I recorded an improvisation with the above DIY 23 edo guitar. The string are tuned in a quasi-normal 12 edo tuning – unison at the 9th fret except for the “B” string which is unison with the “G” string at the 7th fret.
Artificial - drums and izotope stutter edit both driven by a midi extraction of the guitar track.
Au Naturale – as I performed it with just a touch of reverberation.
Count the Drops in the Fountain is a fretless classical guitar solo improvisation.
Layton’s Number is an ambient microtonal piece. The piece started when Steve Layton sent me a midi of a performance he did for the piece “How it all came out” and I used it to drive 2 instances of Z3TA+ 2.1 in Johnny Reinhard 8th octave of the harmonic series tuning with a processed recording of me reciting Steve’s number which is: 2 1 7 9 6 1 9 8 5 2 3 8 6 5 4 6 1 8 7 3 5 1 2 7 1 2 1 3 7 8 3 7.
click picture for complete compilation
Along the War Avenue of Honour
Poem by Francis Duggan
Poem selected and recited by Bethan Mathis
Music composed by Chris Vaisvil
Selected for the ANDREAS N°15 – 14-18 First World War – FRACTION STUDIO COMPILATION
Along The War Avenue Of Honour
Poem by Richard Leach selected and interpreted / recited / sung by Christiane Offenbar
The ice is thin, the ice is thin -
the shore more distant year by year,
and nearly sixty since I left it now.
There is no going back again.
And I am old yet not so very old -
I bless the ice. I pray for cold.
Thin Ice is a piece for Alto (Christiane Offenbar in adaptive JI), Female Choir in 16 edo, Harp in 8 edo, bass drum and tamtam.
Street Graffiti under the L overpass on Pratt Avenue in Rogers Park area of Chicago – picture credit Chris Vaisvil
The Heroine Aviators of Rogers Park is a (raw, unedited) piano improvisation in a 22 note 7-limit JI tuning made by John O’Sullivan at my request. The tuning can be found in this scala file. or below:
JOS’ JI for CJV’s request
22
! 16/15 15/14 10/9 9/8 8/7 7/6 6/5 5/4 9/7 4/3 7/5 10/7 3/2 14/9 8/5 5/3 12/7 7/4 16/9 9/5 15/8 2/1
Fretless Classical Guitar Improvisation – to be honest I didn’t think the guitar was going to have as much sustain on fingered notes as it did and I ended up having quite a bit of fun playing with various JI intervals and a touch of 24 edo. The guitar cost only $20 at my local Guitar Center because it had Grateful Dead stickers plastered over it, perhaps in an attempt to hide the slight impact on the soundboard. But for that price I can remove stickers, live with cracks and gleefully remove the frets. This will probably end up being a harmonic series fretted guitar. I just put on new strings the day before so I have to tune the guitar a little here and there during the performance. The tuning I used is a modified Dante Rosati tuning of CGCGCC – the duplicated C’s on top are because the high tension string set just wouldn’t make the high G without breaking. Luckily breakage is a lot easier to deal with on a classical. You can see from the above pictures that I back filled the kerfs (fret slots) with plastic wood and sanded. It looks sloppy but that excess is actually filling in the slight dents in the wood – I used a straight edge to remove the excess plastic.
Found Poem is an electronic / ambient-ish microtonal piece in the simultaneous tunings of 203 ct (cent), 125 ct, 65 ct, and 50 ct steps implemented in 4 instances of Z3TA+ 2.1 in 4 successive performances captured in separate tracks in Sonar X2. The piece was aided by duplicating the tracks to Kontakt and izotope for percussion and general effects. The reading by Walter Lowenfels comes from Pennsound. What Walter did was take a copy of the New York Times and rearranged the words he found into a poem – thus… a found poem!
Where Have the Angels Gone is a Just Intonation – 12 equal mash guitar vocal piece. I tuned my guitar to an open JI E7 chord and play barre at 12 equal frets G, A, and up to D in a middle 8 affair. I also play leads on the “G” and “B” strings which are tuned just major 3rd and 5th respectively. Open tunings on a 12 equal guitar is a very low cost of entry method for getting a flavor of microtonality.
The Cusp of Sanity – an ambient piece for synthesizers and processed guitars.