User:MisterShafXen/Alt world 1
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This page is part of a worldbuilding project. It describes musical tuning concepts from a fictional alternate world, rather than the real world.
It may contain references to people, cultures, or places that do not actually exist, or events that did not actually happen. This does not mean that it can’t be used to make real music—it still could be; it just means this article shouldn’t be used as a factual source about real history or traditions, or as a source of terminology and principle compatible with real established common practices and conventions. |
History
6,000 years ago, the first humans appeared on Alt. 215 years later (5.785 years ago), an older fellow named Adam discovered music. He hit metal tongs against different rocks, and started composing melodies. Fast-forward to the year 70 CE (Earth years are assumed). The ancient Levites had been exiled from their land. Until then, they had always used 12edo. When they were exiled, they wanted to compose songs, sadder than ever before. They discovered that flattening the minor third to 265 cents made their minor-key music even sadder. In the year 71, the Levites realized something that no culture had realized before: All those 265 cent minor thirds needed perfect fifths above them, and a perfect fifth up from 265 cents was almost equally off from the nearest 12edo note as the octave inversion (a 935 cent major sixth) was from the note a semitone below, in the opposite direction. This led to the Levites discovering 36edo. Over the next 129 years, the Levites taught their children about 36edo. Soon enough, their host nation (the Romans) caught on. 36edo quickly spread after that.
As 36edo was rapidly taking over Alt, the Reubenites of China discovered 5-limit harmony. In the year 135, the first 5-limit music was being sung for the Emperor of China, Liu Liu. He enjoyed it so much that he made 5-limit JI the official tuning system of China. In the year 216, 36edo finally reached China. The new Emperor liked 36edo and 5-limit music equally, so he came up with 72edo, effectively combining those 5-limit ratios with 36edo.
All this time, nobody had reached Russia or the Americas. However, in 590, an ice age hit. By the end of said ice age in 654, people started moving into southern Russia. In 680, a small group of social outcasts from various tribes founded the town of Love, named for the policy of loving all. These people who never learned music from the mainstream tribes independently discovered the harmonic series. By the year 1000, they had started their own music-based religion. The first musical instruments on Alt (besides the voice) were built for religious ceremonies. These evolved into all the modern-day instruments.