Misconceptions about xenharmony: Difference between revisions
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<div style="width:100%; max-height:400pt; overflow:auto; background-color:#f8f9fa; border: 1px solid #eaecf0; padding:0em"><pre style="margin:0px;border:none;background:none;word-wrap:break-word;white-space: pre-wrap ! important" class="old-revision-html">The field of microtonality is rife with colorful personalities and diverse perspectives, and there are many contradictory philosophies and approaches. However, the literature on microtonality in general seems to over-represent certain perspectives, and this page is intended specifically to represent some of the views that diverge from the more "mainstream" or traditional ideas about microtonality.[[toc]] | <div style="width:100%; max-height:400pt; overflow:auto; background-color:#f8f9fa; border: 1px solid #eaecf0; padding:0em"><pre style="margin:0px;border:none;background:none;word-wrap:break-word;white-space: pre-wrap ! important" class="old-revision-html">The field of microtonality is rife with colorful personalities and diverse perspectives, and there are many contradictory philosophies and approaches. However, the literature on microtonality in general seems to over-represent certain perspectives, and this page is intended specifically to represent some of the views that diverge from the more "mainstream" or traditional ideas about microtonality.[[toc]] | ||
=Igliashon's " | =Igliashon's "Five Misconceptions About Xenharmony and Microtonality"= | ||
This section expresses the views of [[IgliashonJones|Igliashon Jones]], a guitarist and electronic music producer who has recorded several well-received albums of xenharmonic music in rock and electronica styles. He is an outspoken advocate for many relatively-discordant tunings (and for the importance of discord in general). | This section expresses the views of [[IgliashonJones|Igliashon Jones]], a guitarist and electronic music producer who has recorded several well-received albums of xenharmonic music in rock and electronica styles. He is an outspoken advocate for many relatively-discordant tunings (and for the importance of discord in general). | ||
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The truth is, anyone not actively seeking out microtonal music will either not be able to hear the difference, or if they can hear it, they won't like it (unless it's "ethnically correct" microtonal music, like Indian or Arabic music). The only people looking for music in some variety of meantone or 12-tone well-temperaments are looking for the words "historically informed performance", aka the "authentic" or "early" music crowd. Those who //are// actively seeking out music that is called "microtonal" couldn't care //less// about smoother and more in-tune harmonies following the same familiar patterns. As Brian McLaren once said, "they are not shrinking violets". They want stuff that will make their brain do happy back-flips, stuff that will turn their ears inside-out. There are many ways to accomplish this, and they do not all involve chucking 5-limit harmony out the window (in fact, some of the best ways are completely //centered// on 5-limit harmony in some way or another), but the point is that if you pussy-foot around microtonality mumbling quietly about how it's "just like 12-TET, but more in tune", absolutely NO ONE will take you seriously. Not average listeners, not microtonal enthusiasts, not your fellow microtonal musicians, and most //certainly// not the average Guitar Center customer or university music student. The only way to make it as a microtonalist in this world is to go for broke, whether that means 13-EDO, 13-limit JI, 900 notes of Hemiennealimmal temperament, or somewhere in between. Pull that "familiar = good" stick out of your anus and do something //new//. Smack the world in the face with something they've never heard before, and at the very least you'll attract a handful of people who will enthusiastically beg for more. If you're good at it, you might even make an international name for yourself among the underground microtonal scene, and if you're REALLY good at it (and/or really LUCKY) you might actually break out of the sub-culture and find your way into the public-at-large. | The truth is, anyone not actively seeking out microtonal music will either not be able to hear the difference, or if they can hear it, they won't like it (unless it's "ethnically correct" microtonal music, like Indian or Arabic music). The only people looking for music in some variety of meantone or 12-tone well-temperaments are looking for the words "historically informed performance", aka the "authentic" or "early" music crowd. Those who //are// actively seeking out music that is called "microtonal" couldn't care //less// about smoother and more in-tune harmonies