#41

love all his string quartets! the kepler quartet did an amazing amazing job in playing and recording these!

#43

ā€˜microtonalā€™ is a funny descriptor.

but yea on the contemprary/experimental/JI side, worth emphasizing:
cat lamb is brilliant. some very memorable investigations of JI sawtooth stacks in large concrete rooms
https://sacredrealism.org/catlamb/audioreleases/main.html
calarts mid-aughts had a lovely confluence of work with michale pisaro, james tenney, mark menzies all being there (later mandfred werder ā€˜replacingā€™ jim -oops no), cat and other remarkable students in the performance programs really pushing things forward -
https://www.wandelweiser.de/johnny-chang.html
https://www.southlandensemble.com/
(cultivating performance chops for this stuff is a pretty big deal, respect)

(and omg super bummed now i missed being in LA for a johanna beyer program. dangit)

4 Likes
#45

Iā€™m sorry, I had a total brain-flap thinking of wandelweiser, I meant to say wolfgang von schweinitz

#46

Some of my released music is microtonal and was made with various prototype quantizers I built.

This is an Indian ā€œSa-Gramaā€ scale played live with an analog sequencer:

The lazy mariachi ā€œtrumpetsā€ here are 24TET:

8 Likes
#47

On the Just Intonation front, you can buy a dvd of a 6.5 hr performance of La Monte Youngā€™s ā€œThe Well Tuned Pianoā€ straight from his website:

http://www.melafoundation.org/store.html

#48

Does anyone have a chart or table with different tunings and the v/8 voltage values?

4 Likes
#49

Ragas donā€™t all have seven tones. There are many ragas with more or fewer notes. Indian classical music usually proceeds mostly in just intonation, with some notes occasionally bent for effect.

#50

I am unsure if that is exactly what you are looking for but it surely helped me.
http://www.plainsound.org/enter.html

#51

hereā€™s some lua code to generate such tables. which i guess i consider better then just the tables.

i think you could use these functions on crow (if crow has access to lua math lib which i assume it does.)

note that the output is voltage offsets from fundamental.

of course to make more octaves, just add 1v per octave.

require 'math'

function log2(x)
    -- math lib doesn't have base-2 log.
    -- so this just uses precomputed log(2) to save some cycles
    return math.log(x) / 0.69314718055995
end

function ratio_semi(ratio) 
    return 12.0 * log2(ratio)
end

function semi_voct(semi) 
    return semi / 12.0
end

--- that's all you really need, but here are some convenience functions

-- given a table of semitones from tonic, return table of voltage offsets
function semitone_scale_voct(scale)
    local n = #scale
    local volts = {}
    for i=1,n do
        volts[i] = semi_voct(scale[i])
    end
    return volts
end

-- given a table of ratios, return table of voltage offsets
function ratio_scale_voct(scale)
    local n = #scale
    local semi_scale = {}
    for i=1,n do
        semi_scale[i] = ratio_semi(scale[i])
    end
    return semitone_scale_voct(semi_scale)
end 

---- test / demo

-- 12tet ionian scale, specified in semitones
local ionian_12tet_semi = {0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11}
local ionian_12tet_voct = semitone_scale_voct(ionian_12tet_semi)
print("ionian_12tet_volts:")
for _,v in pairs(ionian_12tet_voct) do print(v) end

-- 5-limit just-intoned ionian, specified as ratios
local ionian_ji5_ratios =  {1, 9/8, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2,  5/3, 15/8}
local ionian_ji5_voct = ratio_scale_voct(ionian_ji5_ratios)
print("ionian_ji5_volts:")
for _,v in pairs(ionian_ji5_voct) do print(v) end

output

ionian_12tet_volts:
0
0.16666666666667
0.33333333333333
0.41666666666667
0.58333333333333
0.75
0.91666666666667

ionian_ji5_volts:
0
0.16992500144231
0.32192809488736
0.41503749927884
0.58496250072115
0.7369655941662
0.90689059560851
7 Likes
#52

Besides some of the exotic scales, itā€™s interesting to play with historic temperaments. Some years ago I retuned 5 or so octaves of my piano to Werckmeister III, which some scholars think was what J.S. Bach used when composing the Well-Tempered Clavier.

