[PD] more Fibonacci

[David Powers]

Hi,

Just to bring a different persepective here:

More interesting to me than alternate tunings, are simply the types of
unpredictable variances when gets when real instruments go "out of tune". To
me, music that is accidentally "out of tune" sounds quite rich and
interesting.

I used PD recently to generate long tones in eight instruments on a very
simple set of four pitch classes, in any one of three octaves. However, a
simple Markov chain allows the pitch to drift either up or down by some
randomly chosen amount (something between 0 and a quarter tone I believe).
The sound turned out to be far richer than I imagined. The best thing is,
that the same algorithm can also generate the events for my score of real
instruments, though I think I must draw the score by hand to get the right
look. So I will probably have PD generate text files. I might even generate
images for the score with GEM, but I don't know how to make curves that have
the randomness of the ones I draw, so in this case I'd probably trace the
images and humanize the look of the lines.

John Cage "Ryanji" pieces were something of an inspiration for this - where
he draws pitch curves using the edges of rocks.

~David


On 8/10/06, Chuckk Hubbard <badmuthahubbard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have to disagree with this.
> You could play music that sounds just as natural using a series of 6
> or 8 perfect fifths.  *Any* number of notes separated by fifths sounds
> natural.
>
> 12-tone equal temperament is useful because 2^(7/12) is close to 3/2.
> In 19-tet, 2^(5/19) is close to 6/5 (minor third), 2^(6/19) is close
> to 5/4 (major third), and 2^(11/19) is close to 3/2.  That makes these
> exponential divisions of 2 useful for *fooling* the ear, but in all
> cases they are approximations, and 19-tet's substitute for 3/2 is
> farther from it than 12-tet's.
>
> I say if you want 3/2, use 3/2.
>
> I don't think 5-tone equal temperament is a substitute for the
> pentatonic scale.  The pentatonic scale is made up of decidedly uneven
> intervals.  Javanese gamelan tuning is notoriously non-standardized,
> adjusted individually for different ensembles.  They usually don't
> even use octaves.  http://www2.hmc.edu/~alves/laras.html
>
> Also, it is not true that all intervals are based on fifths.  Anceint
> Chinese theorists suggested this, but their anceint Chinese secret was
> that the Ch'in used intervals not derived this way, such as 8/7.
> Ptolemy and Didymos both suggested tuning thirds based on the 5th
> harmonic, 5/4, rather than Pythagoras' 81/64, which is more out of
> tune than 12-tone equal temperament.
> Islamic theorists used intervals like 18/17, 81/68, and 27/22,
> supposedly because it was simply easier to tell people where to put
> the frets that way.
> This part is more against the Jeans quote than the article, though.
>
> BTW, he mentions the idea of 7 plus or minus 2.  George Miller's essay
> on this idea is awesome:
> http://www.well.com/~smalin/miller.html
> One thing he mentions, that I think dispels the idea that the 7-tone
> scale is inviolable, is that folks can recall longer and longer series
> if they form a vocabulary of smaller parts, i.e., become more familiar
> with the material.  How else could we differentiate 26 letters, or
> remember 10-digit phone numbers?  Or recognize hundreds of people on
> sight?  Cross-categorizing- Identifying a fat, bald man in a blue
> shirt is far easier than recognizing someone based on any one of those
> criteria.  A melody is far easier to recognize than a single note.
>
> -Chuckk
>
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