following the same familiar patterns. As Brian McLaren once said, "they are not shrinking violets". They want stuff that will make their brain do happy back-flips, stuff that will turn their ears inside-out. There are many ways to accomplish this, and they do not all involve chucking 5-limit harmony out the window (in fact, some of the best ways are completely //centered// on 5-limit harmony in some way or another), but the point is that if you pussy-foot around microtonality mumbling quietly about how it's "just like 12-TET, but more in tune", absolutely NO ONE will take you seriously. Not average listeners, not microtonal enthusiasts, not your fellow microtonal musicians, and most //certainly// not the average Guitar Center customer or university music student. The only way to make it as a microtonalist in this world is to go for broke, whether that means 13-EDO, 13-limit JI, 900 notes of Hemiennealimmal temperament, or somewhere in between. Pull that "familiar = good" stick out of your anus and do something //new//. Smack the world in the face with something they've never heard before, and at the very least you'll attract a handful of people who will enthusiastically beg for more. If you're good at it, you might even make an international name for yourself among the underground microtonal scene, and if you're REALLY good at it (and/or really LUCKY) you might actually break out of the sub-culture and find your way into the public-at-large. | ||
**Misconception #5: "Beatless Harmonies are More Relaxing" and "12-TET Music is Fast Because it's Out of Tune"** | |||
This is one that really gets me. Yes, it is true that if you try to play a piece of symphonic music written for meantone tuning in something like 13 or 23-EDO, the results will be harsh, unsettling, and generally nasty, and if you play the same piece in adaptive Just Intonation, it will be much more "restful". Many conclude from this that beatless harmonies are thus inherently more "restful" than those that beat...but this is a regrettable example of wrongful inductive generalization. | |||
The more correct conclusion suggested by this observation is that what determines the amount of "restlessness" a musical stimulus will induce in a normal listener is the sheer volume of psychoacoustic and musical information present. A little bit of information is boring but not unpleasant--think the single drone of a tambura or the hum of a refrigerator--and an overload causes the cognitive faculty to shut down and let the stimuli blur into pure noise--which is also, coincidentally, soothing, at least if it's near pink or brown noise. So at either extreme of the spectrum--monophonic drone vs. noise--we have a sort of soothing "dullness". As we edge away from the drone, the informational content increases, and we develop **interest**; this can take many forms, be it monophonic melody or subtly shifting overtones or harmonic textures and what not. At some point--a point which is very much listener-dependent--interest (and thus pleasure) peaks, and further increasing the informational content becomes confusing and decreases pleasure. At some point (also very listener-dependent), pleasure becomes negative; this is usually the point where the information is as high as it can get before it becomes totally unintelligible, i.e. before it comes to be heard as pure noise. | |||
Now, as I said, there are many ways to increase the informational content of a piece of music. One of them is to decrease the concordance of the intervals, as this introduces beating and increases harmonic entropy. Another one of them is to increase the level of compositional complexity, i.e. to increase the number of pitches being heard within a given time-frame. The implications of this should be obvious: to maintain a constant level of interest, compositional complexity ought to vary inversely with harmonic concordance of intervals being heard. In other words, music that is "out of tune" will be more pleasant if it is //slower//, not faster. | |||
Now, if one looks to the meditative traditions of the world that use sound to help enhance meditation, the most common sounds are gongs, bells, and group chants (usually monophonic or even monotonic). The clear trend between all of these is "harmonic impurity", i.e. beating. Most bells produce inharmonic spectra where the overtones actually beat with one another, as do most gongs, and a room full of people chanting the same mantra or hymn will //never// be in perfect tune--there will always be some amount of beating. In modern times, the phenomenon of "binaural beating" is well-known and quite popular as a method of inducing relaxed states. One thing that is conspicuously absent from all meditative or trance-inducing sounds is beatless harmony played by pure harmonic timbres. Try this experiment for yourself: listen to 10 minutes of a Justly-tuned pipe organ sustaining a 4:5:6:7:9:11 hexad, and see just how relaxed it makes you feel! The truth is, given a static sustained harmony, one that beats is more relaxing than one that doesn't. | |||
