Golden Master

On the header of this site, it mentions “tunings,” in addition to the musings and so on.  I thought it was about time to explain these golden numbers to my humble followers.  

Recently, I’ve been interested in other things, but last year I especially dove into researching the overtone series, where musical harmony comes from, and how to make music that relates directly to natural harmony.  Among musicians it’s commonly known that the “equal temperament” scale that we’ve been using since roughly the time of Bach compromises the purity of the tuning of a scale in order to allow musicians to explore more harmonic relations and progressions without having to worry about howlingly out-of-tune notes.  The practical value and elegance of this compromise have been proven by the fact that it’s been the standard for tuning of western instruments for about 300 years now, and even modernity with all its breakings-down of traditions and upheavals has hardly managed to make a dent in the ubiquity of this tuning system.

In fact, in my experience, I’ve found it very difficult to use anything besides this ingrained-by-centuries system.  Any instrument that has a fixed tuning–nearly all of them, except for fretless instruments like violins–is always tuned to equal temperament.  People interested in composing with other pitches have usually had to resort to using difficult software or building or modifying their own instruments, like Harry Partch. Electronic music instruments, despite offering new frontiers of sound, generally offer no way to circumvent equal temperament, though there are options out there.  The only hardware synthesizer I own that is capable of micro-tunings is my Yamaha TX81z.

Harry Partch, one of my inspirations, built many beautiful instruments so he could perform his own microtonal music.

I’ll get into the details and theory behind this at some point, but for now, I’ll just share what I was working on today.  I decided that I should go ahead and take advantage of the tuning capabilities of the TX81z, naively assuming that it would be fairly easy to operate.  I was wrong, of course.

The TX’s microtuning system is based around a weird system of 1/64th semitones, instead of the usual 1/100th “cents” that are used almost everywhere else.  Besides this, ‘cents’ are quite different from the ratios that Harry Partch, others, and myself prefer.  So, I’ve slapped together a little spreadsheet to make all the necessary calculations.  

excerpt from the excel spreadsheet I use to determine microtunings. If anyone is interested in these, feel free to email me.

Yes, it seems like it’s a lot of work to make microtonal music.  But I think, to break free of old traditions and make something new, that kind of work is always required.

here is the track that I made today. Somewhat of a test just to see if everything was working, but I liked how it turned out.  Panned to the left is the tx81z, and the other synth, with the granular effects, is a reaktor patch i’ve made.  

In this track, I linger a lot on the “harmonic minor seventh,” which is a minor seventh that is based on the seventh overtone in the overtone series, as opposed to a more typical one, which normally is composed of a fifth with a minor third stacked on it, or two fourths stacked on each other.  The harmonic minor seventh is much flatter than the one we’re used to, but also has a completely new sound.

Link to MP3 audio of “ratio etude #1″