SAKryukov

Introductions

Hello there! I have to wonder what brings a physicist like you to microtonality... --Aura (talk) 07:57, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Hello Aura! — SA:

I'm not sure I'm answering in a technically correct way, please help me if I don't. To answer your question: will you take a look at my articles referenced on my page? For example, I can explain how tonal systems work and what part of musical perception is poorly natural, and what part is cultural. I invented some microtonal musical instruments with some exceptional properties. You can try to play them right on your browser, and, if you have a touchscreen, with ten fingers...

I'll first take a look at your Wiki page gladly answer if you have any questions...

Hm... I can't seem to find the articles anymore... --Aura (talk) 15:15, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

What articles? — SA

On the my page I referenced, there are three articles, under «Original publications», and historically first one under «See also» (this first one is not microtonal, but theoretical things are mostly there)...

Here:

Musical Study with Isomorphic Computer Keyboard

Microtonal Music Study with Chromatic Lattice Keyboard

Sound Builder, Web Audio Synthesizer

Can you click and see them?

Okay, I see them now... For the record, I'm trying to work with 159edo, and it would be great if we could devise a way to play with that in actual performance- e.g. different preset tunings for individual notes that can be changed on the fly by a push of two buttons that modify the pitch of any given note by one step of 159edo- and yes, I'm actually trying to write a song that uses an approximation of 159edo. --Aura (talk) 15:30, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

The reason I like 159edo so much is that you have near-perfect approximations of both the 3-limit and the 11-limit. --Aura (talk) 15:35, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps we can discuss it later. I consider N-limit systems as artificial (no the system with rational frequency ratio themselves — this is the natural fundamental of the harmony —, but the concept of the limit itself and selection of the intervals for the tonal system, I am presently trying some research in this direction. I already noticed 159-EDO on your page, hard to understand how it's possible to deal with such high-order system, compose and play :-)

I'm working with the prominent theorist and pedagogue Valeri Brainin, creator of "Brainin method", predictive method of music teaching, developing musical hearing understood as musical intellect. He is using my platform and some instruments. He just reported his work at the seminar he created, "Mastering of complicated interval structures by ear". The seminar is remote, he is using the capability we devised for remote work. They record sequences and send/receive across social media. The typical task of the method is to predict and continue (not to reproduce). A student receives the sequence, modify it by playing over it and sends back, and so on...

See Brainin page on this wiki, for links to his materials.

Well, all I have to say about dealings with 159edo- or any other large edo for that matter- is to consider all of the pitches as belonging to one of two classes "main" and "variant", and since I have a background in 24edo, I've started working with chains of 3/2 and 11/8. Yes, I'm very classical-minded in terms of my music theory, however, see my page on Diatonic scales for my particular approach to diatonic scales. For the record, I do think of the traditional seventh of Ionian mode as being in some sense the "Natural Seventh", as it occurs in the harmonic series as the 15th harmonic, and furthermore, when you take the 8th through 16th harmonics, you can remove the 14th harmonic and still have a heptatonic scale that demonstrates Rothenberg propriety, whereas removing the 15th harmonic instead doesn't give you such a scale. --Aura (talk) 16:12, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Nice reference material on diatonic scales! Interestingly how EDO simplify things: for any 7-element diatonic system rendered as any EDO, it would be enough to describe only one mode, and then say: all other modes are derived by starting from the next element and then cycling through the remaining 6 sequential elements, and then shift by one until you get all 7 modern "natural" diatonic modes. It's remarkable that many musicians don't capture this simple idea from a school where they are taught each natural mode separately.

Thanks! I should point out that 159edo doesn't simplify things that much- only joining the Locrian and Lydian diatonic scales into modes of a single diatonic scale. Besides, when you actually look at the harmonic functions of the notes in the different diatonic "modes", you find that it actually does make sense to try and separate them due to their differing tuning proclivities. I still have to do some work on that page though. --Aura (talk) 16:33, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Oh, yes, I already mentioned that I cannot even imagine dealing with such high number of microtones. I still have to figure out why it makes sense. (Any quick hints? :-) And yes, from the functional point of view, separate natural diatonic modes have distinctly different properties, so it totally makes sense to study those functions separately, absolutely.

Have you even thought about usable N-EDO systems, why N>12 are always prime numbers (I don't want to consider something like 22-EDO (which is very special) or 24-EDO (which has nothing new at all))?! It resembles the problem of remarkable Ulam spiral, as far as I can see, it still doesn't have a theoretical explanation. Before finding any literature, I started from the algorithm for finding EDOs other than 12-EDO using different criteria of balanced approximating harmonic intervals, and immediately obtained those prime-number EDOs. I called the phenomenon "musical Ulam spiral". And I never found any publications trying to explain it.

I'm going to remove my reply message from your "talk" page as redundant and replace with the notice that you have a reply on my page...

Please call me "SA", this is my nick well known by many (from Сергей Александрович, Sergey Alexandrovich, given name + patronym, a Russian form of polite addressing, neither mentioning of a title, nor a family name). And, by the way, typographically correct rendering for "--" is "—", coded as "—" "entity"…" :-)

Right SA. Sorry, I didn't have the link to my page on diatonic scales right the first few times. It's finally corrected. --Aura (talk) 16:15, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

I'll keep reading your materials, I can see some interesting points. And if you find it possible to look through my articles, try to play the instruments (which does not require anything but following the links to the application in your browser) and give me some feedback, I'll be enormously grateful.

The first article requires a build on Windows, but 1) this is not so interesting, because it is not microtonal application, 2) this is just to download and build by one click. Not so interesting anyway, in the Web browser-based application (and Web Audio API) I support number of different EDO which can be changed on the fly.