=**Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren**= | =**Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren**= | ||
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Musical instruments which produce harmonic series timbres are so rare and so unusual that, to a first approximation, essentially all the world's musical instruments avoid this kind of construction. There is nothing new about this conclusion: A. J. Ellis first stated in 1885 that his survey of world music showed that "The music of most of the world's cultures is not based on mathematics nor or integer ratios, but is very contingent, and arbitrary, and entirely unique to its own society." (Ellis, translation plus commentary on Hermann Helmholtz's //On the Sensations of Tone//). The mathematical acoustics of most vibrating bodies have been known to be nonlinear and to produce inharmonic partials for most vibrating objects for well over 100 years: see Lord Rayleigh's two-volume //Acoustics//, 1895, for details.</pre></div> | Musical instruments which produce harmonic series timbres are so rare and so unusual that, to a first approximation, essentially all the world's musical instruments avoid this kind of construction. There is nothing new about this conclusion: A. J. Ellis first stated in 1885 that his survey of world music showed that "The music of most of the world's cultures is not based on mathematics nor or integer ratios, but is very contingent, and arbitrary, and entirely unique to its own society." (Ellis, translation plus commentary on Hermann Helmholtz's //On the Sensations of Tone//). The mathematical acoustics of most vibrating bodies have been known to be nonlinear and to produce inharmonic partials for most vibrating objects for well over 100 years: see Lord Rayleigh's two-volume //Acoustics//, 1895, for details.</pre></div> | ||
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<div style="width:100%; max-height:400pt; overflow:auto; background-color:#f8f9fa; border: 1px solid #eaecf0; padding:0em"><pre style="margin:0px;border:none;background:none;word-wrap:break-word;width:200%;white-space: pre-wrap ! important" class="old-revision-html"><html><head><title>misconceptions about xenharmony</title></head><body>The field of microtonality is rife with colorful personalities and diverse perspectives, and there are many contradictory philosophies and approaches. However, the literature on microtonality in general seems to over-represent certain perspectives, and this page is intended specifically to represent some of the views that diverge from the more &quot;mainstream&quot; or traditional ideas about microtonality.<!-- ws:start:WikiTextTocRule:4:&lt;img id=&quot;wikitext@@toc@@normal&quot; class=&quot;WikiMedia WikiMediaToc&quot; title=&quot;Table of Contents&quot; src=&quot;/site/embedthumbnail/toc/normal?w=225&amp;h=100&quot;/&gt; --><div id="toc"><h1 class="nopad">Table of Contents</h1><!-- ws:end:WikiTextTocRule:4 --><!-- ws:start:WikiTextTocRule:5: --><div style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Igliashon's &quot; | <div style="width:100%; max-height:400pt; overflow:auto; background-color:#f8f9fa; border: 1px solid #eaecf0; padding:0em"><pre style="margin:0px;border:none;background:none;word-wrap:break-word;width:200%;white-space: pre-wrap ! important" class="old-revision-html"><html><head><title>misconceptions about xenharmony</title></head><body>The field of microtonality is rife with colorful personalities and diverse perspectives, and there are many contradictory philosophies and approaches. However, the literature on microtonality in general seems to over-represent certain perspectives, and this page is intended specifically to represent some of the views that diverge from the more &quot;mainstream&quot; or traditional ideas about microtonality.<!-- ws:start:WikiTextTocRule:4:&lt;img id=&quot;wikitext@@toc@@normal&quot; class=&quot;WikiMedia WikiMediaToc&quot; title=&quot;Table of Contents&quot; src=&quot;/site/embedthumbnail/toc/normal?w=225&amp;h=100&quot;/&gt; --><div id="toc"><h1 class="nopad">Table of Contents</h1><!-- ws:end:WikiTextTocRule:4 --><!-- ws:start:WikiTextTocRule:5: --><div style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Igliashon's &quot;Five Misconceptions About Xenharmony and Microtonality&quot;">Igliashon's &quot;Five Misconceptions About Xenharmony and Microtonality&quot;</a></div> | ||
