User:Moremajorthanmajor/Misconceptions about xenharmony/Convergent views
The Musical Instruments’ “Greatest Common Misconceptions of Microtonalists"
This section expresses the views of the musical instruments. They are outspoken advocates for many complete, but relatively-small tunings (and for the importance of parsimony in general). Don’t be surprised if it contains a “clarinets think rather poorly of Bohlen-Pierce, actually” joke.
General Misconception 1: "More is More Because it’s More"
As you progress in microtonality, usually a very early thing that happens is you discover there's a huge variety of potential new consonant intervals, which are not represented in 12-TET. It's only natural to want to try out all these new intervals, but it's a mistake to begin with a humongous tuning system that approximates as many of these new intervals as possible. If you're accustomed to (and proficient in) 12-TET, you are going to have a mental melt-down if you go straight for something like 31-EDO or 41-EDO or triple-BP or something. The sheer variety of new possibilities will short-circuit your brain. The truth is that nothing you have learned in 12-TET has prepared you to juggle such a plethora of new harmonic possibilities, and you will probably try to do a million things at once--and this will probably sound terrible, and you will probably be disappointed, and you will probably lay your shiny new microtonal instrument aside and go back to what's familiar. It is better to begin small--absolutely no more than 28 notes per 2/1 if an equal temperament, and definitely no more than 12 if JI (since JI is so drastically different than equal temperament). You can always expand later, and you will find the novel sounds of smaller systems more accessible and more immediately rewarding. We speak from experience, as it is awkward for us to help you in 31-EDO, so do not begin immediately there lest you be retreating to smaller and smaller EDOs ever since, lamenting the loss of thousands of dollars and countless hours to tuning systems that looked good on paper but were difficult and confusing (and therefore disappointing) to work with. If you are doing it for the first time, we advise you, for your own sake as much as ours, to start at 13-EDO or 14-EDO (if you want to be that literal) and not read a word of theory until thoroughly accustomed to a single new system. As far as we have seen, seemingly nobody in all of time who has begun with 31-EDO has been satisfied enough with it to stop their exploration right there and spend the rest of their life in that one tuning; they either move on to JI, or down to the smaller EDOs, or up to the more accurate temperaments (41, 53, 72, etc.)...or they give up on microtonality all together, thinking that if the "best" system didn't work out for them, what hope is there?
It's also true that a JI system can produce a drastically larger palette of intervals than an equally-sized equal temperament. If you are hell-bent on exploring all the intervals within the 15-limit tonality diamond, do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not touch 31-EDO, but go straight to the harmonic series, specifically the scale of harmonics 8-16. In one 8-note octave-repeating scale, you will find all the intervals in the 15-limit tonality diamond (which is A LOT of intervals), although most only occur at one place in the scale. You should absolutely become fluent with the sound of these intervals in this scale before you consider trying out a temperament based on them. Then bump it up to harmonics 16-32 to see what some of the even more exotic identities feel like. Then, and only then, are you ready to start looking at high-limit temperaments. The sky's the limit once you get your sea-legs, but you must get those sea-legs first!
General Misconception 2: "Consonance is Rare"
Consonance is not rare at all. In fact it is omnipresent. Especially in the higher ETs, maybe 28-EDO and above, it is almost impossible to find a tuning that is not at least as capable of consonance as 12-TET. Even among the smaller EDOs, it is almost universally true that each one approximates some consonant subgroup of Just Intonation with the same or greater level of accuracy that 12-TET has in the 5-limit. With a little care, all of these EDOs can be made to sound nice enough for the tastes general public. Yes, even 10, 11, 13, and 14-EDO. In fact, even 8-EDO does a fairly passable approximation of harmonics 10:11:12:13:14 as 0-150-300-450-600 cents; it's not great, but it's awesome for such a tiny EDO--no interval is off by more than 18 cents, which is more or less as good as 12-TET.
No, consonance is ubiquitous, practically inescapable unless you insist on using ridiculous scales like 0-1-2-3-4-5-13 of 13 (equal) divisions of something. The strength and quality of consonance may vary from tuning to tuning, but there is nearly always enough to serve effectively as contrast to the equally-ubiquitous dissonance, if only you take the time to understand what the contrast is and how to deal with it appropriately. Sometimes the most consonant harmonies look nothing like major and minor chords in 12-TET, so they can take some searching. But they are almost always there to be found if you know how to look.
