Kite Giedraitis

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See also: User:TallKite

Kite Giedraitis, also known as Tall Kite, is a musician, author, theorist, instrument builder and software developer.

Popular tracks: Evening Rondo, I Hear Numbers

He has invented the Kite Guitar, which makes a 41-edo guitar about as playable as 19-edo or 22-edo.

He has written alt-tuner, unique from other microtonal software in several ways:

It allows dynamic retuning via midi input from the musician, in the form of keyswitches and/or foot pedals. This in turn allows the "holy grail" of retuning: adaptive just intonation.

It features a color-coded lattice and a graph of all intervals up to an octave, both of which respond instantly to tuning changes.

With others such as Robert Walker and Ozan Yarman, he has developed a new tuning method that uses very high keyswitches (midi notes 122-127) to "smuggle" tuning information through DAWs that won't transmit sysex messages. This method has been used to retune Kontakt instruments to allow complete retuning freedom -- any note can take on any pitch in the 10-octave midi range, and can even glide to any pitch while sounding, all using only one instrument instance, one midi channel, and one DAW track.

He has written the EDOstrobetuner, a free strobe tuner for microtonal guitars.

He has developed several notation systems, not only typable and staff notation but also spoken and sung notation:

His color notation represents each prime via 1 or 2 colors (2 = clear, 3 = wa, 5 = yo for 5-over and gu for 5-under, 7 = zo and ru, etc.). Combined with standard diatonic notation, any ratio can be expressed as a color plus a degree, e.g. "zo third" for 7/6. There is a rigorous one-to-one correspondence between ratios and color notation, making it ideal for JI. But it can also be applied to temperaments and EDOs, since ratios are often used to refer to intervals in such tunings.

Ups and downs notation can notate every EDO with only 2 new accidentals. The standard seven letters and the standard sharp and flat is used to represent the chain of fifths. For EDOs in which 7 fifths octave-reduce to one EDOstep (12edo, 19edo, etc.) this is sufficient. For other EDOs, the up symbol "^" and the down symbol "v" represent raising and lowering the pitch by one EDOstep.

Along with Praveen Venkataramana, he has developed the concept of a pergen, which categorizes rank-2 and rank-3 temperaments. The pergen article also exhaustively covers how to notate them.

Unlike Sagittal, Johnston, HEWM and Sabat, Kite's color notation, ups/downs notation and pergen notation include relative notation. This makes naming not only intervals but also chords possible. Kite has listed hundreds of JI chords and EDO chords with their names.

Manifesto

Kite has called for xenharmonic terminology that requires less memorization. His manifesto:

Things I refuse to memorize:

  • I refuse to memorize any ratio with numbers of more than 2 digits
  • I refuse to memorize any extended ratio with numbers higher than 20
  • I refuse to memorize the difference between a limma, a kleisma, a schisma, a diaschisma, and a diesis
  • I refuse to memorize the 62 sagittal accidentals
  • I refuse to memorize the 46 TAMNAMS names
  • I refuse to memorize the 750 temperament names

A Rant

Kite's horribly opinionated rant about the current state of microtonal music:

There's such a thing as an over-educated ear. Anyone that studies microtonal music for a decade or so can hear consonance in anything. You learn to appreciate ever larger odd limits and prime limits until the octave is packed with hundreds of ratios. And every possible cents interval becomes a tempered version of some ratio or other. I personally would never use, say, 15/13. I just don't want to make music that requires that level of ear training. It just makes microtonal music unlistenable and inaccessible to the general public. It's like avant-garde jazz or atonal classical music. It's honestly hard for me to tell the difference between either of those and a toddler plunking away on the piano at random. I guess if I went to music school, I could learn to tell the difference, but why bother? Music is supposed to be fun, and you shouldn't have to read a textbook to get it.

Rant about the xenwiki

Yet another one of Kite's horribly opinionated rants.

A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are each tasked with finding out the volume of a ball. The mathematician gets a piece of string, measures the circumference, solves for the radius and calculates the volume. The physicist fills a large container with water, puts the ball in it and measures the change in volume when it sinks. The engineer finds the ball's serial number and looks up the volume on the internet.

Three different professions, three different ways of thinking. In the microtonal world, the mathematician is roughly analogous to the theorist, notation creator, xen software author and/or instrument builder/designer. The physicist = composer/arranger, and the engineer = performing musician. Or maybe the instrument builder is more of an engineer. Whatever, the point is there are very different levels of abstraction going on.

IMO the xenwiki caters far too much to the mathematician and not nearly enough to the physicist/engineer. It creates a feedback loop wherein the mathiness repels non-mathy types and attracts mathy types, who then make the xenwiki even more mathy. two examples:

Excessive precision, especially in cents. No one can hear a tenth of a cent except under certain carefully controlled conditions. Ask yourself, have you ever walked across the room while listening to music? Have you ever noticed the doppler effect causing the tonic to drift off, then drift back when you stop walking? If not, you have no business insisting on tenth of a cent accuracy, let alone the thousandths or even millionths of a cent found here.