<!-- ws:end:WikiTextTocRule:5 --><!-- ws:start:WikiTextTocRule:6: --><div style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren">Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren</a></div> | <!-- ws:end:WikiTextTocRule:5 --><!-- ws:start:WikiTextTocRule:6: --><div style="margin-left: 1em;"><a href="#Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren">Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren</a></div> | ||
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This section expresses the views of <a class="wiki_link" href="/IgliashonJones">Igliashon Jones</a>, a guitarist and electronic music producer who has recorded several well-received albums of xenharmonic music in rock and electronica styles. He is an outspoken advocate for many relatively-discordant tunings (and for the importance of discord in general).<br /> | This section expresses the views of <a class="wiki_link" href="/IgliashonJones">Igliashon Jones</a>, a guitarist and electronic music producer who has recorded several well-received albums of xenharmonic music in rock and electronica styles. He is an outspoken advocate for many relatively-discordant tunings (and for the importance of discord in general).<br /> | ||
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The truth is, anyone not actively seeking out microtonal music will either not be able to hear the difference, or if they can hear it, they won't like it (unless it's &quot;ethnically correct&quot; microtonal music, like Indian or Arabic music). The only people looking for music in some variety of meantone or 12-tone well-temperaments are looking for the words &quot;historically informed performance&quot;, aka the &quot;authentic&quot; or &quot;early&quot; music crowd. Those who <em>are</em> actively seeking out music that is called &quot;microtonal&quot; couldn't care <em>less</em> about smoother and more in-tune harmonies following the same familiar patterns. As Brian McLaren once said, &quot;they are not shrinking violets&quot;. They want stuff that will make their brain do happy back-flips, stuff that will turn their ears inside-out. There are many ways to accomplish this, and they do not all involve chucking 5-limit harmony out the window (in fact, some of the best ways are completely <em>centered</em> on 5-limit harmony in some way or another), but the point is that if you pussy-foot around microtonality mumbling quietly about how it's &quot;just like 12-TET, but more in tune&quot;, absolutely NO ONE will take you seriously. Not average listeners, not microtonal enthusiasts, not your fellow microtonal musicians, and most <em>certainly</em> not the average Guitar Center customer or university music student. The only way to make it as a microtonalist in this world is to go for broke, whether that means 13-EDO, 13-limit JI, 900 notes of Hemiennealimmal temperament, or somewhere in between. Pull that &quot;familiar = good&quot; stick out of your anus and do something <em>new</em>. Smack the world in the face with something they've never heard before, and at the very least you'll attract a handful of people who will enthusiastically beg for more. If you're good at it, you might even make an international name for yourself among the underground microtonal scene, and if you're REALLY good at it (and/or really LUCKY) you might actually break out of the sub-culture and find your way into the public-at-large.<br /> | The truth is, anyone not actively seeking out microtonal music will either not be able to hear the difference, or if they can hear it, they won't like it (unless it's &quot;ethnically correct&quot; microtonal music, like Indian or Arabic music). The only people looking for music in some variety of meantone or 12-tone well-temperaments are looking for the words &quot;historically informed performance&quot;, aka the &quot;authentic&quot; or &quot;early&quot; music crowd. Those who <em>are</em> actively seeking out music that is called &quot;microtonal&quot; couldn't care <em>less</em> about smoother and more in-tune harmonies following the same familiar patterns. As Brian McLaren once said, &quot;they are not shrinking violets&quot;. They want stuff that will make their brain do happy back-flips, stuff that will turn their ears inside-out. There are many ways to accomplish this, and they do not all involve chucking 5-limit harmony out the window (in fact, some of the best ways are completely <em>centered</em> on 5-limit harmony in some way or another), but the point is that if you pussy-foot around microtonality mumbling quietly about how it's &quot;just like 12-TET, but more in tune&quot;, absolutely NO ONE will take you seriously. Not average listeners, not microtonal enthusiasts, not your fellow microtonal musicians, and most <em>certainly</em> not the average Guitar Center customer or university music student. The only way to make it as a microtonalist in this world is to go for broke, whether that means 13-EDO, 13-limit JI, 900 notes of Hemiennealimmal temperament, or somewhere in between. Pull that &quot;familiar = good&quot; stick out of your anus and do something <em>new</em>. Smack the world in the face with something they've never heard before, and at the very least you'll attract a handful of people who will enthusiastically beg for more. If you're good at it, you might even make an international name for yourself among the underground microtonal scene, and if you're REALLY good at it (and/or really LUCKY) you might actually break out of the sub-culture and find your way into the public-at-large.<br /> | ||
