Archive for March, 2010

Solo Flute – comparing 12 edo and microtonal tunings

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Written I’m guessing in the early 80′s. A contemporary styled classical piece. I moved 3 notes down an octave to give a bit more interest in a chromatic run and added a “F” at the end – which turned out to be the real tonal center.

This was written with trying to imagine the flute in my head and capturing the notes on paper. Some people are really good at this, I’m not – thus the revisions. Still the piece seems to be passable quality for the style it is in.

That being said I used this piece to compare several tuning systems on a purely melodic basis.

The conventional 12 edo tuning

A tuning system that uses the 12th root of phi

12th root pf phi in 12 steps (or perhaps actually 11 steps – I’m still figuring things out)
11
!
69.42116
138.84232
208.26348
277.68464
347.10580
416.52696
485.94813
555.36929
624.79045
694.21161
763.63277

A tuning system posted by Petr of the Tuning List the adjusts 12 equal to the Golden Spectrum

The golden spectrum
12
!
99.27089
198.54178
267.63881
366.90970
466.18059
565.45148
634.54852
733.81941
833.09030
932.36119
1100.72911
1200.000

For Piano and Scat Voice (w/o Voice)

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

This is one of my favorite music theory assignment compositions. The voice part didn’t work out too well so it is not presented here.

The goal of the assignment was to use 7th, 9th, 11th, and 13th chords in a somewhat impressionistic manner.

Download or play mp3

Talking to God – 12 tet vs Lucy Tuning

Friday, March 12th, 2010

The above video uses Pianoteq in Lucy tuning . When posted to a music site a number of people commented that they thought the Lucy tuned piano sounded out of tune. So I posted the 12 tet version of the performance and the opinions were divided as to what was better. In response I posted a mash up with the left ear 12 tet and the right ear Lucy tuned.

I present this mash up here so you may decide for yourself.

Download mash up mp3