source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 25 Feb 1996 08:14:52 -0800 Subject: Some thought on alternate tunings From: pfly@nyx.net (Paul Fly) I have been exploring alternate tunings via synthesizers for about 1/2 year so far (mainly 19 tone and 88CET so far). There seems to be a "hyperrealism" effect that comes from the double nature of a tuning like, say, 88CET. The double nature is that the tuning is "close enough" to sound fairly "normal" is one wants. The basic feelings involved in chord progressions, voice leading, cadence, etc, can be close enough to normal to pass for familar. In fact, wholly normal progressions can be created. The effect of this is to bring the listner into a familar world -- not something strange and uncertain, but the concrete "reality" of "normal music". The traditional music effects involving expectation, tension, release, consonance and dissonance, are in effect. But 88CET is not 12TET, and in addition to "normal" (ie, 12TET-like) sonorities, one can also create a wide range of unfamilar and unusual sounds. The quality of these ranges from sounding like "slightly wrong 12TET" to "wholly dissonant" (in fact, sounding "more than possibly dissonant"). And the effect of these non-12TET sounds depends on their particular relation to 12TET. If one sticks a slightly "off" sound into a more or less 12TET-like framework, the result is, of course, a feeling of "offness in an otherwise clear world. "Normalacy" is given an edge, which can feel slightly unsettling, unstable, wrong, or poignant. If the unusual is brought out more, there is a feeling of modulation *from* "normal musical reality" into an unfamilar and disruptive world. Sustained exploration of the more radically non-12TET aspects of a tuning like 88CET tend toward the abstract. When the listener cannot relate their experience to 12TET, if the links between this musical world and one's traditional world are few, the whole experience becomes "abstract". It becomes more on par with "noise as sound" (ie, each sound has to be taken "as is", without the large rich body of tradition, which colors and concreticizes most music we hear). Therefore, it is the transistional areas *between* 12-TET-like and fully non-12TET-like that are most interesting to me. And it is in this area where the term *hyperrealism* seems appropriate. It was my experience of some specific effects regarding 88CET that made me think of the relation to hyperrealism (a link to photorealism and computer graphics in my mind). For example, I noticed when one write blaring consonant "triumphant" chords in 88CET, it is easy to make use of slightly "off" consonances, like the "major octave". One of the features of 88CET is that is has no octave or 2 octave intervals (only multiples of 3 octaves). Instead, it has two intervals that sit on either side of the octave, what I will call a minor octave and a major octave. Played alone, they both sound awful. They are very dissonant and produce ugly beatings. But within the context of a loud triumphant chord (especially in a "blaring" timbre), perhaps at the end of a major key cadence, a chord with a major octave sounds very consonant, even thought the off octave is clearly audible. The result, rather than dissonance, is the feeling of unstability in the consonance, and the "stretched" nature of the octave makes it sound as if the music cannot quite contain itself and "oversteps" its goal a little. This feeling of "over-eagerness" is an example of my interpreation of hyperrealism: The music is not simply running through traditional progressions and cadences like other music -- it is doing it with such force as to strain the intervals themselves! So it is not an "alternate tuning" one heard with these slight "offnesses", but music on the verge of losing control, that is, hyper-expressive music. This "on the verge of being out of control" is a major feature of this use of 88CET (or many other alternate tunings). When a more or less "normal" chord progression is "interrupted" by a few "unusual chords" before returning to "normalacy", the result can be a feeling of actual loss of control. What was progressing alright suddenly veered off into "wrongness" for a moment. It shows that the illusion of "everything being normal" is just that -- an illusion. And it shows that the music is quite capable of "going dreadfully wrong". This effect can be used to give a sense of struggle and energy -- as if the music itself is truggling to maintain "normalacy", but cannot always do it, and sometimes loses its grip, so to speak. This "struggle" between "everything going as expected" and "everything going dreadfully wrong" is *the* main feature of my interest in alternate tunings. The give and take between the expected and the unexpected is what breathes life into music, it has always been. This is, in part, the force behind the long exploration of dissonance in Western music. But today, even the most glaring dissonances of 12TET sound glaring and dissonant in a familar and expected manner. It is a tuning that has been so thoroughly explored and listend to over the last several centuries that today it is near impossible to bring out some new and strange harmony in it. And this "saturation" of 12TET in our culture, the overwhelming bias for 12TET music that we are programmed for from a very young age, is exactly the situation in which a tuning like 88CET can work like magic. For this is a bias that is so ingrained that most people are not even aware that there are alternatives! The experience