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<strong>Misconception #5: &quot;Beatless Harmonies are More Relaxing&quot; and &quot;12-TET Music is Fast Because it's Out of Tune&quot;</strong><br /> | |||
<br /> | |||
This is one that really gets me. Yes, it is true that if you try to play a piece of symphonic music written for meantone tuning in something like 13 or 23-EDO, the results will be harsh, unsettling, and generally nasty, and if you play the same piece in adaptive Just Intonation, it will be much more &quot;restful&quot;. Many conclude from this that beatless harmonies are thus inherently more &quot;restful&quot; than those that beat...but this is a regrettable example of wrongful inductive generalization.<br /> | |||
<br /> | |||
The more correct conclusion suggested by this observation is that what determines the amount of &quot;restlessness&quot; a musical stimulus will induce in a normal listener is the sheer volume of psychoacoustic and musical information present. A little bit of information is boring but not unpleasant--think the single drone of a tambura or the hum of a refrigerator--and an overload causes the cognitive faculty to shut down and let the stimuli blur into pure noise--which is also, coincidentally, soothing, at least if it's near pink or brown noise. So at either extreme of the spectrum--monophonic drone vs. noise--we have a sort of soothing &quot;dullness&quot;. As we edge away from the drone, the informational content increases, and we develop <strong>interest</strong>; this can take many forms, be it monophonic melody or subtly shifting overtones or harmonic textures and what not. At some point--a point which is very much listener-dependent--interest (and thus pleasure) peaks, and further increasing the informational content becomes confusing and decreases pleasure. At some point (also very listener-dependent), pleasure becomes negative; this is usually the point where the information is as high as it can get before it becomes totally unintelligible, i.e. before it comes to be heard as pure noise. <br /> | |||
<br /> | |||
Now, as I said, there are many ways to increase the informational content of a piece of music. One of them is to decrease the concordance of the intervals, as this introduces beating and increases harmonic entropy. Another one of them is to increase the level of compositional complexity, i.e. to increase the number of pitches being heard within a given time-frame. The implications of this should be obvious: to maintain a constant level of interest, compositional complexity ought to vary inversely with harmonic concordance of intervals being heard. In other words, music that is &quot;out of tune&quot; will be more pleasant if it is <em>slower</em>, not faster.<br /> | |||
<br /> | |||
Now, if one looks to the meditative traditions of the world that use sound to help enhance meditation, the most common sounds are gongs, bells, and group chants (usually monophonic or even monotonic). The clear trend between all of these is &quot;harmonic impurity&quot;, i.e. beating. Most bells produce inharmonic spectra where the overtones actually beat with one another, as do most gongs, and a room full of people chanting the same mantra or hymn will <em>never</em> be in perfect tune--there will always be some amount of beating. In modern times, the phenomenon of &quot;binaural beating&quot; is well-known and quite popular as a method of inducing relaxed states. One thing that is conspicuously absent from all meditative or trance-inducing sounds is beatless harmony played by pure harmonic timbres. Try this experiment for yourself: listen to 10 minutes of a Justly-tuned pipe organ sustaining a 4:5:6:7:9:11 hexad, and see just how relaxed it makes you feel! The truth is, given a static sustained harmony, one that beats is more relaxing than one that doesn't.<br /> | |||
<br /> | <br /> | ||
<!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:2:&lt;h1&gt; --><h1 id="toc1"><a name="Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:2 --><strong>Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren</strong></h1> | <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:2:&lt;h1&gt; --><h1 id="toc1"><a name="Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:2 --><strong>Myths and Facts about Xenharmonics by mclaren</strong></h1> | ||