I am a technical musician for 40 years and I couldn't understand the points he was trying to make... poorly explained
Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the task of dividing the octave in heptatonic scales. that's not task. The octave has already been divided into twelve tones here. The task is to pick sets of those twelve tones to serve some aesthetic purpose. The sets may be of various sizes, though 7 is common in a lot of european music. If the task was to generate heptatonic scales from within the octave, there are a huge number of possibilities not described h…
> The task is to pick sets of those twelve tones to serve some aesthetic purpose Aesthetic in the musical or visual sense? The visual aspect is based on the Z12 symmetry and it is pleasant - like all symmetries. The question is what does the visual experience have to do with the music experience? The first disconnect with the musical experience is that the 12TET itself is not what people would, e.g., choose to sing i…
On singers and violinists adjusting their harmony to just intonation by fine-tuning to zero beat frequency, I wonder if anyone has made a keyboard that can do that.
Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#23How can I make music without knowing an instrument?
Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#24I am a technical musician for 40 years and I couldn't understand the points he was trying to make... poorly explained
[deleted]
Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The task is to pick sets of those twelve tones to serve some aesthetic purpose Aesthetic in the musical or visual sense? The visual aspect is based on the Z12 symmetry and it is pleasant - like all symmetries. The question is what does the visual experience have to do with the music experience? The first disconnect with the musical experience is that the 12TET itself is not what people would, e.g., choose to sing i…
On singers and violinists adjusting their harmony to just intonation by fine-tuning to zero beat frequency, I wonder if anyone has made a keyboard that can do that.
If you mean a keyboard which includes a mechanism for causing strings to vibrate, you can tune ANY such keyboard to use just intonation.
What you cannot do is modulate between keys with a keyboard tuned to just intonation: it would have to be retuned for every key change. The scope of the mechanism that would be required to do this has not been implemented since the harpsichord was invented.
There are synthesizers that can be retuned in this way, because there is no physical mechanism to adjust. The results are ... odd. It is still challenging to play them because in addition to performing the notes, you need to signal the key change/retuning points.
Also, when singers and violinists do this, they are not "fine tuning to zero beat frequency". Either you sing in just intonation, in which case you cannot modulate between keys (because the Nth note of the scale has a different frequency depending on the root note), or you sing in some tempered scale (in which the frequencies of the notes have been adjusted to make modulation possible).
Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#26How can I make music without knowing an instrument?
E.g. with a tool like this: https://nodalmusic.com/
Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#27Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#28The diagrams look nice, but in the end of the day, they are merely nice visualizations of what's fundamentally algebra. There is not much geometry going on besides a quite simple group structure of order 12.
Geometry of Music by Dmitri Tymoczko is a fun book of visualizing chromatic music theory with geometry models, some of it also covered in author's papers https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/publications.html
Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
On singers and violinists adjusting their harmony to just intonation by fine-tuning to zero beat frequency, I wonder if anyone has made a keyboard that can do that.
If you mean a keyboard which includes a mechanism for causing strings to vibrate, you can tune ANY such keyboard to use just intonation. What you cannot do is modulate between keys with a keyboard tuned to just intonation: it would have to be retuned for every key change. The scope of the mechanism that would be required to do this has not been implemented since the harpsichord was invented. There are synthesizers th…
This is not true.
Singers and violinists can and do adjust intonation so each chord sounds (justly) in tune. The exception is if they were trained with equal tempered instruments (which is common nowadays - see Duffin, “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony”) or if they are playing with pre-quantized (fretted/keyed) instruments, in which case they would match the existing temperaments.
So the linked article, while it shows some beautiful shapes linked to 12s, has nothing to do with actually (justly) in tune music.
Source: master’s degree in the topic; am a professional singers specializing in music written before equal temperament was invented
Re: Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
#30As a longtime guitarist, this is exactly the type of visual pattern crutch that the fretboard encourages and which is (for me) both a crutch and a trap. Geometry can help explain music but if it takes the lead, that’s the definition of formulaic.