Comments | lihan161051: (без темы)

lihan161051

(Untitled)

Oct 31, 2011 16:23

I've put some thought into it, and decided that it's most likely that any population of humans not connected with those on earth, as in panspermia/lost-colony genre stories, would, if they have reasonably human-like ears, probably settle on some kind of 12-tone equal tempered scale. There are other possibilities, but 12 tone equal temperament has ( Read more... )

Comments 5

Like you thought I could resist this... nyyki November 1 2011, 02:55:47 UTC

The first problem you face with this is the difficulty of modulability vs pure intonation -- the two are not compatible until you get to thirty-one tones per octave. And this is reflected in the overtone series. Since you have low brass chops I'll explain some of this in those terms. Remember that D above the bass clef staff? It's slightly flat in coparison to either equal temperament or just intonation. The F above it is sharp, and the A flat above that, still with all valves up or first position on the trombone is very flat. It gets worse the higher you go. This is easy to check if you have a chart of pitches for the notes in hertz, as each partial is the same number of hertz as the fundamental up from it's previous note. So if, say we had a not at 50 hertz, each partial would go up in fifty hertz increments ( ... )

Re: Like you thought I could resist this... lihan161051 November 2 2011, 17:07:01 UTC

I agree with most of this, and my feeling is that with non-parallel-evolved or distant-cousin human or near-human-biology aliens, all bets are off with regard to what sorts of auditory aesthetics might come into play. And there's definitely enough controversy on pitch standards that A-440 is very much not written in stone ( ... )

Re: Like you thought I could resist this... nyyki November 2 2011, 17:19:45 UTC

The place were it becomes more interesting isn't in the realm of pitch but instead that of timbre. Note how western music focuses on purity of tone while the music of other cultures has more artifacts in it like buzzing, nasal sounding tones, and other such things that make the tone more interesting but confound complex harmonic consonance.

I think the scale is a given to a point, but the number of notes in the scale is a variance factor. Imagine an interface for more notes -- the fretboard would grow more frets, wind and reed instruments would require more keys and valves, and the shape of the keyboard would change. Some of our limitations of scale are limitations of interface -- widen an octave on the keyboard and you make it hard to reach an octave with human fingers or to hit keys accurately. (As anyone who has real keyboard skills can tell you after trying to play one of those mini-key keyboards)
As an interesting side note, check out the artificial language (you though Esperanto was the only one?) called Doh-sol-doh.

in_quinecorners November 2 2011, 14:18:34 UTC

Yeah, I dunno... out of the thousands of years of human existence, it's only been less than 300 years since Das Wohltemperierte Klavier. It may be a bit premature to say that we've "settled" on equal temperament.

I did a computer music project at Berkeley about 18 years ago where I was essentially arguing that, in some sense, we now had the technology such that we didn't necessarily need equal temperament anymore. Equal temperament was a lesser of two evils that became popular because with just temperament, you couldn't stray very far from one particular key without retuning your instrument. I attempted an adaptive just temperament system wherein the temperament would change depending on in what key you were playing on your MIDI instrument. I wasn't horrendously successful, admittedly, but then again I was just an undergraduate trying to get this to run in real time on an early 90's Macintosh II....

lihan161051 November 2 2011, 17:24:13 UTC

The technology has almost certainly evolved beyond the need for scales as we know them, because we're no longer stuck with sets of fixed pitches that require elaborate retuning. The only reason 12 tone equal temperament is still as commonplace as it is is because the theory that influences most *popular* commercial music is subject to market forces which drive the development of most of the musical instruments and software used to produce it, so the possibilities for exploring outside the A-440 12 tone equal temperament system are fairly limited ( ... )