It is true that accurate approximations of the 5-limit (let alone the 7, 11, or 13-limit) are rare among small tunings. This should not be surprising, considering that the octave-equivalent 13-odd-limit tonality diamond contains 42 intervals. But consonance does not require the full 13-limit, and subgroups of the 13-limit are plentiful.
General Misconception 3: "Tunings Relatable to the Familiar are Easier to Learn/More Appealing to the 'Average' Listener Because They are Relatable to the Familiar"
In one sentence, true strangeness is literally rare and the one true average counts all of humanity. But to unpack this, tunings relatable to the familiar, like 17, 19, 22, 26, 27, 29, and 31-EDO, are easy to learn--especially if what you want to learn is how to make relatively-familiar-sounding music! These tunings all support many of the same patterns and relationships that work in 12-TET, so at first blush it is dead-simple to apply those same patterns and make nice-sounding music. The problem is that this music will not sound a whole lot different than what you're used to. If you want to make music that doesn't just sound like a mild retuning of the same old diatonic clichés, these systems are all a greater challenge than less-familiar ones, because the strong pull of the familiar is difficult to escape from. The truth is, the familiar diatonic scale is about the sweetest-sounding thing in music, as are the familiar 5-limit consonances. When we give you the choice between familiar and sweet or “unfamiliar and sour”, it is hard to make yourself choose the latter. Odds are you will keep coming back to those familiar patterns, because they sound nicer and are easier to play--it's as if we must be rewarding you for being conservative and punishing you for trying new things.
On the other hand, if you begin with a tuning that lacks the familiar diatonic structure and the familiar 5-limit consonances, you will have no choice but to find something new. At first it may seem that the learning curve is steeper, because your old habits are being thwarted at every turn, but what is actually happening is that the tuning is teaching itself to you. When you don't find sweet sounds in the old familiar places, you have to look in new places, and they are more rewarding when you find them; being "rewarded" helps you stay motivated to continue learning. Eventually the old habits will die, new ones will take their place, and you will be effortlessly making music that sounds new and good.
On the feet, most tunings relatable to the familiar, like 17, 19, 22, 26, 27, 29, and 31-EDO contain an “unfamiliar but relatively sweet” choice. For example, 17 is the smallest tuning which distinguishes “major” and “neutral” diatonic scales. This is useful for harmonizing maqamat in a Western Classical style where chord V of a “neutral” key may deceptively resolve to chord I of the parallel major or minor key. Even tunings like 13, where at first blush it is dead-simple to escape from the strong pull of the familiar because the obvious perfect fourths and fifths simply aren’t there, may reveal sour but relatively familiar choices when you free up your fixed notion of what a “real” heptatonic scale should be.
Just read history! But seriously, we know how it feels at first. You've gotten your first taste of microtonality and you think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but your friends, family, and fellow musicians are totally NOT sharing your enthusiasm. They are utterly failing to grasp why in the hell you would want to split off from the rest of the civilized 12-equal world and play music that "only aliens would like". So you start to have your doubts, and you start thinking that maaaaaybe instead of starting out with something wildly unfamiliar, at least to the conventionally-civilized 12-equal world, like Miracle temperament or 16-EDO, maybe you should be "easing people into it" with something like extended 7-limit Meantone or 19-EDO, even though what really got your motor running for microtonality in the first place was the really crazy-sounding new-to-you stuff. You think that if you can show people, "look, I can still play 'Smoke on the Water' or 'Moonlight Sonata', microtonality doesn't have to sound like alien music!" that this will turn their aversion into fascination and then they will eagerly join your cause.
Guess again, grasshopper. There's a big and obvious problem with this way of thinking. The truth is that people who want to listen to and/or make familiar-sounding music are not going to find anything very compelling about microtonality, because if you are going to make a new and more complicated tuning sound totally normal...what's the point of switching? It's like trying to sell ice-makers to the Inuits--why would they want to spend money for a machine that makes ice cubes when there's snow all around them? It's all cost and no benefit, because all they want is stuff that sounds familiar...and there's nothing more familiar than what they already have.
The truth is that lots and lots of people don't give two turds about microtonality, no matter what form it's in. The only way to win them over is to make music they like that is impossible to approximate with something familiar, and even then the odds of them actually becoming "converts" is practically non-existent. On the other hand, the people who are interested in microtonality want to hear music that sounds, well, microtonal. Sure, there are lots of ways to sound microtonal and not all microtonalists like all forms of microtonal music, but none of them want to hear music that sounds like 12-TET if you promise them something microtonal. There's nothing at all wrong with playing in 12-TET, and most microtonalists still listen to tons and tons of music in 12-TET (it's hard not to!), but you've really got to ask yourself if it's worth the trouble of refretting a guitar, or having a retunable synth, or learning new fingerings on the bassoon (etc.), if what you really want to do is make music that doesn't actually sound much different?
Or maybe this is all overly defeatist, new and more complicated tunings can’t sound totally normal as easily as we’re threatening unless they’re literal multiples of 12-TET and you treat the several circles as relatively separate entities. Your true problem is that you are thinking too literally. Thinking literally is easy for lots and lots of people to do, and thus to overdo. It’s beside the point if you literally show people, "look, I can still play 'Smoke on the Water' or 'Moonlight Sonata', microtonality doesn't have to sound like alien music!" Most people who just to want play well-known music independently of 12-TET for Cristofori’s sake will figure how to do this for themselves.
General Misconception 4: "Beatless Harmonies are More Relaxing" and "12-TET Music is Fast Because it's Out of Tune/Off-Register"
This is one that really gets us. Yes, it is true that if you try to play a piece of symphonic music written for meantone tuning in something like 13 or 23-EDO, the results will be harsh, unsettling, and generally nasty, like if you use scales that sound like meantone tuning but are other than octaves, and if you play the same piece in adaptive Just Intonation, it will be much more "restful". Many conclude from this that relatively-beatless harmonies are thus inherently more "restful" than those that beat...but this is a regrettable example of wrongful inductive generalization.
The more correct conclusion suggested by this observation is that what determines the amount of "restlessness" a musical stimulus will induce in a normal listener is the sheer volume of psychoacoustic and musical information present. A little bit of information is boring but not unpleasant--think the single drone of a tambura or the hum of a refrigerator--and an overload causes the cognitive faculty to shut down and let the stimuli blur into pure noise--which is also, coincidentally, soothing, at least if it's near pink or brown noise. So at either extreme of the spectrum--monophonic drone vs. noise--we have a sort of soothing "dullness". As we edge away from the drone, the informational content increases, and we develop interest; this can take many forms, be it monophonic melody or subtly shifting overtones or harmonic textures and what not. At some point--a point which is very much listener-dependent--interest (and thus pleasure) peaks, and further increasing the informational content becomes confusing and decreases pleasure. At some point (also very listener-dependent), pleasure becomes negative; this is usually the point where the information is as high as it can get before it becomes totally unintelligible, i.e. before it comes to be heard as pure noise.
Now, as we said, there are many ways to increase the informational content of a piece of music. One of them is to decrease the concordance of the intervals, as this introduces beating and increases harmonic entropy. Another one of them is to increase the level of compositional complexity, i.e. to increase the number of pitches being heard within a given time-frame. The implications of this should be obvious: to maintain a constant level of interest, compositional complexity ought to vary inversely with harmonic concordance of intervals being heard. In other words, music that is "out of tune/off-register" will be more pleasant if it is slower, not faster.
If one looks to the meditative traditions of the world that use sound to help enhance meditation, the most common sounds are gongs, bells, and group chants (usually monophonic or even monotonic). The clear trend between all of these is "harmonic impurity", i.e. beating. Most bells produce inharmonic spectra where the overtones actually beat with one another, as do most gongs, and a room full of people chanting the same mantra or hymn will never be in perfect tune--there will always be some amount of beating. In modern times, the phenomenon of "binaural beating" is well-known and quite popular as a method of inducing relaxed states. One thing that is conspicuously absent from all meditative or trance-inducing sounds is beatless harmony played by pure harmonic timbres. Try this experiment for yourself: listen to 10 minutes of a Justly-tuned pipe organ sustaining a 4:5:6:7:9:11 hexad, and see just how relaxed it makes you feel! The truth is, given a static sustained harmony, one that beats is more relaxing than one that doesn't.
Of course, if you want to write music with lots of melodic and harmonic complexity, then by all means, go with the more near-Just harmonies. The spectrum of musical interest is broad and deep, and the most important thing is to develop a sensitivity to the sorts of music appropriate to the tuning you're working with.
General Misconception 5: "You Should Listen to the Advice of (More) Experienced Microtonalists"
The world of alternative intonational practices (also know as the world of microtonality or xenharmony) is vast, and when you first enter it, it's easy to be overwhelmed and confused and maybe even terrified. Especially when there are all sorts of people and organizations making all sorts of grandiose claims about this tuning or that tuning. There is almost no consensus, and there is a TON of rhetoric, much of it based on questionable scientific studies or historical sources. In your initial confusion, it will be almost impossible to resist the siren song of someone's particular brand of microtonality, because you need to start somewhere and it's hard to figure out this stuff on your own. The rhetoric is occasionally made all the more enticing by the existence of compelling music based on the advertised tuning system; after all, if composer X could make such cool sounds with this tuning, then surely it must be a great tuning for anybody!
The truth is that no one is qualified to tell you what tunings to you use, because different tunings are good for different things and it's almost impossible to know what you want from a tuning when you've spent your whole life immersed in a single tuning. You will have no idea at first whether harmonic properties or melodic properties are more important, or whether you work better in equal tunings or unequal tunings, or whether you think better in terms of frequency ratios or cents or note-names, or whether you think beating and discordance are really as undesirable as some people say they are. In all probability, no matter what alternative tuning you begin with, you will find something unsatisfactory about it and seek out alternatives. There are very, very few microtonalists in the world who have picked a single tuning system and stuck with it, and just because someone has spent a lifetime trying out every tuning under the sun and finally settled on one, that does not mean you will get the same results. Tuning is a very personal choice, and can be a very deep and enlightening personal journey. Do NOT trust anyone who tells you it has to be a certain way. In fact, don't even listen to us. Every word ever written about microtonality needs to be taken with a heap of salt, including ours.
General Misconception 6: Insert Statement About the Harmonic Series Here
It may not say “Harmonic Series” obviously or literally, but there are one thousand things one may say to refute it.
General Misconception 7: “If the best-known microtonal music sounds so ‘bad’, microtonality must somehow be ‘bad’ theory” (e. g. "Microtonality produces great theory and bad music." -- Brian Eno)
It has been said many times in many ways that “Error can easily get halfway around the world before anyone figures out it’s wrong”. Modern microtonality seems irredeemably bound up with the erroneous idea that dissonance and modes are somehow “fighting” each other. Before 1919, this would have been easy to reject out of hand. But a war had just blown the literal center out of Europe and the leading intellectuals thought that it must be Year Zero.
It wasn’t, but now the internet abounds with information about microtonality and xenharmonics, essentially all of it provably false. In contemporary music as in foreign affairs and economics and most other realms of daily life, those who talk don't know, while those who know don't talk.
Pournell's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that any institution will tend to harbor two kinds of people. The first are the people who actually do the work that pushes things forward. The second group are those those who excel in the kind of bureaucratic infighting which advances their own careers and gains them publicity and renown. And Pournell's Law states that the second group will always tend to take power in an institution, write the rules, and end up marginalizing the first group.
This applies to the internet and to academic bodies and prestigious contemporary music institutions (like Wikipedia or tuning discussion groups or Ivy League tenured university professorships or institutions like Lincoln Center) as well as to other other types of bureaucracies. The people who wind up dominating Wikipedia articles about xenharmonics (as administrators with the power to delete edits they don't like) or Ivy League tenured professorships or the concert programmes or high-profile concert venues like Lincoln Center tend to be the people who excel at politicking and bureaucratic infighting...not the people who actually know or have accomplished things. A person becomes an administrator with the power to delete undesired entries in Wikipedia articles about micrtonality by spending 16 hours per day editing Wikipedia. This leaves no time to compose or perform or listen to microtonal music. As a result, the people who spend all their time composing and performing microtonal music get marginalized and written out of Wikipedia articles about microtonality. The same applies to people who attain positions of great power in institutions like Lincoln Center. Such people must spend essentially all their time running and politicking in Lincoln Center and navigating the treacherous waters of funding committees and budget infighting with the City of New York, leaving no time to compose or perform music.
