I find slightly sharper major thirds to sounds better generally [for western common practice harmony]. An interesting system, which I wish I've had more time experimenting with before suggesting it, is 55EDO, using a system where each whole tone is broken into nine equal parts; a five part interval is a major semitone and a four part interval a minor semitone. The major scale is made from whole tones and two major semitones. A C# is slightly flatter than a Db in this system, and you only have to worry about enharmonics (old meaning: futzing with the small distances between similar pitches) in complicated chord progressions. Not suggesting not to try JI of course, I'd recommend experimenting with it (including the suggested 7-limit JI as well)! Scales in the end can only be judged in the context of what you want to do with them -- they certainly all have tradeoffs.

powersnail 6y ago
One thing to note is that you don't have to always play a note at the same frequency, even in the same piece. On the violin, it's common to adjust intonation to different concerns: to bring out multiple voices, to put emphasis on the melodic line, or to nail the chords. I don't know how hard it would be to do this digitally though. I imagine it would be quite tedious to work on a fretless digital music software.
Slow_Hand 6y ago
Out of curiosity, how do you go about auditioning these systems in your own practice? Are you a performer playing an instrument by ear? Are you sequencing sounds in a DAW? Or are you tuning your sounds in a programming environment similar to the linked article? I ask because I'm an electronic musician working in a DAW (Ableton mostly) and am trying to find the best workflow to start exploring these concepts. Ideally, there would be an interface for switching between tuning systems that's as easy as drawing in a time-signature change, but micro-tuning seems to be a low priority for most DAWs. The only one I know to even begin integrating alternate tuning systems is Logic, and those settings are tucked away deep in the preferences. Does anyone here have a resource for starting to familiarize oneself with how to integrate alternate tunings into their composition? The simpler the better, I suppose. As soon as one sets their foot into the world of alternate tunings you're usually flooded with 40+ tunings. As someone who's worked in Equal Temperament their whole life I would like to pick ONE system and really drill down on it until I get a grip on how to integrate these tunings into programs that are built for ET.
- devilduck 6y ago
  You can use jack or soundflower to pipe audio into Live from the outside.
- smrq 6y ago
  I won't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I think it's more a synth problem than a DAW problem. VST, for example, deals in 12TET, so the best a DAW could do to support alternate tuning systems would be to translate each pitch into a 12TET pitch + offset. Which is feasible, but like, not a feature I would expect to find. (I would be curious to know if any DAW actually can do this.) Personally I have experimented with alternate tuning using SuperCollider. It definitely doesn't qualify as simple, but the upside of code-as-music is that if you can imagine it and express it, you can do it. I recently made a track that switches tuning systems periodically by responding to a particular MIDI CC. I have to imagine that those sorts of shenanigans would be pretty hard without some code. To live a bit more in Ableton-land, you might be able to find a Max device that does something similar-- maybe a MIDI insert that converts MIDI notes to note + pitch bend?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    VST does not deal in 12TET. VST2 delivers MIDI data to a plugin, which most plugins (not all) will interpret in 12TET. But the plugin may offer its own mechanism to change the mapping between MIDI note numbers and frequencies, or it might use the MIDI Tuning Standard to do so. The only role for a DAW in this comes if the DAW labels MIDI data with note names. If you're not using 12TET, these labels will likely be wrong. But since MIDI itself doesn't inherently use 12TET, just 128 notes numbered from 0 to 127, any DAW can still be used to work in non-12TET tunings and scales.
    - smrq 6y ago
      Since I knew someone on HN would be pedantic about this, I looked it up before I posted anything: > NoteOnEvent Struct Reference > Detailed Description > Note-on event specific data. > Pitch uses the twelve-tone equal temperament tuning (12-TET). https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_doc/vstinterfaces/structSteinberg_1_1Vst_1_1NoteOnEvent.html https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_doc/vstinterfaces/stru... You can, of course, implement a synth that doesn't follow the spec, if you like. (This documentation is for VST3, which does not use MIDI. VST2 has been deprecated for years.)
kortex 6y ago
> comma pump Well this is a fun rabbit hole! https://en.xen.wiki/w/Comma_pump https://en.xen.wiki/w/Comma_pump
elihu 6y ago
For ii, I find it helps to add 10:9 to the list I gave earlier, I just omitted it to stay within the familiar framework of 12 notes-to-the-octave. 12 really isn't enough, though, in a lot of cases. Here's a visualization I like, that uses 22 notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA1C9VFqJKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA1C9VFqJKo Speaking of large-number EDOs, some people I know locally are doing guitar conversions to 41-EDO. The trick that seems like it absolutely shouldn't work but it does is to omit half the frets, so that only half of the notes are available on each string. https://en.xen.wiki/w/The_Kite_Guitar https://en.xen.wiki/w/The_Kite_Guitar
- kmill 6y ago
  Oh, that's a great visualization! (And that's a wonderfully low-tech way of animating it.) I appreciate the Johnston notation, too, which made it easy for me to follow. The Well-Tuned Piano [1] also has a really nice lattice, though the Wikipedia page doesn't reflect this yet. (The B7+ should just be an A. I think scholars have taken La Monte Young too literally when he said everything was an overtone of an extremely low Eb.) Here, just drew a picture: https://imgur.com/S5OndL6.png https://imgur.com/S5OndL6.png (light gray is the piano key it's mapped to). It's illuminating taking the "chords" in Kyle Gann's paper and seeing them on this lattice, which shows major and minor septimal triads in each triangle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tuned_Piano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tuned_Piano

by kmill 6y ago

powersnail 6y ago

One thing to note is that you don't have to always play a note at the same frequency, even in the same piece. On the violin, it's common to adjust intonation to different concerns: to bring out multiple voices, to put emphasis on the melodic line, or to nail the chords. I don't know how hard it would be to do this digitally though. I imagine it would be quite tedious to work on a fretless digital music software.

