Music of Georgia

Georgian folk music is well known for its traditional vocal polyphony. There is no clear consensus on the structure of the underlying scale or tuning system, except that it is heptatonic and close to equalized. It is sometimes claimed that their scales are based on equal divisions of the fifth, but this is hard to verify.

English Wikipedia has an article on:

Music of Georgia (country)

From a corpus analysis of field recordings by Scherbaum et al.^[1], the following conclusions can be made:

Fourths and fifths are close to just.
Thirds tend to be neutral (around 350 ¢), as are sixths.
Harmonic seconds are close to 9/8, while the melodic seconds are smaller (between 150 ¢ and 180 ¢).

Videos

The empirical research of a Georgian sound scale" by Z. Tsereteli and L. Veshapidze
Georgian chant tuning (Malkhaz Erkvanidze demonstrates)
Video on Georgian music theory by Stephen Weigel (suggests the use of 34edo notation)
- transcript (Archive.org)

References

↑ Scherbaum, F., Mzhavanadze, N., Rosenzweig, S., & Müller, M. (2022). Tuning Systems of Traditional Georgian Singing Determined From a New Corpus of Field Recordings. Musicologist 2022. 6 (2): 142-168. DOI: 10.33906/musicologist.1068947

[1] Scherbaum, F., Mzhavanadze, N., Rosenzweig, S., & Müller, M. (2022). Tuning Systems of Traditional Georgian Singing Determined From a New Corpus of Field Recordings. Musicologist 2022. 6 (2): 142-168. DOI: 10.33906/musicologist.1068947

[1]

Music of Georgia

Videos

Further reading

References