2017-01-11 01:49:20-0500
A Little Music Theory:
I actually think that consonance is related to phase coherence, and so music that wishes to exploit the contrast between consonance, near consonance, and dissonance need to be cognizant of how phase coherence creates tonal fusion, and fixed scales, equally tempered or not, are not going to have that flexibility if you feel like straying far from your original tonal center.
I say phase coherence and not rational frequency multiples because I don't expect tone generators to hold their frequencies constant, and I posit that the process is more like phase locked loops than some kind of magical fraction-applying process. The phase coherence is clearly related to the structure of the partials of the timbres involved, which have no obligation to be harmonic partials.
But I also think you can make music out of anything, and intervals and scales don't have to be perfectly produced to unambiguously be perceived in a preexisting framework of musical possibilities. It is the really lousy EDO scales, like 24 or 36, which help blaze new structures of music, not based on consonance or resolution to consonance, and the elastic human brain can rationalize and recognize these structures as scales and harmonies along the more prevalent (and naturally occurring) harmonically related structures.
My upcoming app PolyHarp is dedicated to exploring these ideas, that "scales" are side effects of chord clusters, and so it builds scales - realized as "string sets" - explicitly out of whatever interval material you would like - expressed as transposed chords. For instance, you can call the harmonic series a chord (and it does, there are H32 and H64 chords included), and transpose them by just intervals to build scales with them. You can also knock out any of those harmonics and transpose them to make familiar chords or unfamiliar ones. Or you can make chords out of a grab-bag of intervals, specified as cents or degrees or equal divisions of any other interval, and transpose them any way you like. You can also add flavor to them by setting up multiple strings per course, and making them equally or randomly out of tune.
http://polyharp.com
But I also think you can make music out of anything, and intervals and scales don't have to be perfectly produced to unambiguously be perceived in a preexisting framework of musical possibilities. It is the really lousy EDO scales, like 24 or 36, which help blaze new structures of music, not based on consonance or resolution to consonance, and the elastic human brain can rationalize and recognize these structures as scales and harmonies along the more prevalent (and naturally occurring) harmonically related structures.
My upcoming app PolyHarp is dedicated to exploring these ideas, that "scales" are side effects of chord clusters, and so it builds scales - realized as "string sets" - explicitly out of whatever interval material you would like - expressed as transposed chords. For instance, you can call the harmonic series a chord (and it does, there are H32 and H64 chords included), and transpose them by just intervals to build scales with them. You can also knock out any of those harmonics and transpose them to make familiar chords or unfamiliar ones. Or you can make chords out of a grab-bag of intervals, specified as cents or degrees or equal divisions of any other interval, and transpose them any way you like. You can also add flavor to them by setting up multiple strings per course, and making them equally or randomly out of tune.
http://polyharp.com
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