Slow_Hand 6y ago

Out of curiosity, how do you go about auditioning these systems in your own practice? Are you a performer playing an instrument by ear? Are you sequencing sounds in a DAW? Or are you tuning your sounds in a programming environment similar to the linked article? I ask because I'm an electronic musician working in a DAW (Ableton mostly) and am trying to find the best workflow to start exploring these concepts. Ideally, there would be an interface for switching between tuning systems that's as easy as drawing in a time-signature change, but micro-tuning seems to be a low priority for most DAWs. The only one I know to even begin integrating alternate tuning systems is Logic, and those settings are tucked away deep in the preferences. Does anyone here have a resource for starting to familiarize oneself with how to integrate alternate tunings into their composition? The simpler the better, I suppose. As soon as one sets their foot into the world of alternate tunings you're usually flooded with 40+ tunings. As someone who's worked in Equal Temperament their whole life I would like to pick ONE system and really drill down on it until I get a grip on how to integrate these tunings into programs that are built for ET.

devilduck 6y ago
You can use jack or soundflower to pipe audio into Live from the outside.
smrq 6y ago
I won't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I think it's more a synth problem than a DAW problem. VST, for example, deals in 12TET, so the best a DAW could do to support alternate tuning systems would be to translate each pitch into a 12TET pitch + offset. Which is feasible, but like, not a feature I would expect to find. (I would be curious to know if any DAW actually can do this.) Personally I have experimented with alternate tuning using SuperCollider. It definitely doesn't qualify as simple, but the upside of code-as-music is that if you can imagine it and express it, you can do it. I recently made a track that switches tuning systems periodically by responding to a particular MIDI CC. I have to imagine that those sorts of shenanigans would be pretty hard without some code. To live a bit more in Ableton-land, you might be able to find a Max device that does something similar-- maybe a MIDI insert that converts MIDI notes to note + pitch bend?
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  VST does not deal in 12TET. VST2 delivers MIDI data to a plugin, which most plugins (not all) will interpret in 12TET. But the plugin may offer its own mechanism to change the mapping between MIDI note numbers and frequencies, or it might use the MIDI Tuning Standard to do so. The only role for a DAW in this comes if the DAW labels MIDI data with note names. If you're not using 12TET, these labels will likely be wrong. But since MIDI itself doesn't inherently use 12TET, just 128 notes numbered from 0 to 127, any DAW can still be used to work in non-12TET tunings and scales.
  - smrq 6y ago
    Since I knew someone on HN would be pedantic about this, I looked it up before I posted anything: > NoteOnEvent Struct Reference > Detailed Description > Note-on event specific data. > Pitch uses the twelve-tone equal temperament tuning (12-TET). https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_doc/vstinterfaces/structSteinberg_1_1Vst_1_1NoteOnEvent.html https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_doc/vstinterfaces/stru... You can, of course, implement a synth that doesn't follow the spec, if you like. (This documentation is for VST3, which does not use MIDI. VST2 has been deprecated for years.)

kortex 6y ago

> comma pump Well this is a fun rabbit hole! https://en.xen.wiki/w/Comma_pump https://en.xen.wiki/w/Comma_pump

elihu 6y ago

For ii, I find it helps to add 10:9 to the list I gave earlier, I just omitted it to stay within the familiar framework of 12 notes-to-the-octave. 12 really isn't enough, though, in a lot of cases. Here's a visualization I like, that uses 22 notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA1C9VFqJKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA1C9VFqJKo Speaking of large-number EDOs, some people I know locally are doing guitar conversions to 41-EDO. The trick that seems like it absolutely shouldn't work but it does is to omit half the frets, so that only half of the notes are available on each string. https://en.xen.wiki/w/The_Kite_Guitar https://en.xen.wiki/w/The_Kite_Guitar

kmill 6y ago
Oh, that's a great visualization! (And that's a wonderfully low-tech way of animating it.) I appreciate the Johnston notation, too, which made it easy for me to follow. The Well-Tuned Piano [1] also has a really nice lattice, though the Wikipedia page doesn't reflect this yet. (The B7+ should just be an A. I think scholars have taken La Monte Young too literally when he said everything was an overtone of an extremely low Eb.) Here, just drew a picture: https://imgur.com/S5OndL6.png https://imgur.com/S5OndL6.png (light gray is the piano key it's mapped to). It's illuminating taking the "chords" in Kyle Gann's paper and seeing them on this lattice, which shows major and minor septimal triads in each triangle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tuned_Piano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well-Tuned_Piano