source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 08:57:41 -0700 Subject: RE: Stretching 88CET From: PAULE >You establish a conceptual framework for your music that establishes >9:7s, 11:9s, 7:6s, 7:4s, 10:9s, and such as the basic building >blocks, instead of 2:1s, 5:4s, 6:5s, 4:3s, and such. Forcing >yourself to rethink the problem entirely from that perspective, >rather than using variants on a traditional set of premises, will >almost certainly cause you to produce entirely different music. >Making it miss the triple octave as well as the double octave may somewhat >enhance that different perspective. I agree. Let me add my two cents. My experience with non-octave scales (and I'm still playing with them) is that although you can set up functional harmonic relationships and weird but beautiful melodies without octaves, once you "modulate" far enough to use an interval which is a near-octave, that won't sound like a distant harmonic relationship but like an out-of-tune version of the same note. The fact that we perceive pitch along a "helix" with the same notes repeating at every octave seems an unalterable property of our auditory system, and studies such as that of the "tritone paradox" demonstrate that cultural influences are built upon this framework, not vice versa. Anyhow, the acoustical octave, as Harry Partch pointed out, has a larger "sphere of influence" in the pitch continuum than any other interval (save the unison). Thus if a progression takes us to, say, 81/40, or even 63/32, the "gravitational pull" of the octave will be very strong and the implication hard to ignore. Randy Winchester's beautiful improvisations in the Pierce-Bohlen scale (13th root of 3) show how the near-octave can be used as a rough consonance, which however is not as stable as some of the purer-tuned consonances (like 7:1) and tends to resolve to them. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 2 Oct 1996 20:24 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA04315; Wed, 2 Oct 1996 19:24:12 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA04358 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id LAA14380; Wed, 2 Oct 1996 11:24:06 -0700 Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 11:24:06 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu