Microtonal - the emperor's (not so) new clothes?

[CyberGene]

I stumbled upon some video of a guy playing jazz on a microtonal harpsichord and (if the latter by itself is not outrageous enough) it sounds awfully out of tune to me. What's all the fuss about "microtonal" music?

 

 

[stoken6]

So what's going on here? This isn't microtonal, it's still "12 divisions of the octave" isn't it?

 

My guess is that all the "alternative" keys are tuned to different temperaments (or intonations, based on a few key centres) to allow playing in just intonation, rather than equal temperament.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[Tusker]

The closest thing to useful microtonal I've encountered  is in Joseph Collier's In the Bleak Mid-Winter. Most of it is tonal. You'll want to wait till 4.30 to hear the payoff of a microtonal modulation into  G half Sharp major.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[CyberGene]

@Tusker yeah, I remember seeing this and other transcriptions/analyses of microtonal transitions by Jacob and they are so natural I couldn’t have guessed he’s outside the equal temperament notes of the A440 tuning (I don’t have perfect pitch though, so it tricks me perfectly, no pun intended). The guy is a genius! However stuff like that harpsichord video I linked are just bad to my ears and I see so many comments praising it, I wonder if there’s something wrong with me 🧐

[Anderton]

I'm a big fan of just intonation, but have yet to meet a keyboard that can successfully anticipate the proper pitch adjustments to maintain JI when you transpose. The most striking feature of JI is everything has the same consonance as fifths in the standard even-tempered scales. Sixths become actually very useful

[K K]

Yep, the initial video above is about using JI / UT variations. This particular performance might be a bit too much an example, but it gives a good idea how UTs can offer a different feel compared to the boring ET. Decades ago, on Kurzweil instruments like the K1000 and K1200 series one could not only create custom temperaments but also change the reference key while playing using a fun integrated MIDI option. I used that extensively back in the day for strong temperaments such as JI. Since then, I almost never use ET and prefer my own UT both on electronic instruments and on the grand piano.

[AROIOS]

19 hours ago, Tusker said:

...You'll want to wait till 4.30 to hear the payoff of a microtonal modulation into  G half Sharp major...

I started listening at 4:25 and it sounded beautiful and majestic. But to my crude ears, it's nothing twelve-tone equal temperament can't deliver. And Jacob's "flat" tuning did nothing for me.

I transcribed what I heard in the attachment below, what hidden beauty of this mysterious "micro-tonal modulation" am I missing?

[AROIOS]

22 hours ago, CyberGene said:

I stumbled upon some video of a guy playing jazz on a microtonal harpsichord and (if the latter by itself is not outrageous enough) it sounds awfully out of tune to me. What's all the fuss about "microtonal" music?

Same here, sounds terribly out of tune.

I simply won't trust opinions about sound from anyone who plays jazz on a harpsichord.

[CyberGene]

1 minute ago, AROIOS said:

But to my crude ears, it's nothing twelve-tone equal temperament can't deliver. And Jacob's "flat" tuning did nothing for me.

I tend to agree. As I said, the guy is a genius and he just can’t help but show off “see what I can do” and it’s impressive in itself but only in itself.

 

That's a nice choir patch you use. Is that a Roland JV sound?

[AROIOS]

28 minutes ago, CyberGene said:

...That's a nice choir patch you use. Is that a Roland JV sound?

Very close, it's a patch from the XV series called "Ooh Aah Mod".
 

[CyberGene]

5 hours ago, AROIOS said:

Very close, it's a patch from the XV series called "Ooh Aah Mod".

 

I love the Roland choir sounds especially this one. Many choir sounds on many boards are pretty cheesy and obnoxious. Wondering what virtual synth has similar sounds, however I don't want to subscribe to the Roland cloud to get the XV-sounds, so what alternatives are there?

 

P.S. Remembered that I recently purchased the complete Korg bundle and went through the Triton/Extreme choir presets. There are a few that are pretty good.

[AROIOS]

5 hours ago, CyberGene said:

I love the Roland choir sounds especially this one. Many choir sounds on many boards are pretty cheesy and obnoxious. Wondering what virtual synth has similar sounds, however I don't want to subscribe to the Roland cloud to get the XV-sounds, so what alternatives are there?

 

P.S. Remembered that I recently purchased the complete Korg bundle and went through the Triton/Extreme choir presets. There are a few that are pretty good.

