Chris Vaisvil

Caleb Morgan on the tuning list posted a piano piece using his 36 note tuning of fractions created in homage to Harry Partch.

I asked and received permission to try his tuning as well as the scala formated tuning itself.

The piece in the video is a sight unseen improvisation using a M-Audio 88es midi controller to drive Pianoteq 3 standalone. I midi recorded the performance via pianoteq and rendered the midi without correction post performance and combined it with video I took of the performance with added effects.

Being an improvisation and a totally new tuning scheme there are “bad” notes and also the exploration section is intact. I can’t say I really grok this tuning though I want to try it again – at an octave or two lower.

Orchestral piece in 22 edo – minimalistic and seems best on headphones

http://clones.soonlabel.com/mp3/daily20100210-22edo-b.mp3

I have been playing with this for about 2 weeks and seem to have come to an impasse. This is a very quirky strange piece – it sounds childish and immature in a way. Reminds me in a very abstract way of the sounds of my neighborhood recorded on my dad’s monaural tape recorder recorded and played back at full amplification.

Garritan Personal Orchestra in 22 edo

brass, woodwind, strings, percussion, choir
The technique to compose this piece is to improvise an instrument’s part and then go back as edit as necessary to remove mistakes or correct intonation.

Not done yet – but I can’t move past at this point.
Part of a planned series examining my childhood aural memories.

Watching it Snow is an edited piano improvisation using M-Audio keystation 88es, Pianoteq, Sonar 8.5, and the Hanson 19 scala tuning file (click the “more” below). That the piece is in Just Intonation is actually an accident! Going by the advice I received from Petr Parízek ( tuning list Message #86387 ) to improvise in Hanson I found Hanson_19.scl and proceeded along with no research whatsoever which is how one obtains an inadvertent composition.

This is piece is more melodic than my usual microtonal piece – though I may revise the melody in the beginning sometime in the future to give it more variety.

The score for the piece in pre-translated 12 EDO is here

The piece itself is here

All of the information for the piece is in this folder

! hanson_19.scl
!
JI version of Hanson’s 19 out of 53-tET scale
19
!
25/24
27/25
9/8
125/108
6/5
5/4
125/96
4/3
25/18
36/25
3/2
25/16
8/5
5/3
125/72
9/5
15/8
48/25
2/1

And here are the intervals those ratios turn out to be. Note – in 12 EDO (“normal” tuning) each half step is 100 cents – so any deviation from 100 cents and multiples thereof (200, 300, ….) is “microtonal” even if the name is the same.

Interval class, Number of incidences, Size:

1: 11 25/24 70.672 cents classic chromatic semitone

2: 7 27/25 133.238 cents large limma

3: 7 9/8 203.910 cents major whole tone

4: 7 125/108 253.076 cents semi-augmented whole tone

5: 15 6/5 315.641 cents minor third

6: 12 5/4 386.314 cents major third

7: 6 125/96 456.986 cents classic augmented third

8: 13 4/3 498.045 cents perfect fourth

9: 11 25/18 568.717 cents classic augmented fourth

10: 11 36/25 631.283 cents classic diminished fifth

11: 13 3/2 701.955 cents perfect fifth

12: 7 25/16 772.627 cents classic augmented fifth

13: 12 8/5 813.686 cents minor sixth

14: 15 5/3 884.359 cents major sixth

15: 9 125/72 955.031 cents classic augmented sixth

16: 10 9/5 1017.596 cents just minor seventh

17: 7 15/8 1088.269 cents classic major seventh

18: 11 48/25 1129.328 cents classic diminished octave

This is a hybrid performance / scored piece using Kontakt 3, pianoteq, sonar 8.5, and a Korg MS2000 as a midi controller.

Kontakt contributes drums, upright bass, sax section, and trumpet.

Pianoteq 2.3 contributes the jazz piano.

The drums were scored first, bass second and then other instruments played along with that. The goal was to keep the composition to 60 seconds or less since this is a submission to the Chicago 60×60 event (not selected at this time).

The main motive is a 17 ET analog to a suspended 4th to major 3rd in common practice 12 edo tuning.

MP3 file

OGG file

This performance at the Oddmusic Convergence used the same tuning (19 ET), equipment and software as GR-20 Hexaphonic 19-ET Guitar Improvisation with the exception that Session Drummer 3 was added. I performed two pieces that night and this one received silence for a minute and then some scattered polite applause. Afterwords I received some comments one of which was “You sounded like the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange”. I chalked that up to the use of the tritone in a riff I quoted from Toni Iommi’s composition Black Sabbath

Here is the riff on the album

the main riff of "Black Sabbath" is one of the most famous examples of harmonic progressions with the tritone G-C#

The Oddmusic Convergence (Urbana IL 12/14/09) was a great deal more “folksy” than I expected – a lot of acoustic music was presented and this piece probably was the most “synthetic”. It was a good experience and I met some interesting people. What I wish I could get my hands on is the recorded we made at the end of the show – only performers left – we played a musical game in which random advant garde musical scores were interpreted as vocalizations – each score was lines, dots, curves, in 3 colors – each color assigned to a different vocalist and six sets of three performers took turns based on a screwdriver used as a “spin the bottle” spinner. The resulting collages were interesting.

To supply the text I applied the program Marktxt to a large number of lyrics by Evan Harrington and myself and used the output as the basis of the text in this video. Marktxt is a program that someone (Mark?) wrote to attempt to converse with people on USENET through randomization of text and posting it back on to the newsgroup it came from. This was discovered on alt.binaries.gothic about 1998 or so.

The original enhanced performance render (230 megs) which is much better quality is available here: performance enhanced

And a cropped raw version is here

MP3 is here

OGG is here

This is an orchestral piece scored for percussion, strings and brass in 7/8 time and 22 EDO. It was realized in Sonar 8.5 with session 3 drummer and Garritan Personal Orchestra ver. 4 which uses the scala tuning file capable Aria player. The main idea here was to work a bit with the Sonar step sequencer and some rhythmic complexity. The score is in 12 EDO but is midi note number accurate to the 22 EDO realization and is accurate to the nearest eight note for compactness. The brass was performed on a Korg MS2000 real time in 22 EDO and then some editing done to the performance.

MP3 version
OGG version
PDF score

The prepared electric guitar

A couple weeks ago I purchased my favorite prepared guitar device – round split shot sinkers – i.e. fishing weights! These would out nice because they are easy to use, removable, and provide sufficient weight to unmistakeably modulate the vibration of the string.

Here is an mp3 of an improvisation done with strings 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 prepared (see photo) and string 6 left normal. MP3 of the prepared guitar improvisation

The improvisation is not the most impressive piece of music but it does serve as a demonstration of this modification. The tuning is a hybrid of 12 EDO and ring modulated alternate tuning pitches – and I don’t know what the other pitches are at this point.