"just intonation"

[DocBop]

Originally Posted by lemur821

Well, there are a few things to keep in mind here. You probably heard computer-generated samples (there are a lot of those around), in which case they probably were pretty lifeless to begin with, and needed all the help they could get. The next thing is that those were pieces written for ET12, with ET12 sounds in mind, and not using any JI intervals more complex than what you might approximate with the 12-tone scale. Music in JI can incorporate more harmonic complexity (i.e. intervals other than thirds and fifths) without turning to mush, and your average JI composer (if there is such a thing) takes advantage of that. So while justly tuning a piece of music built with normal Western harmony comes out as flat as organum, that's not the sum of JI.

To me just intonation means that the entrancing tonalities you can usually only find in things like train whistles and bells become available to the composer, and putty in his hands.

You might give these a listen for examples of real JI music:
Harry Partch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lPOibcWWzs
Kyle Gann:
http://www.kylegann.com/TheDayRevisited.mp3 from http://www.kylegann.com/Gannaudio.html .

The examples with both 12ET and JI were done on syntheiser, but I thought they did a good job. I JI tunes I heard were on some strange string instrument. I think part my dislike on that was it was IMO just bad music.

I used to have Harry Partch box Delusions of Fury on vinyl. I really dug the music and the booklet talking about all the instruments. When I was a recording engineer (in dark ages of tape) I work some sessions with precussionist that played in Harry's group. I remember they had some pretty funny stories about Harry gig's. I remember one about a gig Harry having them wear miner hats with the lights of an outdoor concert at night. Well the wind came up and started blowing the music away. So the band just started improvising to keep the show going. Audience loved it Harry was going nuts and once again downing bottles of Pepto Bizmo.

I like that Kyle Gann piece a lot, thanks for the link.

[TimmyBoomBoom]

Google Harry Partch.

[lemur821]

Originally Posted by DocBop

I used to have Harry Partch box Delusions of Fury on vinyl. I really dug the music and the booklet talking about all the instruments.

Hey, I've got it on vinyl too! I've never heard it since I don't have a record player. One day....

Harry Partch is something else. I still can't get over his love for pitched percussion and qlunqy noises.

[uethanian]

well for me i never really understood wat partch was trying to do...his scale isnt very pleasant (11-limit i think?) and hard to hear because almost everything is percussion.

well i supposed i shouldnt say anything bad about the guy...he was quite a visionary. im just not into stuff that majorly abstract. and i cant stand the sound of pitched percussion

what im trying to say is that as someone discovering JI, i was very put off by his music. go get some ravi shankar!

[DocBop]

Originally Posted by uethanian

well for me i never really understood wat partch was trying to do...his scale isnt very pleasant (11-limit i think?) and hard to hear because almost everything is percussion.

well i supposed i shouldnt say anything bad about the guy...he was quite a visionary. im just not into stuff that majorly abstract. and i cant stand the sound of pitched percussion

what im trying to say is that as someone discovering JI, i was very put off by his music. go get some ravi shankar!

Okay here's where I am lost. I listen to Ravi Shakar and I wouldn't think JI. I love Indian music but I hear lots of bent notes and note droning from sympathetic vibration. Seems like they rarely fret a note and leave it alone they are always bending. It that JI?

[uethanian]

in sitar music, the open strings are tuned justly, and the frets are placed justly. the notes that they bend to are supposed (if its an experienced player) to be JI pitches in their scale. of course with all that bending and added expressions, its not always in perfectly in tune, but then it would lose its character.

the droning sound of the sitar is the most JI thing about it. the drones consist of a justly tuned fifth, C to G (or D to A, it depends on the player). sitar would not have the same continuous, sustained sound (sometimes called harmonic enertia) if it was not in JI. if a sitar was tuned to an ET system, the sympathetic vibrations would rub and the notes would die out very quickly. since indian music doesnt modulate, there would be no reason why it wouldnt be in JI.

also on a sitar, because of its construction (especially in the bridges), natural harmonics speak on their own. these would not speak in ET. JI is wat gives sitar its rich harmonic content. almost as if there's as much overtone as there is fundamental.

for comparison, think of bagpipe music. if its the real traditional stuff, its played in JI, with the drone pipes chanting a fifth. and also similar to indian music, is the ornaments and 'squeaks' that bagpipers do to add color. no, its not in tune, but ornaments dont need to be.

when i want to give someone an impression of JI, i tell them to listen to sitar music. it can move you very deeply if you listen closely, and it can give you relaxation that you could not grasp before.

