Carlo Serafini
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Carlo Serafini (b. 1957) is an Italian composer of futurist electronic music.
Progress report
- What was your path to discovering alternate tunings?
- It was in the 80's. I was an international student (from Italy) at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA studying music synthesis. I heard about Wendy Carlos and her "Beauty in the Beast" I was (and still am) very impressed by that album. I bought "Tuning In: Microtonality in Electronic Music: A Basic Guide to Using Alternate Scales. Temperaments and Microtuning using Synthesizers" by Scott Wilkinson and tried to apply what I was learning retuning a couple of Yamaha synths I had: TX81Z and TX802 but trying to retune each and every note of the 128 midi pitches by hand was way too much for me and gave up, plus, I wasn't ready and my interest remained dormant for almost 20 years until I started thinking about what could be the subject of a dissertation for my master's degree in music and new technology at the Conservatory of Music in Florence, Italy.
- After much thinking I came up with this title “Technology and Temperament: Hardware, Software and Online Resources for Microtonal Music” and started gathering informations (you can find it here).
- What instruments or means have you had/do you have now/do you want for the making of microtonal music?
- During the researches for my dissertation I stumbled upon a great piece of software: LMSO by X.J. Scott
- I bought it and with Jeff Scott's help I started experimenting. A new world opened up! Intervals I had never thought possible unfolded in front of me. All kinds of scales, exotic, weird, beautiful, ugly ones appeared. In the meantime I started reading and studying many books, among them: "The Just Intonation Primer" by David Doty "On the Sensations of Tone" by Hermann Helmholtz and Alexander Ellis and "Genesis of a Music" by Harry Partch and searched everything I could find on the internet (music, articles and everything else).