Indeed, I don't come across many high quality vocal patches on Romplers usually. Short of dealing with Roland Cloud subscription, you can get a XV-5050/XV-5080 rack, or even the dirt cheap JV-1010, a great machine with the entire JV soundset and one of the best expansion cards inside. I've had all three machines for decades and the sound difference among them is hardly noticeable (5080 allegedly has a bit of "hyping/sweetening" on its output, something you can easily emulate in DAWs), and the extra samples/patches on the XV never justified the price difference IMO.
 

I never paid much attention to the vocal sounds in my TritonEX and MicroX, thanks for the tip and I'll give them another listen. In terms of finding other quality sources of vocal sound, that XV patch I used was programmed with two old "VoiceOoh" samples from the JV romset, in other words, sampled during the Eric Persing era. So I would look into Spectrasonics' products like the "Vocal Planet" and "Symphony of Voices" sample CDs and Omnisphere for similar sounds. I recall hearing demos of the two CD sets decades ago and they were absolutely beautiful.
 

Have fun!

[David Emm]

6 hours ago, CyberGene said:

P.S. Remembered that I recently purchased the complete Korg bundle and went through the Triton/Extreme choir presets. There are a few that are pretty good.

 

Agreed. I got the rush of the gods the first time I played "Deep Choir" on the 01W. Companies recycle their data to some extent, but if its good, its good. That sound always did a Mellotron-ish thing, where a single note could be lacking, but as chords & clusters, it comes into its own. I sometimes add it TO a Mellotron choir and it definitely, um, embiggens it. Heh, we talk about old synth patches the way yer Grandpa I.D.s old cars on TV.

[David Emm]

I wish I could hand a copy of Wendy Carlos's "Beauty In The Beast" to anyone who was curious about alternate tunings. Its like a starter handbook showing you just a tantalizing taste of what's possible. Your ears have to learn to stand on their heads to get microtonal works, but its often rewarding. Wendy's use of the natural overtone series of brass instruments is especially mesmerizing to me. You >get it< immediately.

[AROIOS]

On 12/26/2023 at 1:09 PM, David Emm said:

...Heh, we talk about old synth patches the way yer Grandpa I.D.s old cars on TV...

Some of these old romplers like the Super JVs had excellent architecture even by today's standards. Their main bottleneck was memory price and the resultant tiny sample size. But I guess Grandpas could say similar things about their 67 Camaros.😃

Every time I program something on the JVs, I can't help but cringe at the mismatch between their synth engine and ROM size. On the other hand, how the engineers' clever/tasteful programming overcame/masked those limitation never ceased to amaze me. In comparison, most of those multi-gig sample libraries in the last 20 years just seem obscenely wastefully.

[AROIOS]

4 hours ago, David Emm said:

I wish I could hand a copy of Wendy Carlos's "Beauty In The Beast" to anyone who was curious about alternate tunings. Its like a starter handbook showing you just a tantalizing taste of what's possible. Your ears have to learn to stand on their heads to get microtonal works, but its often rewarding. Wendy's use of the natural overtone series of brass instruments is especially mesmerizing to me. You >get it< immediately.

Thanks for the recommendation. But "Beauty in the Beast" sounds terribly out of tune.to my crude ears. They must have been permanently conditioned by decades of exposure to equal temperament tuning.

[Artomas]

Every so often, I listen to out-of-tune music on purpose and like it, and I vote. But it's usually the XXedo type, instead of whatever uncanny valley that harpsicord was summoned from. Here are some musical examples that I unironically like. I saw you chuckle when I said "musical"... LISTEN FIRST, hey. Some of these might not make you want to kill. Everyone loves King Gizzard, right? Quartertone yellow Steinberger:

22edo and 5/4 time, Sevish - Gleam:

31edo (try from about 1:30 onward):

JI, but unusual note choices:

15edo Lo-fi:

Well, that's enough easy listening. Here's the reverse engineered harpsicord from the Roswell crash, finally used as the ETs fully intended.

The MIDI controller in the last 2 videos is called a car down payment... er... Lumatone.

[AROIOS]

Just ran some simple math, and "just intonation" seems to be highly self-conflicting.
 

The most fundamental frequency relationships under 'just intonation" are: C  1/1; E  5/4; G  3/2; in other words, a major 3rd interval and a perfect 5th interval.

