Any good alternative scales for harmony?

[Topiness]

I've always found it pretty good fun playing with alternative/world tunings with microtonal synths... but often more for solo or melodic lines. Apart from maybe the gamelan tunings, i've generally found it tough to make nice chords with them.

With the tradition of harmony in western music i'd understand if the 12-tone scale was king of this. But are there any others worth looking at that are designed for harmony?

I don't mean alternative temperaments, but different scale systems...


thanks!

[Toxikator]

Hermode Tuning scale is a new digital technology which retunes the instrument based on the chords being played.

It's a neat trick; see, the "purest" or most consonant form of a chord is the "Justly tuned" variant. the fifths and thirds are tuned to suit this chord and make it truly consonant, with basically no pitch fluctuation or "out of tune" qualities.

Problem is the further you get FROM that chord the more OUT of tune you get. So while justly tuning to C makes your C chord sound great, your G and F chords sound horrific.

Equal temperment is the compromise, wherein you trade off "one great chord and a bunch of crappy ones" for "no great chords but a bunch of pretty good ones".

Hermode tuning utilizes a bunch of fancy digital technology (which, AFAICT, just notices which notes are sounded and retunes the keys slightly), so that EVERY chord you play is "justly" (or "harmonically") retuned to sound good.

z3ta+ has a hermode option, you may want to try it if you think it sounds cool. Also check out http://www.hermode.de (and choose your language)

So that's a tuning designed for harmony... though I guess for practical and not exotic reasons.

[Topiness]

I think I have Hermode tuning on my Acess Virus, but that's several thousand miles away at the moment, sadly.

Still, that's a 'dynamic' temperaments of the 12-tone western scale system, rather than really being a different scale system...

My thoughts were more along the lines of:

'Consonance' in a chord supposedly occurs when a large proportion of harmonics from the notes involved
- coincide
- line up such that there is a simple ratio relationship between them

(this is ignoring absolute pitch issues).

the equal-tempered 12-tone scale is a very clever (or, perhaps i should say highly-evolved) solution to providing many, many opportunities for this to happen. A great many of the possible note combinations are very nice to the ear.

Sadly i don't know as much as I would like about other scale systems, hence this thread. But i do know that when I play chords with them (even allowing for the fact that the intervals on my keyboard are no longer meaningful), I usually get a mess.

So I was wondering if there were any scales that were totally different to the western 12-tone scale (not just a different temprament) that also tended towards consonant effects?

[VicDiesel]

I've always found it pretty good fun playing with alternative/world tunings with microtonal synths... but often more for solo or melodic lines. Apart from maybe the gamelan tunings, i've generally found it tough to make nice chords with them.

Here is a really interesting paper. The guy claims that the scale in which you play should fit the overtones of your instrument. He goes on to develop synthesized instruments with inharmonious overtones, and scales to go with it.

Look for sound examples at the bottom of the page. The Klingon song with a division of 60 notes per octave is pretty cool.

Victor.

[Toxikator]

@Topiness: Not really.

I mean, yes and no.

As you said, there's really only one way for notes to be "tuned" to harmonic consonance. Their melodic relationship may differ but their harmonic relationship is going to be much more difficult to vary whilst still keeping consonant.

Hermode Tuning is really less of an "Equal tempered" tuning and more of a "Harmonic" or "Just" tuning that is dynamically altered.

But yeah, if you want other interesting consonance/dissonance relationships, check out "Just" tuning systems.

An important thing to know about the general umbrella of "world" music (and the alternative scales and tuning systems that they're built on) is actually something you noticed; they seem better-suited to melody than harmony. The reason for this is that Western Music is rather unique in its use of harmony; most musical cultures or trends significantly different from the Equal Tempered or western tuning systems are not set up for harmony because harmony is not valued. This is particularly true of both East Asian (Japan in particular has a really cool musical culture) and Indian music, where the traditional aesthetic was rhythmic/melodic with little to no use of harmony outside of unison or imitation, ever.

Of course, global cross-pollenation has changed this, but it is true that traditional musics of these cultures were not concerned with harmony, while the roots of Western European music are highly harmonic due to the influence of polyphonic church compositions.

[Topiness]

Here is a really interesting paper. The guy claims that the scale in which you play should fit the overtones of your instrument. He goes on to develop synthesized instruments with inharmonious overtones, and scales to go with it.

Look for sound examples at the bottom of the page. The Klingon song with a division of 60 notes per octave is pretty cool.

Victor.

Thanks a lot - that looks like exactly what i was talking about. So, appartently I just need a VST synth that maps its timbre dynamically to my scale... or vice versa.

It's interesting what was said about the gamelan - that the scale is apparently right for the timbre of that instrument sounds intutively correct, because real gamelan pices sound so resonant and non-jarring, and yet if you try to go too far away from bell tones when you play those scales, it does jar.