of 88CET in such a situation can be practically paradoxical. It can be the destroyer of paradimes. People on this tuning forum have occasionally expressed a desire to "spread the word" of alternate tunings. This seems to be a feeling that the general ignorance of alternate tunings is detrimental to the work of composers exploring alternate tunings. I would like to suggest that the degree of understanding of alternate tunings among general listeners is, more or less, unimportant. The use of alternate tunings is not a *style*, like be-bop or techno (although styles might require alternate tunings (like gamelon music)) -- it is a tool, more like the use of a new musical instrument, like the saxophone. People might like the sound of a saxophone, or of an altnerate tuning, in an abstract, non-musical sense. But until good music is written with new tools, there is no impetus to listen to music written with these tools. One might "spread the word" of a new tool to composers, but as far as listeners are concerned, one wants to spread "good music", regardless of the tools. And the point is that new tools often make it easier for compoers to write good music. The new tools allow the exploration of new sonorities, new discoveries, they allow easier access to that magical zone between expected and unexpected music. All too often, music that is "different" in some specific way is advertised as such, thereby limited the appeal of the music to people who are interested in that certain characteristic of the music. A good example of this is "gay music". For a gay musical act to cross over and become successful at large is seen as a rare and sought after phenomenon. Good music is not good because of one particular aspect, be it its lyrical meaning, its instrumentation, or its tuning. Good music transcends its various characteristics -- and to advertise one or another characteristic of it is to miss the point entirely, to reduce the music to some *non-musical* aspect of limited interest. Why play music for someone and say beforehand, "listen to this weird tuning", thereby focusing them *away* from the deeper aspect of good music? John Coltrane is not particularly interesting because he played the saxophone, he is interesting because his music *works*. And it works in a way that, while fundamentally tied to instrumentation, transcends it. But to return to the discussion of 88CET, there are a few more examples of hyperreality that I would like the mention. If *hyperreal* means "more real than real", then it is an appropriate word to describe musical events that "go beyond" what they are "supposed" to do. Chord progression and modulation in 88CET seem to display this kind of thing often. Because of the asymmetrical octave nature of 88CET, chord progression tend to sound relatively normal, but might end up someplace unexpected -- either too high or too low. An upward modulation that somehow ends up "too high", or a downward modulation that ends up "too low", but otherwise sounding more or less like its "expected to", resulted in a sense of skewed musical space. A feeling of "going beyond normal", being realer than real. These feeling would not be as poignant as they are if it were not for our overwhelming bias for 12TET dimensions. And that is the effect of this "skewing of musical space" -- poignancy. If done well, this technique can increase the particular mood, be it triumphant, bittersweet, or whatever -- if the harmonies are "going a little beyond" the expected, so too will the emotion -- the music will be "overly expressive". Suddenly old techniques of harmonies -- basic cadences, passing tones, suspensions, etc -- are free of their 12TET incarnations (those basic "licks" our culture is saturated with beyond the point of cliche) and useful once again as basic building blocks of new sounds. One final reason why I enjoy working in 88CET so much -- the exploration of uncharted realms. What a joy to work with progressions and modulation that have never been heard before. To be a participant in the discovery of an entirely new world. People seem to think that in today's modern world there is nothing left to explore. People seek out the deepest, most remote caves and underwatern trenches in search of the "lost frontier". The same feelings of this lost frontier are perceivable in the arts. Was not art brought to (and beyond) the ultimate frontiers in the 1960s? Is not art today retrospective and lost? How could this be when unthinkably vast realms of totally unexplored musical worlds lie at our feet, asking for pioneers? And this in the field of alternate tunings alone. There are similar vast frontiers visible in electronic music, to name just one other example. Just as the heliocentric theory and thetheory of evoultion redefined our notions of the Earth and humanity as small subsets of infinities of possibility, so too have alternate tunings (And electronics, etc) redefined western music, placing it within a small set dwarfed by the infinity of possibility. And who says it is difficult to be original?? If the unexplored was any more obvious, it would be biting our legs. -- Paul Fly | Our deeds travel with us from afar pfly@nyx.cs.du.edu | And what we've been makes us what we are Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sun, 25 Feb 1996 21:59 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id MAA15195; Sun, 25 Feb 1996 12:58:52 -0800 Date: Sun, 25 Feb 1996 12:58:52 -0800 Message-Id: <960225205536_71670.2576_HHB46-4@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu