User:BudjarnLambeth/Cultural appropriation-o-meter: Difference between revisions

Taking ideas from other cultures, then pretending that they're your own, is just as bad as claiming you represent a tradition when you don't.

''Do'' give credit. Just do it in a way where you say (1) "I took inspiration from x to make this tuning", instead of saying (2) "I found this tuning that is the same thing as x". The first of those is awesome and should be encouraged. The second is the one that will upset people.

You should NOT claim the temperament is completely original and has nothing to do with Otterpop, and name it something unrelated like "the beaver dam temperament".

You should also NOT call your temperament the "clam rock temperament", because that implies that it's the exact same as the traditional scale, which it is not. It's an approximation. You can't emulate all the [[Empirical tuning|nuances]] of clam rock music because you didn't train in that musical culture for decades.

What you SHOULD do is call your temperament something '''distinct ''and'' related'''. For example: "the near-clamrock temperament", "the almost-clamrock temperament" or "the clamrocklike temperament".

Not only is it stealing the respect afforded to the storied tradition you're claiming relationship to, it is also eroding the respect that people then pay to that culture's music theory. The more people who make unrelated bootleg copies of [[slendro]] scale or [[maqam]] biyati, the less seriously the public and scholars will take the actual, real slendro scale and maqam biyati, which is extremely unfair.

[[Slendric]]: the 5&36 temperament which has a sum total of absolutely nothing in common with real slendro scales.  

R.M.A. Koesoemadinata found that the temperament most similar to slendro scales is 9&17, i.e. [[bleu]] temperament. So bleu is the only temperament that could ever get away with being called "slendric". Though even then, it would better to have a name that acknowledges being similar but different to slendro, like "slendroesque", "slendro-like", etc., or a name after a city in [[Indonesian|Sunda]] like "palembang", "makassar", etc.

[[49/48]], the “slendro diesis”, doesn’t appear to have anything much in common with slendro, besides being tempered out in equipentatonic and quasi-equipentatonic tunings like [[5edo]] and [[semaphore]][5], only a surface level similarity.

Luckily, this interval has two other names, “large septimal diesis” and “semaphore comma”, which are both wonderful, descriptive names. So we can just use those and pretend like “slendro diesis” never happened.

At least unlike slendric, the [[pelogic]] temperament does actually resemble an Indonesian [[pelog]] scale, which is why it doesn’t get 1 star.

Biyatismic temperament would score 5 stars instead of 1 if it were named something like:

[[Srutal]] temperament and its [[Diaschismic family|siblings]] are quite close to the [[Indian]] shruti system, so it is good that they give credit to that inspiration in the title.

The name [[gamelismic]] is a bit unsuitable, because the temperament doesn’t really have anything to do with Indonesian gamelan. However, “gamelismic” is at least different enough from the word “gamelan” that it’s unlikely to confuse the two, and as a result “gamelismic” is unlikely to muddy the perception or reputation of the gamelan tradition in any way.

"Maqamic" has been renamed to "[[neutrominant]]". While that's an improvement, I actually dislike "neutrominant" too. Not as much, but still.

The reason neutrominant does still, ''barely'', get a pass, is that it does at least still reference neutral thirds in its name, which are a concept associated with Arabic music.  

The inventor of the [[Kartvelian scale]] wrote a lot of dodgy stuff, claiming that his tuning was the exact same one that is actually used in [[Georgian|Georgia]], erasing all the nuances of how Georgian music is actually tuned. If I was rating based on all that, this entry would get 1 star.