Consequently, there is essentially no valid information about xenharmonics on the internet. Moreover, as a general rule, the better-connected any xenharmonic commentator is to the internet, the more elaborate hi/r webpage, the more highly visible and polished hi/r YouTube videos, the less that person knows about xenharmonics. People with elaborate and impressive web pages and superb YouTube videos have attained that level of expertise by spending all their waking hours learning web design and video production. This leaves no time for composing and performing music. Contrariwise, the expert musicians who spending all their waking hours composing or performing music don't have years to take off to learn web design or high-definition video editing and production (Whatever happened to everyone knowing something about everything?). Invariably, the expert musician who asks someone "Please design a high-quality professional looking web page for me" or "I need three hundred hours of video of performances edited and titles added and the viewpoints of three different cameras intercut, with SMPTE synchronization" gets the response: "I make my living doing web design/video editing and I charge $50 per hour -- why should I do it for you for free?" With the inevitable result that the web page never gets designed or the video never gets edited and put up on YouTube.
There exists a vast amount of superb microtonal music. Brian Eno has never heard it because it's produced by practicing musicians and composers who spend their time making vividly memorable music, not impressive websites or Lincoln Center concerts or thick gilt-edged books published by prestigious academic publishers. There is a great deal of insightful and accurate writing about microtonality, but it was produced by people like Ivor Darreg who cannot get published by conventional academic publishers. (Peer review generally offers a reliable method of academic quality control except in new fields like xenharmonics. With microtonality, peer-review encounters a vicious cycle of Catch-22: the academic to whom the book on microtonality gets sent for peer review responds "Never heard of this. Deep six it." And because of this kind of response in peer review, academic books on microtonality typically don't get published. But because academic books on microtonality don't get published, academics remain unfamiliar with the subject -- leading to a self-reinforcing closed cycle of lack of information about microtonality in academia.) Meanwhile, the books on microtonality which doget published (viz., Harry Partch's Genesis of a Music) contain enormous amounts of misinformation about microtonalityand ignore most of the range of xenharmonic tunings and most of the styles of xenharmonic music produced over the last 80 years.
This appears to be the case in the early part of the development of any new art. For the first few years, the people who are most prominent are those who know the least and have produced the worst music or art. Only slowly, after a period of many decades, do the obscure figures eventually become revealed as the great practititioners, and the previously unpublished writings finally get into (and stay in) print. Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources, for example, was written in 1919 but not published until 1930. it then fell out of print in the 1950s, and stayed out of print for well over 40 years.
Contemporary music finds itself subject to even more violent fads and fashions than bubble-gum pop music designed for teenagers. And just as pop music witnesses transient fashions like The Spice Girls (who at one time sold more records faster than any other group in music history and have now completely vanished from pop culture, never to be heard of again), in contemporary music transient fashions like total serialism gain immense fame, only to submerge into oblivion and disappear from the general consciousness, never to be heard of again, but nevertheless leave behind destructive misconceptions about the art. In contemporary music, as in bubblegum pop music, the transient fads and fashions are what grab people's attention. The work that stands the test of time only emerges gradually, over the course of many years. (Sometimes the work that stands the test of time was famous when originally produced. But sometimes not.)
General Misconception 8: “Tunings Relatable to the Familiar are Much Thought-terminating Clichés/Microtonality is About Appearing Unique”
These are two sides of the same coin. Tunings relatable to the familiar, like 17, 19, 22, 26, 27, 29, and 31-EDO lie squarely within the common sense of the vast majority of your potential audience even if they are obviously “off” at first blush because the diatonic scale fits neatly into them. If you want your friends, family, and fellow musicians to get your argument without unnecessary explanation, this shorthand is inescapable as much as you may mock it when it betrays lazy composition.
Special Misconception 1: “Clarinets don’t care about twos.”
This is a case of “corpus est omen”. Cylindrical wind instruments often get this because stopping a cylindrical pipe cuts the even numbers out of its quasi-harmonic series. The whole idea of no-twos scales is rather new, even to clarinets. It seems to have originated between 1863 and 1866. 155+ years on, they still find these scales rather questionable theory.
Special Misconception 2: “12-TET is keyboards’ fault.”
It really isn’t, nobody checked the design of the first keyboard with accidentals before it left the designer’s studio in the mid 14th century.
Now go forth, make mistakes, and learn from them!