D, F, A and B are then derived based on these two fundamental intervals from C, E and G: D = G x (3/2) / 2 = 9/8, F = 2 x C / (3/2)   = 4/3, A = 2 x E / (3/2) = 5/3, B = G x 5/4 = 15/8
 

Now here's the problem: you can't even play a 'just intoned" D chord in the key of C. Why? the A in a D chord is supposed to be D x 3/2 = 9/8 * 3/2 = 27/16 ≈ 1.69, and our "just intoned" A of 5/3 ≈ 1.66 would simply sound flat.
 

To me, the core issue with "just intonation" is the arbitrary designation of the 5th harmonic to E. It just don't gel with the Pythagorean "circle of 5ths" (based on the 3rd harmonic) mathematically.
 

And we are not even talking about key changes yet.

[Anderton]

47 minutes ago, AROIOS said:

Now here's the problem: you can't even play a 'just intoned" D chord in the key of C. Why? the A in a D chord is supposed to be D x 3/2 = 9/8 * 3/2 = 27/16 ≈ 1.69, and our "just intoned" A of 5/3 ≈ 1.66 would simply sound flat.

 

Indeed - that's the problem. For just intonation to always generate pure sounds, chords would have to be intoned on the fly to match transpositions.

 

Microtunings are common in other musical idioms. For example, with classical Indian music, there are no harmonies as we understand the term. In fact, there aren't really keys in the conventional sense. Instead, there are incredibly complex melody lines which often involve microtonal intervals called shrutis. The octave is divided into 22 shrutis. They're not exactly equal, so they're kinda quarter-tones. But remember there's a lot of note-bending in classical Indian music and pretty much everything is referenced to a tonic/fifth drone, so the very concept of pitch itself is fluid, especially with fretless instruments like the sarod. "Tuning" a sitar basically means finding a pitch that works well with a vocalist (if vocals are part of the music), and moving the frets on the neck to tweak the tunings. Classical Indian music is VERY deep and there are multiple genres. The above is just a (highly) superficial overview. 

 

I'm familiar only with Indian musical theory because I was taught classical sitar, but there are others. The classical Turkish makam system has 53 uniquely named tones. I'm not sure I could wrap my head around that  

 

(True story: Indians see music differently. I was taught by someone who was born to a prominent musical family in India, but came to the US because he wanted to be an engineer. In the US, a family would freak out if someone who studied hardcore engineering decided to drop it and become a musician. Over there, it was like "Our son wants to be...(gasp)...an engineer!! Where did we go wrong?!?")

 

[CyberGene]

Barbershop quartets sing in a dynamic just intonation, tuning aurally each chord as pure as possible. 

[Anderton]

18 hours ago, CyberGene said:

Barbershop quartets sing in a dynamic just intonation, tuning aurally each chord as pure as possible. 

 

Excellent point. String quartets, too. Now all we need is synths with enough artificial intelligence to retune our keyboards!

[Paul Harrison]

Here's a classic a cappella recording where you can hear "on-the-fly" microtonal adjustments to make the harmony "spot on".

 

 

[K K]

I am number 6 and I want to meet number 1.

 

 

[AROIOS]

Great, both songs (Manhattan Transfer and the Delta Rhythm Boys) sound in tune. There's hope in my TET-ruined ears!

 

[timwat]

Another vote for Carlos' BITB, which to my anecdotal is the only serious, musical foray into microtonal I've ever heard and enjoyed. 

 

And it took me several listenings to get past the "this makes me feel funny and scared" phase to the "this makes me feel like when I climbed the rope in gym class" phase (to quote Wayne's World).

 

BITB seems to me to marry real compositional prowess with "more than 12" and some fascinating timbral choices - and of course very few synthesists also have Carlos' musical depth. But it wasn't an easy first listen for me, that is for sure.

 

In a sort of analogy, it is perhaps a bit like when someone who has only listened to Western pop music encounters odd meter for the first time. This sounds horribly confusing and I can't find the one and I don't like how this makes me feel I'm anxious and it makes me nervous where's my pills. That was my first listen to BITB, but gradually it opened up a whole new world to me. But there isn't another BITB (or...BITB 2) that I've run across, so it's like a journey of one CD.