[Topiness]

I changed the thread title to alternative 'scales' rather than tunings because i can see how it's a bit ambiguous - I'm thinking of, say, things like the 7-TET scale, or the quarter-tone scale.

An important thing to know about the general umbrella of "world" music (and the alternative scales and tuning systems that they're built on) is actually something you noticed; they seem better-suited to melody than harmony. The reason for this is that Western Music is rather unique in its use of harmony; most musical cultures or trends significantly different from the Equal Tempered or western tuning systems are not set up for harmony because harmony is not valued. This is particularly true of both East Asian (Japan in particular has a really cool musical culture) and Indian music, where the traditional aesthetic was rhythmic/melodic with little to no use of harmony outside of unison or imitation, ever.

Of course, global cross-pollenation has changed this, but it is true that traditional musics of these cultures were not concerned with harmony, while the roots of Western European music are highly harmonic due to the influence of polyphonic church compositions.

This is what I often read... and yet the link posted by VicDiesel points to another thing i've perhaps half-noticed, which is that while other world musics may not emphasise motion from one chord to the next, they are often still harmonious in the sense of not being audibly discordant in ensemble playing. Some gamelan music in particular has an incredible brightness and depth.

[spuddle]

Have you looked at the Equal Interval System?

[Topiness]

Have you looked at the Equal Interval System?

do you mean http://www.equalinterval.com/? that page says 'Find new and unique sounds from the simplest to the most complex relationships possible with 12 equal intervals'. Is there a version for other scales?

[spuddle]

Yes that is the site.
The Equal Interval System is a badly named but very very interesting approach to composing music. It doesn't actually refer to the 12-tone scale. It has a different way of looking at music entirely which you might find interesting. It's an online course, ideally suited to composers and arrangers for film and TV.

[VicDiesel]

The Equal Interval System is a badly named but very very interesting approach to composing music.

The resemblance between your handle and the nickname "spud" of the author of the EIS is a coincidence, right?

Victor.

[tamahome]

How about this one:

Code: Select all

C   C#  D   D#  E     F   F#    G     G#  G#    A     A#  B    C
1/1 135/128 9/8 75/64 5/4 21/16 45/32 3/2 25/16 27/16 7/4 15/8 2/1

Then you have these chords:

minor		10:12:15    E G B			    
major		4:5:6       C E G, G B D 
dim		  5:6:7       E G Bb, B D F
subminor	6:7:9       G Bb D, D F A
7th		  4:5:6:7     C E G Bb, G B D F
9th		  4:5:6:7:9   C E G Bb D, G B D F A

In the 7th chords, the minor 7th is 31 cents flat and the major 3rd is 14 cents flat (like the 7th & 5th harmonics), but they sound great.

[spuddle]

The Equal Interval System is a badly named but very very interesting approach to composing music.

The resemblance between your handle and the nickname "spud" of the author of the EIS is a coincidence, right?

Victor.

lol

[nuffink]

I changed the thread title to alternative 'scales' rather than tunings because i can see how it's a bit ambiguous - I'm thinking of, say, things like the 7-TET scale, or the quarter-tone scale.

You should change it to alternative temperaments if I read the rest of your posts correctly.

Here's a site http://www.geocities.com/scaleopia/ with hundreds of different, named, scales from 2 to 10 notes but they're all still in 12TET.

For other temperaments you might want to try Scala http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/scala/
The Scala archive index http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/doc/scalesdir.txt contains thousands of scales in many different temperaments

[Topiness]

I changed the thread title to alternative 'scales' rather than tunings because i can see how it's a bit ambiguous - I'm thinking of, say, things like the 7-TET scale, or the quarter-tone scale.

You should change it to alternative temperaments if I read the rest of your posts correctly.

As I understand the word, tempering is a way of twisting a scale slightly so that it can be close to satisfying more than one set of requirements. I'm after completely different scales to 12-tone western, which work well with chords... or, at least if someone can tell me 'there are none', it saves me looking.

Here's a site http://www.geocities.com/scaleopia/ with hundreds of different, named, scales from 2 to 10 notes but they're all still in 12TET.

Of course many subsets of 12-tone, such as all the modes and pentatonic, are likely to work. Still, it's an interesting link - thank you

For other temperaments you might want to try Scala http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/scala/
The Scala archive index http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/doc/scalesdir.txt contains thousands of scales in many different temperaments

I have all these, plus all the ones that come with Rapture, Wuzik, Vaz... but it's a lot to go through!

putting temperament aside, it does seem that the 12-tone scale is a good solution to creating concordant sounds using sounds with harmonic partials. However, I've while i've read people claim that it's 'the natural solution', i've never seen anynone coherently explain why it is 'the perfect' or 'the only' solution. So, I was wondering if anyone else had had a go at say, coming up with a nice 16-tone scale that still allowed concordant harmony. If not, maybe i'll have a go...

seems like maybe i should start witth the idea of 'limits': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_%28music%29

Found this interesting too, about Harry Partch:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Part ... tone_scale