[DocBop]

Originally Posted by uethanian

in sitar music, the open strings are tuned justly, and the frets are placed justly. the notes that they bend to are supposed (if its an experienced player) to be JI pitches in their scale. of course with all that bending and added expressions, its not always in perfectly in tune, but then it would lose its character.

the droning sound of the sitar is the most JI thing about it. the drones consist of a justly tuned fifth, C to G (or D to A, it depends on the player). sitar would not have the same continuous, sustained sound (sometimes called harmonic enertia) if it was not in JI. if a sitar was tuned to an ET system, the sympathetic vibrations would rub and the notes would die out very quickly. since indian music doesnt modulate, there would be no reason why it wouldnt be in JI.

also on a sitar, because of its construction (especially in the bridges), natural harmonics speak on their own. these would not speak in ET. JI is wat gives sitar its rich harmonic content. almost as if there's as much overtone as there is fundamental.

for comparison, think of bagpipe music. if its the real traditional stuff, its played in JI, with the drone pipes chanting a fifth. and also similar to indian music, is the ornaments and 'squeaks' that bagpipers do to add color. no, its not in tune, but ornaments dont need to be.

when i want to give someone an impression of JI, i tell them to listen to sitar music. it can move you very deeply if you listen closely, and it can give you relaxation that you could not grasp before.

thanks for the explanation now I understand.

As for bagpipes you keep them, that has to be one of the loudest things I have ever heard. Most people only know bagpipes from hearing them on recordings or TV, but go hear them in person you find yourself backing up.

[lemur821]

Originally Posted by uethanian

well for me i never really understood wat partch was trying to do...his scale isnt very pleasant (11-limit i think?) and hard to hear because almost everything is percussion.

well i supposed i shouldnt say anything bad about the guy...he was quite a visionary. im just not into stuff that majorly abstract. and i cant stand the sound of pitched percussion

I think he was trying to evoke the feel of an ancient ritual, in part. His music has shades of so many other things but largely a character all of its own, and it can be challenging to accept it on its own terms. Unless you have some conception of what to listen for, gleaned either through lots of experience with his music or some reading, it will likely leave you cold.

One thing is that Harry Partch's music was intended to be anything but abstract! What he called "corporeality" was very important to him. At the very least, the musicians had to be like dancers, and much of his music was set to dance and a story. Listening to Partch on CD is much the same as listening to opera on CD: you've got to imagine the action happening since it's not really there. But at least he wrote in English!

Another is that, probably due to the nature of his instruments, his music is arranged differently than anything else. It takes some time to learn to synthesize in your mind the sound of wood blocks and plucked strings and whatever other strange things into a coherent whole.

And there's much more. What else do you expect when a man creates his own musical tradition out of his own mind and takes his lyrical approach from the speech of hobos and his own unusual rhythm?

Partch is kind of a Jaco figure. Not everyone can get into him, but his importance to a certain set of composers is the same as that of Jaco to bassists.

[uethanian]

and i never understood why bagpipers insist on playing in groups. you're all playing the same thing anyways. and you're certainly not lacking for volume!

as for harry partch, i understand somewat wat your trying to say. but if i could pick three kinds of music that annoy me the most, it would be
1)steel drum/islander
2)jungle
3)ritualistic/tribal.
that being said, im not a fan of the guys music. the thing that gets me the most is that fact that he composed specifically for multimedia performance. when i say mulitmedia i dont mean musicals, operas, or videos (which i all enjoy). i mean flashing lights, weird sounds, and iterpretive dance.

i find his music lacks any recognizable form or structure, at least to the casual listener. is there melody? harmony? a bass part and a treble part? rythmic repetition? logic? his JI scale is completely arbitrary and unusually dissonant.

my biggest beef is the instruments. obviously he was a creative guy and stuff, and put a lot of effort into his vision...but i cannot agree with his instruments. i'd think that in a JI system, the one thing you wouldnt want to do is use harsh, short sounds. how can you possibly get a musical message across with no real melodic instrument? it doesnt matter wat the piece is, i cant help smirking when i hear a mallet feature. its like it doesnt fit in any context (except jungle music).

his music, if i could label it anything, would be impressionistic. i wouldnt even mention JI. its not a good or bad thing, thats just wat it is. and some people realize his ideas and others dont. i dont think partch is bad in any real sense, but i dont think he went about JI in the right way at all.

[lemur821]

Originally Posted by uethanian

is there melody? harmony? a bass part and a treble part? rythmic repetition? logic? his JI scale is completely arbitrary and unusually dissonant.

i'd think that in a JI system, the one thing you wouldnt want to do is use harsh, short sounds. how can you possibly get a musical message across with no real melodic instrument?