[CyberGene]

I'm a huge fan of Wendy Carlos' Bach releases and even created a few synth arrangements influenced by hers, however I have never stumbled upon that BITB record. Can't find it anywhere besides a pirated website. I downloaded it and would gladly donate some money directly to her if possible, because I hate piracy, I stopped pirating software and music 15 years ago but seems like this time I can't find any other way for this particular recording 😕

 

P.S. Ohh, the last track is based on the Bulgarian folk song Излел е Дельо Хайдутин (Izlel ye Delyo Haydutin) which is a huge pride for us Bulgarians since it was chosen as one of the tracks on the Voyager golden records that were sent in space.

[stoken6]

9 hours ago, K K said:

I am number 6 and I want to meet number 1.

 

 

The tuning on this track is insnane. The first phrase - my ears were screaming "that's pitch-corrected!". Of course it's not.

 

The Manhattan Transfer recording is also sublime, but I knew about their awesome talent already.

 

Cheers, Mike.

[CyberGene]

I’ve grown up in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and although I’m not religious and abandoned it as a grown-up, I remember these guys and how they were held in a very high regard in the church (they are SDA members). Singing like this can make me religious! 😀 It’s simply divine, no other explanation!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZDstjqSmPQ

 

 

Unfortunately the above live video cannot be embedded. Here’s the studio version:

 

 

[Tusker]

Craig's story reminded me of an altered tuning attempt by a band I am otherwise quite fond of: Deep Forest. I had mixed feelings about this song so I listened to it again.

 

This is what I am hearing ...

 

- At about 1.30-142 the male singer (what a voice!) ends his statement of the melody with an important motif => (14321)

- At 1.48 he repeats it (14321)

- At 2.03 when the female singer does her rendition of the melody the comping instrument (a plucked string instrument) uses an alternate tuning. I like this.

- When she ends her statement of the melody at 2.50 with the 14321 motif, it is picked up by a reed instrument with an alternate tuning (and significant vibrato) To me this is jarring.

- Instruments in altered and standard tunings then provide a call and answer. I find this jarring.

- The voices come back for a romantic finale.

 

I've realized that for a) deviations from tuning norms, need to have a clear artistic purpose and b) it's tricky to find that sweet-spot between meaningless and jarring. Much of this may be culture dependent. It's a lovely song. I am just not sure the altered tunings are doing it any favors.

 

 

 

 

 

[CyberGene]

Here in Bulgaria we have the ethnic Turkish and Roma minorities living along the Bulgarian majority, however due to various reasons, there’s not any real integration/mix of music (with a few exceptions) and as a result there’s the phenomenon of people being exposed to both western ET and the Turkish/Roma (but actually Arabic) Maqam modes, but mostly adhering to only one of them which is specific to their culture. And people would even go as far as to declare the other system as “out of tune” which I’ve heard from musicians on both sides, but take my opinion with a grain of salt since I’m no scholar, or a music ethnologist. It’s rather anecdotal.

 

Why am I saying the above? Being also exposed to the Maqams, but finding them “out of tune” for most of my life, I’ve researched them a lot on an amateur level to discover why and how. And I think what I can say is this:

 

The maqams are meant to be used in a predominantly melodic way, with no underlying harmony, which is why the given note “detuning” (from ET point of view) is not chosen to make for pure intervals or chords but rather to produce certain mood which is utilized by the specific melodies.

 

That’s why mixing ET and Maqams as in the example above is jarring. At least to me too. 
 

Western intonations, such as e.g. Just intonation or the various historic Well temperaments try to solve different problems and the offset from the ideal math-based ET is much smaller (e.g. a few cents) compared to just splitting the semitone into a half, or even smaller intervals.

 

With the above in mind, I’m not sure what microtonal really tries to accomplish. A harmonic (interval) purity, or melodic moods. The harpsichord example I started with, plays jazz (highly harmonic music) with some pretty drastic interval offsets (compared to ET) and is IMO just serving no purpose, it’s just an attempt at originality for the sake of originality.

 

And the barbershop/string quartets are the opposite, where a careful on-the-fly adjustment is made with the sole intent of reducing overtone beats. It’s not like they chose just intonation for the sake of it, nor it is fixed throughout and constant in regard to specific note pivot.

 

In summary, one needs to think of what they are trying to solve/achieve. Blindly jumping into some microtonal intervals and exotic tunings, just because ET is “boring” is IMO silly. YMMV 🙂