I can only manage to play a few of the preludes, but it was a revelation!! The harmonies and (more strikingly to my ear) dissonances made much more sense. I have heard comparisons between 12TET and various historic temperaments on e.g. Youtube, but in personā€“playing the music and interacting with itā€“it made a remarkable difference.

I also had the opportunity to collaborate (I was on the modular) with guitarist Steve Flato, who plays a Stratocaster which was re-fretted to a 17 tone just intonation scale. Steve taught me a lot about how to do less. Hereā€™s the video:

5 Likes
#53

Is anyone using Scalia scales on ornament and crime?

Iā€™d love to hear some tipsā€¦

Thanks!

#54

The o_C documentation contains a list of scales in cents as well as in DAC values.

Now Iā€™m wondering, if itā€™s generally possible to use those DAC values with Teletype or if they will be out of tune because of the different DACs of both modules (o_C has 16-bit DACs while those of TT seem to be 12-bit). And in the latter case, would there be an easy way to directly convert between o_C and TT values?

#55

Correct me if I am wrong but I think you could do conversion manually by using following logic:
Teletype uses numbers 0 - 16 384 to represent values between 0 - 10V (which in V/Oct is 10 octaves).
So to use list of scales from o_C documentation I would do the following:
0 - 10V is 0 - 16 384
1V = 1638,4 (but you canā€™t pass fractional numbers to teletype CV outputs - or at least I am not aware of that)
1 semitone (100cents) = 136,5(3)
1 cent = 1,365(3)
By having the value of one cent you can then just multiply the cents values from o_C wiki by 1,365(3) and you will get approximated value which you can pass to teletype CV out. For convenience I would probably input those values to tracks in tracker mode so then selected variable can be used as an scale step index.

2 Likes
#56

I found it to be a little more accurate to just use the N function to get semitone values than to compute them.

From there you can tweak to taste for alternative Western temperaments. Alternatively, itā€™s easier for me to just skip all the math and use a tuner. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#57

Friendly reminder that Teletype has a Just Intonation operator: JI (x) (y)

x is the numerator of the ratio, y is the denominator. The resulting number is the ratio normalled to a 1 v/Oct interval.

5 Likes
#58

Thanks, this looks like a pretty simple way to convert those scales, Iā€™ll try it out. I was also thinking about writing some little conversion script (not a TT script, probably JS or Lua) and then just entering the resulting values in tracker mode.

I already played around with the JI operator and also did some reading about Just Intonation. I think I get the basic principles, however, Iā€™m still figuring out how to actually construct Just Intonation scales (i. e. figuring out the ā€œrightā€ X and Y values).

#59

I wrote such small script to parse data from: https://ornament-and-cri.me/predefined_scales/#tritaval-scales and convert semitones to teletype DAC values:
teletype-scales.txt (35.9 KB)
EDIT:
Also here is an html version for those who canā€™t download file ATM:
http://firmanty.com/teletype/scales.html

12 Likes
#60

Wow, this is great and exactly what I was looking for. I had found the ornament and crime page yesterday morning and itā€™s interesting to see that this thread evolved a similar line of thinking (I had planned on doing the conversion).

2 Likes
#61

I am glad you found it helpful. But it ocurred to me that teletype values for non octave scales are probably broken (sorry about that) so I will fix that late in the evening or tomorrow.
The values listed are only for one octave but adding to these values V Octave should offset these values.

1 Like
#62

Also for Teletype and / or DX7II users, I made this chart that Iā€™ve found to be a good jumping off point for exploring non-equal temperament tunings within a relative 12tet framework.

6 Likes