Why, yes, his music has all those things. It's kind of a trick to make them out at first though. You've got to learn an entirely new musical vocabulary, and that can take a few weeks of study. As for his scale, when you have 43 tones to the octave and you use them all, you're going to sound "dissonant" (although I don't really believe in dissonant). I don't think his scale was any more or less arbitrary than others (12ET for an arbitrary scale founded in wishful thinking, anyone?).

For Harry Partch, I don't think JI was the goal. He didn't set out to be a JI composer, he set out to write his music, and JI was the only sane choice for him. There's no rule that a person who is capable of sustaining interesting chords (by virtue of the scale they use) has to, and he never imagined there was. So while some JI composers might feel the need to "show off" what their scale can do, Partch skipped all that, and just wrote his music. I wouldn't say that he "went about JI" in the wrong way -- in fact, I wouldn't say he went about it at all. He went about music, and only did it in JI because it was the right way to do it.

One thing he knew is that in JI every chord is a new timbre as well. You can play any group of notes together and they will have their own distinct sound (contrast this to ET in which going beyond four pitch classes approaches an unresolvable mess). This is one way that he exploited JI. Arpeggios, chords, and glissandi blur and until you untangle them it's very hard to make sense of his music. Glissandi are not unimportant bits between notes: it's the other way around.

EDIT: And he certainly had melodic instruments. The voice, obviously, as well as the viola and guitar. He mostly used the organ for harmony rather than melody. Other instruments may carry it as well, but mostly it is these. Rhythm is shared between all the instruments, rather than carried by a percussion section.

[Lokire]

Quick question: The harmonic series on any instrument (wind/bass instrument overtones, or open harmonics on a stringed instrument) IS just intonation, correct? So if you were to put frets exactly where each harmonic node is located, you would have certain intervals of a JI scale. Am I understanding that right?

Cool stuff

[lemur821]

Originally Posted by Lokire

Quick question: The harmonic series on any instrument (wind/bass instrument overtones, or open harmonics on a stringed instrument) IS just intonation, correct? So if you were to put frets exactly where each harmonic node is located, you would have certain intervals of a JI scale. Am I understanding that right?

Cool stuff

Yes. Since harmonics fall at exact integer divisions of the string (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, and so on) placing frets there will yield a justly tuned scale. And if every note you play is justly tuned in relation to the root, they will all be justly tuned in relation to one another. Both of these are because you can't multiply integer ratios together and get anything other than an integer ratio.

If you tune your strings to an open just chord after placing the frets there, you'll get a more extensive JI scale. To have every note of the scale available in each octave and position I believe you would need a few more partial frets or a fretless instrument, but it's a good way to get into JI. Tune your fretless whatever to whatever just chord you like (justly tuned Root 5th Octave 10th 12th is nice, if droney), and just play notes that fall a fifth, third, syntonic comma, or other justly tuned interval above the open string. It's a little at odds with the way that most JI composers carefully design a scale, but if you just want to play with it that's the way to go.

[uethanian]

lokire - the harmonic series, in terms of JI, works on the following terms: in the frequency ratio, the denominator is a product of 1 or 2. so 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc are fair game. the numerator counts up by 1's, starting at 1. so in order, the harmonic series would go

(1) (2/1) (3/2) (4/2) (5/4) (6/4) (7/4) (8/4) (9/8) (10/8) (11/8)

notice that an interval like (6/4) is really (3/2) repeated. also, the octaves of the fundamental are repeated many times. if you graphed the harmonic series, it would rise quickly in the beginning and then level off as the spaces between tones shortens.

as for using a harmonic series scale on a string instrument, it has been done, but it may be different than from how you envisioned. every single place you touch, say on a bass string, contains a harmonic node, but because of the restrictions of the physics of hearing and of the string, it cannot sound. so in order to play a "chromatic" scale of any sort, there would be more frets than you probably imagine. also, note that on an instrument like bass guitar, if you used regular frets (being ones that span the width of the fingerboard), each string would have its own harmonic series. now, this yields a lot of notes to choose from, but it only lets you play the note you want on the the string that corresponds to the fundamental (i hope that makes sense). otherwise, you can just stick with one fundamental, and use partial frets. go to http://www.microtones.com to get an idea of what that means. if you have any interest in modding an instrument to JI, just ask. its a pain to figure it out on your own.



whew. well lemur, i use the term "arbitrary" to describe partch's scale because of the way he himself described it. apart from being 11-limit, it had no real restrictions. even then, his scale is hardly based on any sort of number limit. nor is based on the harmonic series. he said that he took tones out of 11-limit, then found the difference inbetween tones to fill in gaps. "filling in gaps" doesnt sound like JI idea at all. lastly, 43 is an odd number, and while his scale has symmetry side to side, it has none top to bottom.

of course when i mention "dissonant," i mean that subjectively. there is no mathematical break between consonance and dissonance. sure, each little increment of his scale has a different "feel" to it. but why would i ever want 4 or 5 different kinds of major 3rds? the true and most consonant major 3rd, (5/4), is the only one i would ever need.

style wise, i dont like how partch is rhythm driven. at least from my experience, and as a bass player, i think rhythm takes a back seat to harmony and voice leading.

