#21

I highly recommend the chapter on “Musical Scales, Tuning, and Intonation” from Musimathics by Gareth Loy, I read that when I want to get my head around the whole A# is not equal to Bb business. In the end it made me appreciate what equal temperament brings to the table, and the new types of music it brought in.

3 Likes
#22

This is an interesting point I hadn’t quite considered – ie Jazz, at least bebop on, is inherently indebted (and thus somewhat trapped) in 12TET scales. I should definitely do more reading on how alternate tunings can relate to / interact with shifting key centers. The wholetone scale (for eg) only really makes sense in equal temperament (right?)…

@jnoble there’s certainly much room to explore non-12tet technology approaches. I’m curious what methods you’ve used to compose / perform that album? I’ve often found myself frustrated when exploring just intonation (for eg) because the only way I could use existing tools was by just applying tuning tables to standard interfaces. Thus it still feels like a traditional piano roll / keyboard / synthesizer with different sounds – hard to shake ~20 years of western musical training when the instrument feels almost exactly the same.

Do you have thoughts on how to ‘unlearn’ some of these habits, or more broadly what was your experience like when first engaging in alternative tunings?

2 Likes
#23

this is when i really regret not having formal music education and very little knowledge of music theory… using the opportunity, what books or resources would you recommend as a good start on music theory, maybe scales / chords specifically? i’ve also been meaning to get Musimathics but not sure if approaching it without any proper background in music theory would be a bad idea?

but it’s such a fascinating topic, developing a system that is capable of altering its behaviour [not just parameters but potentially the algorithm itself] based on its previous state and analysis of the incoming stream of events. neural networks / deep analysis is a big thing nowadays but it feels there is a vast territory of something much simpler that would still be capable of producing interesting results. a smart quantizer being one example, or a system that analyses gestural input and produces complimentary sequences or events.

and it’s interesting to think of how you could abstract it in a more open ended manner. so if i understood @Galapagoose correctly in a smart quantizer you wouldn’t just alter weights or probabilities given to different notes in a scale but alter the scale itself? so, kinda like having a 2 dimensional scale with different mapping rules applied to x and y?

1 Like
#24

“If it sounds good, it is good.”

– Duke Ellington

I think the logical conclusion is a music AI that has a sense of style.

I’d like to point out that music is so much more than pitch and that musical decisions typically associated with quantizers (scales, modes and such) can also be applied to timbre, accent, duration, tempo, etc. A simple approach to this can be to apply pitch CV to, say, envelope decay, which results in higher pitches getting more and more legato. A more advanced approach would be to send a quantizer’s trigger out to an envelope that applies a little glissando chirp to an oscillator’s aux CV input–new notes get a gliss, repeated notes don’t. Run that trigger through a clock divider to get rhythmic variation.

The strength of modular synthesis is that these kinds of constructs are easy to implement. Time domain decisions can be made with e.g. slews, comparators, sample & hold and brethren like ASRs, etc., and their effects can be easily added, subtracted, multiplied and otherwise mangled.

But I preach to the choir. :smiley:

2 Likes
#25

modulars do invite synesthesia like experiments by nature, don’t they.

but yeah, the idea can be applied to anything really, if you separate the analysis part. fixed filterbanks with envelope followers being one example, modules that produce gates when the incoming CV rises or falls etc etc.

for a smart quantizer you could also expose some of the parameters as inputs, then being able to influence them with an LFO or whatever.

there must be something already along these lines! a quick search turned up nothing so far, mostly getting time domain quantization…

#26

yes, this. i was about to ask if y’all were equally interested in “slippery” time, etc. modular lends itself to and overabundance of metric rigidity.

3 Likes
#27

i think it all depends on a patch, modular lends itself well to time domain modulation as well, CVable trigger delay as one example. extracting triggers from things, LFO with a CVable shape into a comparator. another source of interesting triggers - digital based modules that expect stable clock but feeding them something else just to confuse them, with the manner of confusion depending on the implementation, it’s interesting to “break” these things, get them out of their stable comfort zone.

i’ve also been thinking about the concept of events placed on a rigid grid, where the grid itself is placed on a rubber surface which is then stretched. so you have a bunch of events that still maintain some non linear relationship to each other. it’d be interesting to build a trigger sequencer where you program steps in a typical x0x fashion but then you have control over the grid surface where you can stretch/twist it.

2 Likes
#28

You don’t need any music background to read Musimathics (I don’t). I really enjoyed the chapter on tuning, but I found the remainder of the book a bit dull. For me that one chapter was worth the price of the book, I feel like I have a really solid mathematical understanding of the fundamentals of music theory, even if I don’t know the first thing about tension and release.

2 Likes
#29

there is a way to derive the church modes using the ER operator:

1
A + A 1 // incrementing A gives an ascending scale
IF ER 7 12 A: CV 1 N A
ELSE SCRIPT 1

ie. using the ER operator to check if A corresponds to a scale tone
else increment A and try again

5 Likes