2 ms·
> Roughness and smoothness is all very well, but if you want to write some music, the conventional way to do it is to pick a subset of all possible frequencies
by vanderZwan 6y ago
> Roughness and smoothness is all very well, but if you want to write some music, the conventional way to do it is to pick a subset of all possible frequencies to use for your notes and use these as the building blocks for your tune. Actually most musicians don't even do that, they just work with the notes others have picked already. This is unoriginal, perhaps, but convenient for working together.
Is this a tongue-in-cheek comment on unreasonable expectations of originality from artists, given that most programmers don't do their work by constructing their own programming language from the ground up either?
- billynomates111 6y agoIf you want to make an apple pie you must first invent the universe.
- sideshowb 6y agoThe tone of the whole thing is fairly flippant, really (an experiment with a different style of writing which I haven't used since!). I certainly wouldn't criticize anyone for using a standard tuning, indeed I do so myself most of the time. Like I said for one thing it makes collaboration (with other musicians or instrument-makers) easier, then there's the fact that the standard tunings themselves form part of the cultural background we're building on when we make more music. For example if we take the roughness plot in the article as representative (which vnorilo rightly calls into question, but still) we see that any interval in the continuous range between an 5th and octave is evaluated as smoother than a minor third. But we don't perceive it that way, I suspect because of our cultural background.