[lemur821]

Originally Posted by uethanian

of course when i mention "dissonant," i mean that subjectively. there is no mathematical break between consonance and dissonance. sure, each little increment of his scale has a different "feel" to it. but why would i ever want 4 or 5 different kinds of major 3rds? the true and most consonant major 3rd, (5/4), is the only one i would ever need.

Why wouldn't you want four or five (or three, as in Partch's scale) different major thirds? Especially if you want to notate speech with natural contours, as he did, or transpose to a new key.

[Basshole]

Visual aid:

Warwick Just Intonation Bass:

[uethanian]

basshole - thanks for the pic. hansford rowe's bass? im doing something similar with an acoustic guitar.

lemur - partch, in the instance of major 3rds, has mulitiple choices to choose from, but anything other than a (5/4) ceases to function as a major 3rd in harmony. in this case, i'd like to think of that the tones on either side of the true major 3rd are for passing or effect. which again, i dont know why partch puts emphasis on things like this. the human mind cant comprehend the mathematical differences between pitches that close.

for my guitar, which is 5-limit, i have 40 tones. of course i have 3 or 4 notes that kinda sound like the true major 3rd, but they're not there for that purpose. they are there because they represent more common intervals when the bass isn't on the root fundamental. basically, its a symmetrical JI system that has a limited ability to modulate effectively. so i would never need/have to use that-note-right-above-or-below-the-major-3rd.

the ear is naturally drawn to the major 3rd as a center of consonance. theres a reason why the western (and indian AND pentatonic) natural major scales contain the notes they do. so in the case of the major 3rd, any interval that isn't quite recognizably in tune sounds dissonant. the ear wants the interval to correct itself and settle on a consonant pitch. so apart from creating tension, creating dissonance, and for passing, those notes that suround the common pitches aren't musically practicle. so YES, personally i do have the ability to be squirmingly microtonal, but NO, i would never compose JI music in this fashion.

[DocBop]

Seems like a pedal steel guitar would be a great JI instrument. With the pedals and the steel you could get all your JI tones.

[lemur821]

Originally Posted by DocBop

Seems like a pedal steel guitar would be a great JI instrument. With the pedals and the steel you could get all your JI tones.

I think so too.

[uethanian]

yea i dont particularly like the sound of slide guitar, but with the right open string tuning it can work great for JI. on the lap steel the strings would be tuned so that the "frets" lay straight across the board. most ET lap steel players tune their open strings to JI anyways. like the harmonica, in this instrument its more important to sound in-tune with yourself than with others.

as some proof:

[url="http://www.debashishbhattacharya.com/"]http://www.debashishbhattacharya.com/

like the violin, indian musicians have adopted the western slide guitar and made it their own. they add a bunch of sitar-like sympathetic strings to custom archtops and dobros.

also look into fretless guitarists. some chose fretless for the same reason of playing JI on slide.

[uethanian]

this thread died a quick death, unfortunately. not much activity going on. thanks to anyone who responded, its great answering questions and arguing is always fun. so let me leave off with a few ending remarks-

just intonation is the foundation of harmony. i hope there isnt any doubt about that. and i sincerely hope that people are told the truth, instead of being indoctrinated into some rigid system. it heartens me to see muscician's master their craft, and love their work; but it is despairing to know that they have devoted their lives to a sort of falsified harmony. i am in a difficult position. of course i am guilty of playing in ET (how, in this culture, could i not have), but now i can start making choices. obviously, JI is the harder choice. there is almost insurmountable oppostion to JI. think of every western musician you've ever met, heard, or heard about. every one is a potential enemy to any advocator of JI. and how do you convince someone, who put in so much time and effort and practice and money, that they were wrong even before the started? thus in my eyes, musicians, the music industry, and music itself, is all my enemy. it sickens me to see things this way, as i still love music so much, but it is my conviction for what i know is right that keeps me going. i cannot give up. it is either JI, or no music at all. anyone else who pushes for JI, i applaude your courage. its a seriously lonely occupation. and with that, i end the thread.