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What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

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Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#91

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

cjbprime wrote: post #75
jfengel wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key to the article, and to all of Western music, is about a set of weird mathematical coincidences involving the twelfth root of two. In particular, that twelfth-root-of-two to the fourth power is almost exactly 4/3, and twelfth-root-of-two to the fifth power is is almost exactly 3/2. And, of course, twelfth-root-of-two to the 12th power is exactly 1. For some reason, not entirely well understood, when you play f…

I think you're maybe missing the main motivation, which is that "correctly tuned" overtones are in nature, in physics, in all sounds -- they aren't a social construct, unlike everything else about music. I think the argument from JI advocates is that our body's perception knows very well what a justly-tuned chord sounds like, etc.

They aren't though. No acoustic instrument has perfectly linear overtones. And even something like a flute, which probably comes closest, has an overtone system that varies with force and input excitation.

The idea of the harmonic series is a useful approximation, not a physical truth. Fourier applies to completely static waveforms, and says nothing about how waveforms change over time. If you try use Fourier for dynamic waveforms - which is most of them - you run into all kinds of problems and tradeoffs.

So the concept of whole number consonant ratios is an attempt to impose a mathematical ideal of perfection where it very much doesn't exist.

Clearly music is related to the harmonic series, but it's related around it, not trapped inside it. The dissonances and deviations create colour, tension, and movement.

This doesn't mean xenharmonic experiments aren't worth doing, and we should all just use 12TET and not think about anything else.

But it does mean these are experiments away from real acoustics into computed perfection, not back towards a perfect ratio heaven that music was exiled from by 12TET.

Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#92

Post by pbronez »

pierrec wrote: post #66
crtasm wrote: post #63

If the author is here, the audio clips don't play for me. Firefox console has: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: document.querySelector(...).contentDocument is null

Sure, I also use Firefox but I don't have this error, so that's not really enough detail for me to look into it.

I’m on iOS with Safari - no audio either.

Album plays fine on Bandcamp though!

Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#93

Post by pbronez »

riemannzeta wrote: post #81
naltroc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! We don't even have to listen to the audio examples to know that yes, ET chords produce beat frequencies. This is an artifact of the non-integer relationships created in ET chords that don't exist in the JI examples. A piano will produce similar beat frequencies when playing a perfect fifth. Some ears are more sensitive to hearing it than others.

Thank you! I'm so glad to have that confirmed. I feel like I do hear them, and actually have come around to liking them. They feel quite different from what you get with a pure harmony in Just Intonation -- maybe the ephemerality of the flow of energy back and forth between different subharmonics adds to the excitement somehow. It's hard for me not to think of the electric guitar in this context. I love the purity of…

How do you feel about Ring Modulation? It’s another step into weird.

https://youtu.be/9PmHWap1T-E?si=9lbiTQSU1ARFBKeD

Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#94

Post by riemannzeta »

pbronez wrote: post #93
riemannzeta wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I'm so glad to have that confirmed. I feel like I do hear them, and actually have come around to liking them. They feel quite different from what you get with a pure harmony in Just Intonation -- maybe the ephemerality of the flow of energy back and forth between different subharmonics adds to the excitement somehow. It's hard for me not to think of the electric guitar in this context. I love the purity of…

How do you feel about Ring Modulation? It’s another step into weird. https://youtu.be/9PmHWap1T-E?si=9lbiTQSU1ARFBKeD

I don't know that much about ring modulation, but having read a bit about it, I think I love at least most of the uses of it I know. The guitar solo in Paranoid Android is one of my favorites in any record. But I love pretty much everything Jonny Greenwood has ever done.

Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#95

Post by gtani »

wonger_ wrote: post #7
pierrec wrote: post #3

I'd love to get some feedback on this, because I'm not sure I've hit the original goal of this article. For a long time, the topics of just intonation, harmonic lattices, and of their relationship with temperaments were difficult for me to understand, despite reading the theory on them. It's not until I applied the concepts that could say I understood them. I tried writing the "missing article" that would have given…

I am very unfamiliar with the topic. Here's my takeaways from the article: - almost all music I've heard uses 12TET - JI is microtonal / an alternative tuning to 12TET - you're the author of the lovely ambient.garden, which uses JI - the audio widgets and visualizations were very helpful - JI has perfect harmonies, and 12TET approximates those enough to still sound good - JI opens up cool chord options - but there's…

this might help, primer on JI ET and pythagorean intervals for violinists in string quartet context. Good demos 30 seconds in

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

Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#96

Post by naltroc »

riemannzeta wrote: post #81
naltroc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! We don't even have to listen to the audio examples to know that yes, ET chords produce beat frequencies. This is an artifact of the non-integer relationships created in ET chords that don't exist in the JI examples. A piano will produce similar beat frequencies when playing a perfect fifth. Some ears are more sensitive to hearing it than others.

Thank you! I'm so glad to have that confirmed. I feel like I do hear them, and actually have come around to liking them. They feel quite different from what you get with a pure harmony in Just Intonation -- maybe the ephemerality of the flow of energy back and forth between different subharmonics adds to the excitement somehow. It's hard for me not to think of the electric guitar in this context. I love the purity of…

that delightful "abyss" is really just noise. as in white/pink/blue noise.

Signals tend to sound "better" (richer harmonic content) when they have fuzz added. Convolution reverb is a great example of how mixing a noise sample into any source signal increases its apparent depth or richness.

Some saturators do the same thing.

Others distort the signal by boosting selected harmonics (making the waveform more square-like or more sawtooth-like for example, which is not the same as noise and has a different sound).

Clipping the signal by requesting amplitudes beyond the available range is another way to add "cruch" (noise) to a signal.

The actual implementation will vary per device but overall we like our sounds cut with a bit of noise.

Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#97

Post by naltroc »

pbronez wrote: post #93
riemannzeta wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I'm so glad to have that confirmed. I feel like I do hear them, and actually have come around to liking them. They feel quite different from what you get with a pure harmony in Just Intonation -- maybe the ephemerality of the flow of energy back and forth between different subharmonics adds to the excitement somehow. It's hard for me not to think of the electric guitar in this context. I love the purity of…

How do you feel about Ring Modulation? It’s another step into weird. https://youtu.be/9PmHWap1T-E?si=9lbiTQSU1ARFBKeD

Ring Modulation adds a constant frequency above and below the source frequency, producing non-integer relationships between the input signal and the new signal.

That's why it sounds weird, because both of the new tones will almost never be harmonically related to the input signal.

Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#98

Post by crtasm »

pierrec wrote: post #66
crtasm wrote: post #63

If the author is here, the audio clips don't play for me. Firefox console has: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: document.querySelector(...).contentDocument is null

Sure, I also use Firefox but I don't have this error, so that's not really enough detail for me to look into it.

Late reply but here's the full error in my console

   Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: document.querySelector(...).contentDocument is null
   innerElements https://www.osar.fr/notes/justintonation/ji.js?version=1723776197:14
    https://www.osar.fr/notes/justintonation/:70
   promise callback * https://www.osar.fr/notes/justintonation/:69

Re: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation

#99

Post by carterschonwald »

naltroc wrote: post #44
carterschonwald wrote: post #32

This is interesting, but the harpsichord based samples really made me not wanna listen. But that’s probably just me disliking harpsichord

Would it be more appealing if we relabeled "harpsichord" as "pluck triangle synth"? :P

That would explain why it sounds so scratchy to me.
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