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~Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. microtonal Music Musical Technique

A Parking Lot Thought in 17 EDO

A Parking Lot Thought in 17 EDO.

A Parking Lot Thought is a motet I wrote in my first semester of music theory. I had entered the score into Sonar some time ago and grabbed it to try making a choral piece that sounded drone-ish for the ImprovFriday drone theme this week. See this link to watch the 12 EDO video.

At the same time I have been starting to study 17 edo in a more systematic fashion. So I decided to “translate” the 12 edo motet into 17 edo. This is not a simple retune. I first to make life easy I chose 12 notes out of 17 that I was going to use. This way I kept a 1:1 relationship with score. The tuning I chose follows with the 17 edo scale degree in (parentheses):

! C:\Cakewalk\scales\17et.scl
!
12 of 17 cjv ET
12
!
70.58824 (1)
211.76471 (3)
352.94118 (5)
423.52941 (6)
494.11765 (7)
635.29412 (9)
705.88235 (10)
847.05882 (12)
917.64706 (13)
1058.82353 (15)
1129.41176 (16)
2/1 (17)

Since the motet stays in one key this type of translation was not much of a problem. As I listened to the piece and edited the score the biggest change I made was to change the C3#’s to C naturals. The score as a PDF file is here. Since this is in 4 piece part writing the piece is contrapuntal and I made some changes to make more of the harmony functional in 17 – even in 12 at this point in my classical composing career some of the progressions in 12 equal didn’t work quite right. Nonetheless this is a step in the direction I wish to go in with 17 edo – analyzing and developing 17 edo harmonic / melodic contrapuntal technique.

3 replies on “A Parking Lot Thought in 17 EDO”

Dear Chris,

Thanks for posting. I really enjoyed listening to this. Great piece. Nice to hear some of your earlier composition translated into 17 EDO. I think you are well on your way. I look forward to other discoveries you make within the tuning. Thanks!

Peace,

Mike

I think you misunderstood. Second paragraph ” So I decided to “translate” the 12 edo motet into 17 edo. “. We did not write anything microtonal in class. The furthest from common practice we were asked to write was serialism. Thanks for the listen and question!

You know, I once saw the Oscar Meyer wienermobile park in the lot where I work. It gave me a celestial feeling similar to this song.

On an unrelated note, where did you study music theory? I can’t imagine tackling 17-edo in your first semester being on the professor’s priority list.

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