This is really cool, but -- as someone who's been researching just tuning for a while -- I think a lot of very important aspects of human psychology have been overlooked here.
Frankly, familiarity is a vastly more important aspect of music than any micro-tonal artist would like to admit. And while the overtone series is (in many many ways) the root of all music, not every overtone is equal.
For instance: 9/8 (a major second) is just (3 * 3)/(2 * 2 *2) and is generally more consonant (like dull, boring, unmoving: an octave or perfect fifth) than anything with a 5 prime number in it (eg 5/4 a major 3rd). AFAICT, the order of simplicity (dullness -> dissonance) on intervals is 2/1, 4/1, 3/2, 4/3, 3/1, 9/8, 16/9, 5/4, 8/5, 6/5... it's not exactly clear what the math is here.
Also, it's always really, really telling to me when someone shares a music theory without sharing a recording of that theory in action. The site I'm working on lets people use their keyboard to play with every scale, so you can verify that it's not just number play.
yep - I came in here to talk about "familiarity" as the bedrock of how we listen to tunes. In my estimation, music is a constant juggling act between familiarity and novelty, and bending too much on one side or the other trends towards boredom.
I would argue that some of the pure intonation music (i.e. Michael Harrison's Revelations) or alternate tuning (i.e. Lamonte Young's Well Tuned Piano) is striking initially because of how alien it sounds, but to my ear a lot of it doesn't feel like it does too much more than that both as a function of the tuning and the difficulty in building a moving composition in something so foreign.
The standard tunings in Western Music are well-worn, but they can give a rich vocabulary for dissonance and consonance and have the psychological familiarity to build up emotional abstractions that some of the more adventurous scales do not.
My theory is that music is something of a "matching puzzle."
- using only these tones
- and only the intervals between them
- I will construct an elaborate yet consistent path
- which will stray into a place that's hard to resolve from
- then impress you with how I "solve" it
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So when playing with just intoned, I've applied this theory and it works. I've shown it to friends and they like it... they can't even tell it's just intuned.
My favorite so far is using 7/6 and 9/7 as my major and minor thirds. If you multiply them together you get 3/2. Just like you do with 6/5 and 5/4. Pretty cool eh?
As long as the first note and the last are familiar, people seem to be okay with it.
Frankly, familiarity is a vastly more important aspect of music than any micro-tonal artist would like to admit. And while the overtone series is (in many many ways) the root of all music, not every overtone is equal.
For instance: 9/8 (a major second) is just (3 * 3)/(2 * 2 *2) and is generally more consonant (like dull, boring, unmoving: an octave or perfect fifth) than anything with a 5 prime number in it (eg 5/4 a major 3rd). AFAICT, the order of simplicity (dullness -> dissonance) on intervals is 2/1, 4/1, 3/2, 4/3, 3/1, 9/8, 16/9, 5/4, 8/5, 6/5... it's not exactly clear what the math is here.
Also, it's always really, really telling to me when someone shares a music theory without sharing a recording of that theory in action. The site I'm working on lets people use their keyboard to play with every scale, so you can verify that it's not just number play.