The exception to this is generators that get stacked repeatedly to generate a scale. Here tenths of a cent are warranted. But hundredths are only warranted if the generator is stacked a hundred times, which never happens.

There is a xenwiki page on 762148edo, and it isn't marked as a novelty page. One edostep is 0.0015745¢! I could wave a magic wand and quantize all the world's music to 762148edo, and the next day quantize it all to 762149edo, and the next day undo all quantization, and no one would hear any of these changes.

In music, if you can't hear it, it doesn't exist!

Harmonic division vs. arithmetic division. What a musician calls the harmonic series, a mathematician calls the arithmetic series. What a musician calls the subharmonic series, a mathematician calls the harmonic series. Since the whole point of the xenwiki is to promote microtonal music, it should be a no-brainer which one to use here. But what should be called the harmonic division of an octave is called the arithmetic frequency division of an octave.

It takes special talents (like a good ear) and years of study to become a good composer/arranger/musician. To ask one to additionally learn mathy lingo is very off-putting. Let's not drive them away, let's meet them where they're coming from.

Things a composer/arranger/musician should never have to think about:

  • anything to tenths of a cent
  • the phrase "arithmetic division"
  • any comma that can't be pumped in 16 bars or less
  • acoustic pi, acoustic phi, etc.
  • any edo in the thousands or higher, arguably those in the hundreds as well
  • sentences like "A maximal evenness scale deriving from the 118 & 665 temperament, known as vavoom, can also theoretically serve as a calendar leap week cycle corresponding to a year length of 365d 5h 48m 37+17/19s, about 7 seconds shorter than the average length of the tropical year today."

Groaner puns

What's the difference between a clogged lint trap and a comma?

What's the difference between a joint holder and a Slendro comma?

How is steel like a comma?

How is a fool like a vanishing comma?

How is an elaborate musical like a comma's ratio?

How is a choosy person like the Meantone comma?

ANSWERS:

What's the difference between a clogged lint trap and a comma?

One causes a dryer to quit, and the other causes a choir to drift.

What's the difference between a joint holder and a Slendro comma?

One fits the spliff and the other splits the fifth.

How is steel like a comma?

They both improve with tempering.

How is a fool like a vanishing comma?

They both have no sense (cents).

How is an elaborate musical like a comma's ratio?

They both have big numbers.

How is a choosy person like the Meantone comma?

They're both superparticular.

OK, I'll show myself out now...

Beatles parody

(first 7 lines are by Ben Spees, who had the original idea)


What would you think if I sang microtones,

Would you stand up and walk out on me?

Lend me your ears and I'll play you a song

That I tuned xenharmonically


Oh, won't you try xenharmonics, my friend?

Yeah, in JI, all your chords, they will blend

Or, if you like, edos eight, nine and ten


What do I do when my tuning's astray?

(Does it worry you the cents are unknown?)

Why does the tonic keep drifting away?

(Are you sad because you're in Orgone?)


No, I get pythagorean help from my friends

I'm in JI with a little help from pitch bends

Yeah, gonna try Quasiorwell temperament


Do you neeeeeeed necromancy?

I need some version thereof

Does it neeeeeeed to be so fancy?

I want the tuning I love


Do you believe that the ear can be trained?

Yes I'm certain that it happens all the time

What do you hear when you turn off your brain?

I can't tell you but I know it's sublime!


Yeah I get by with a little help from my friends

I wonder why we all love to dissent

Everyone tries all these mathy dead ends

Square root of pi is a hell of a trend

You can't deny that there's few dividends

I'm just some guy with some free time to spend

I really try not to hurt or offend

Hope you don't mind all these words that I've penned

Won't you please buy my software, I recommend

I think you'll find that it is a godsend

I'm pretty sly, my hard sell, I defend

I really try not to hurt or offend

I'm out of time, for my sleep, this prevents

Time to say bye-bye to all my dear friends

All my dear frie-e-e-e-ends

This is the end!

Joseph Heller parody

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. “What if we lowered the 9th to be 5/3 above the 4th?”

“We sure can,” Doc Daneeka said.

“And then all the chords will be in tune?” Yossarian asked.

“No. Not all of them.”

“You mean there’s a catch?”

“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Any 5-limit just intonation major scale isn’t really in tune.”

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that the major 9th can't be in tune with both the fourth and the fifth. 9/4 makes a sharp 5/3 with the fourth and needs to be flattened by 22 cents to 20/9. But 20/9 makes a flat 3/2 with the fifth and needs to be sharpened by 22 cents to 9/4.

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.

“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.

Yin-yang graphic

The tetrahedrons represent 4:5:6:7 and 7:6:5:4 tetrads. The graphic represents my personal views about their usage.

See also

External links

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