User:BudjarnLambeth/A breakdown of my 67edo Negri8 MODMOS improvisation

67edo Negri8 MODMOS Improvisation, Budjarn Lambeth

I originally wrote this as a reply to someone on Facebook who asked for a moment-by-moment analysis of my track, however I thought that since I spent a good half an hour writing it, I might as well publish it somewhere.

The title of the track is actually incorrect. My scale is not actually a MODMOS of Negri[8]. I incorrectly believed it to be one at the time I recorded and named the track. But in fact, it is a subset of Negri[19], not a MODMOS of Negri[8]. Here is the scale used:

• 125.373
• 376.120
• 501.493
• 698.507
• 823.881
• 1020.896
• 1074.627
• 1200.000

The bassline that begins at 0:13 takes advantage of the notes a semitone above and below the root to give it a strong sense of movement and a dark, forceful sound reminiscent of EDM or trap baselines.

However the semitones were significantly wider than diatonic semitones, giving the baseline a non-diatonic 'vibe'. Which is important because the bassline is the harmonic bedrock of the track, it is the context within which everything else sits, so it's important that it has to be unambiguously "Negri". And what better way to do that than to have it use the Negri generator itself, ~125 cents, as its defining intervalic feature, both ascending and descending?

The melody that comes in at 0:29 starts by hanging around on those same three intervals, ~1075, 1200 and ~125, again using the Negri generator as its defining feature.

Technically, the first 33 seconds of the track are entirely written in Negri[3]. You only need two generators to reach all three of the notes that are used for that entire half a minute.

The next note the melody uses, at 0:33, is: ~376 cents. That's a melodic leap of a subminor third, which gives the piece a bit more life, because so far it's used only steps, and it needs a leap to inject some more energy into the melody.

At 0:39, the melody steps down from the ~1075c note to the ~1021c note - this is the narrowest interval used so far, and it has the melodic quality of a quarter tone, giving it a bendy, melting kind of quality.

Too many of these narrow intervals would not be good, because it would cause the melody to become 'slurred' and 'blunted', where notes stop sounding like different notes, and start sounding like different versions of the same note.

The scale deliberately contains exactly one of these narrow intervals, no more, no less, so that it can have that bendy melting effect to inject a little bit of intrigue and disorientation into the melody, but ensure that all the notes still sound separate and have their own strong, distinct identities to maintain the melodic integrity of the scale.

From 0:46 to 1:01, the melody leans very heavily on the subdominant function of the perfect fifth, ~699c, in order to create a sense of strong melodic structure, and strong, simple melodic movement, trying to encourage the listener to get up and dance.

At 1:01 I very briefly quote the Japanese folk song "Sakura".

At 1:34, I use that bendy, melting descending quarter tone interval between ~1075 and ~1021 again. I think it's in the perfect spot in the scale, because that ~1075 really wants to resolve up to the octave, and bending it down instead is a fun fakeout that injects intrigue and energy into the melody. I use that narrow interval again just after 1:42. It really is kind of the defining melodic feature of the scale, and gives it a lot of its character.

I play some dissonant cluster chords starting after 1:49. These are honestly my least favourite thing about the recording aside from my garbage sense of rhythm and timing. I don't think they work very well at all.

The one at 1:53 is kind of interesting though. The beating sounds oddly pleasant. Unless I've just heard it enough times that I've gotten used to how nauseating it is.

To be clear, dissonance is not inherently bad. If I were doing it deliberately, it could be very useful. It's just that I wasn't doing it deliberately, I was doing it by accident because I hadn't practiced with the scale enough to become familiar with where its consonances and dissonances lie. So it came across as clumsy and amateur, at least to me.

At 2:21 I quote Sandy Marton's "Camel by Camel".

The fact that I can quote familiar 12edo melodies like "Sakura" and "Camel by Camel" in this quite un-12-like tuning is part of what I like about the scale. It's melodically familiar but harmonically alien. I think the bassline, which is entirely in Negri[3], is the reason why I can do that. It preserves the strong Negri flavour, even when the melody on top of it has un-Negri-like moments like that.

I end the track by taking advantage of that semitone above the root one last time, going 0c -> ~125c -> 0c, to finish the song with a very clear and satisfying melodic resolution.