The microtonal paradise

[Lazos]

. . .as long as we don't take it too seriously, it's quite useful and lots of fun.

Definitely!

[Jafo]

Frankly, I really dislike the term microtonal as it is popularly used in the West. If I called myself a microtonal composer, to me that would be the same thing as specifying that I'm an "odd-time signature composer." Fairly meaningless, really. But, I guess the term helps for discussion specifics and historical and cultural references.

+1. The term doesn't begin to cover the possibilities. For example, you can use microtonality within traditional tonality, to adjust the tunings to get more perfect harmonic ratios -- the e in C Major is not the e in A minor, and so forth -- but that's just one way to do things. (Get a synth with Hermode tuning if that's your total interest!) You can also do 22 even octave divisions, or 5, or 7, or whatever you like. These are very different things.

[Melkor]

The big problem is,,,,



Any note in any scale, is just another man made label, a term.... Like gay and straight, rich and poor, car and plane, A minor/B flat......

But unlike a car and a plane, music is not tangible... An instrument may be, a guitar, violin,, or a micro-tonal gizmo... But the actual music? You only know it exists if you can hear it... and then.. Boom, what is music becomes open to everybody's interpretation...


And the way I see it... Notes simply do not exist outside mans, man - made, perception of them..

Our incessant quest to label things we can't quite understand...

They ARE labels .... but they also reflect real physical qualities of sound/ air movement/eardrum reception etc that are independant of man.

The only reason we label them is because we CONSISTANTLY agree on what the note/name/thing is.

We can call 100 cents a semitone or anything else really, but we all (almost) agree as to what that 100 cents represents.

Without these concepts we would not be able to have this conversation

[runagate]

I guess the whole issue is a lot different for me being a player-by-ear. I've already long since internalized a bunch of weird temperaments so I needn't have a theoretical framework to instantly compose in odd tunings.

Not only that, I think it's going to solve my audio-to-midi problem via this signal chain:

USB mic (A/D is in the mic, no analog out at all) ---> Fractal Tune Smithy (retuning monophinic material on-the-fly into some 31-notes-per-octave temperament) ----> Usine DAW to host my VST instrument

This should eventually solve the audio-to-midi problem of sending "steppy" semitone values to a synth (as FTS retuned via pitchbend messages) so that it'll follow the natural melismatics of the human voice

*cross fingers*

Being that we all use ringmod and frequency modulation synths we're already dealing with tonalities that are outside Western temperaments and manage to mix them into our songs without overthinking it. Just play, experiement, and you'll learn by hearing. The only reason we favor one temperament over another is acculturation and conditioning so it's not such a stretch to just continue to train your ear for a finer gradation of the spectrum and learn to find new "sweet spots" amongst non-standard intervals and pitch ratios.