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Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

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Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#11

I just recently started playing out of Yusef Lateef’s book and was wondering about the Coltrane diagrams at the front of the book myself. Did Yusef ever respond? I was planning on cleaning them up myself, glad to see someone has already given a lot of thought to it!

I never heard from him.

The Coltrane originals were probably part of his estate, and I would guess have been donated to the university where he taught.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#12
The diagrams remind me of performing a Dehn twist. Perhaps what you're doing at each grouping corresponds to a Dehn twist on the Tonnetz? Of course, since the Tonnetz is a particular subdivision of the torus, only certain groupings that satisfy some divisibility relations will correspond to Dehn twists.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#13

I just recently started playing out of Yusef Lateef’s book and was wondering about the Coltrane diagrams at the front of the book myself. Did Yusef ever respond? I was planning on cleaning them up myself, glad to see someone has already given a lot of thought to it!

I never heard from him. The Coltrane originals were probably part of his estate, and I would guess have been donated to the university where he taught.

I believe that they're in possession of Ayesha. Stephon Alexander credits her in his 2016 book for one of these images.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#14
Anyone know a nice source for learning some basic music theory? To be more specific, something that would teach whatever would be required to understand the musical concepts in this article (for example).

The ideal would be something directed towards readers with some mathematical background (but not a PhD), conversational, and focused on concepts and maybe historical development rather than just stating facts without context.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#15
This has actually been operationalized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_array_model

It's conjectural on my part, but if you apply D-weighting to the resulting pitch cylinders you can conceptualize musical space as an aesthetically pleasing spherical shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting

If you further consider the nature of stereo hearing, head-related transfer functions, and sympathetic resonance, then you could go a bit nuts in the visualization department: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#16

This has actually been operationalized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_array_model It's conjectural on my part, but if you apply D-weighting to the resulting pitch cylinders you can conceptualize musical space as an aesthetically pleasing spherical shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting If you further consider the nature of stereo hearing, head-related transfer functions, and sympathetic resonance, th…

Doesn't the spiral array model discard enharmonic equivalence?

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#17
Are there musicians of today, with popularity similar to Coltrane's in 1960, that study and explore the theory of music at this level? If not, why not? Was jazz, and bebop in particular, unique in this regard?

It's a serious question; I don't know. I can't think of any current musicians but that's not conclusive. Also, I'm not sure exactly how popular John Coltrane was in 1960; certainly jazz was orders of magnitude more popular than it is now.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't thought about it in depth, but my guess is that it is not, because a lattice is not isomorphic with a cylinder or torus. Figuring out the relationship in detail would be a good project.

The Tonnetz is a torus, unwrapped onto the plane. On the first Wikipedia image ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonnetz ) you can see the circles of major- and minor-thirds on the 60˚ lines, whole-tone and semi-tone scales along 30˚ and vertical lines, and the circle of fifths on the horizontals. Different presentations skew it in different ways, to emphasize different features, but it's very hard to make a diagram li…

I'd look to see how the spiral array model can map these together.

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#19
post #3

Coincidentally, i just stumbled upon this today: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xUHQ2ybTejU Basically a musical palindrome: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_canon

You might enjoy this piece too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzkOFJMI5i8

(Steve Reich's Clapping Music...)

Re: Coltrane Pitch Diagrams: Wrapping notes around a torus

#20

This has actually been operationalized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_array_model It's conjectural on my part, but if you apply D-weighting to the resulting pitch cylinders you can conceptualize musical space as an aesthetically pleasing spherical shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting If you further consider the nature of stereo hearing, head-related transfer functions, and sympathetic resonance, th…

I have considered a spiral version.

You could see the Coltrane diagrams as viewing a spiral head-on, so that the spiral nature of the structure is hidden by occlusion.

This would solve the problem of the arbitrary nature of representing only five octaves.

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