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Music for People Who Can't Sleep
EDIT: Some tonal investigations with the Velocity Keyboard App.
** I changed it to a tonal investigation since its clearly aimed at a C root **
** You can intend atonality but find out your ears make choices based upon root centers.
** I did that. I won't loose any sleep over it.
Ruismake Noir for the patterned rhythm
Quanta for it's MPE response to the velocity keyboard
iSymphonic Strings
Go to bed... then just lay there and listen for something in the walls scratching to get out.
Comments
Very cool. It needs a spooky radio narrator ... like that great voice from Mind Webs... do you remember...
when dreams drift into darkness and shadows wear the clothes of those departed? In a garden of cobwebs the light sifts forever sighing and the jeweled countenances glint in somber procession. Toward a tomorrow of neverlasting heartache.
Say that into a microphone and upload to SoundCloud and I will add it to the mix... before it's too late. (Dread enters the thread).
Ooh - very dark and mysterious. Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not watching you....
I want one of those jobs where you get to watch the paranoid people and then slip them notes that say "Meet me out back around 2AM... bring snacks and some beers." Then you don't show but leave another note asking for another meeting. See... I'd be good at it.
I'm just asking myself - and you experts - what is "atonal" when you're in fact using the chromatic scale?
Is "atonal" just a rating of how well the note sequence matches with a widely used set of scales?
Can't any set of notes be matched with one of the many scales, even if they change more rapidly than we're used to?
Atonal is often used by people to mean dissonant but technically means not having a tonal center/organization.
While the latter is more "correct ", people often describe dissonant tonal music as atonal--even though there is a tonal organization. Atonal music might not be dissonant, too.
Dissonance is a subjective phenomenon. There is music that was once considered hideously dissonant that no longer seems that way. Rite of Spring is an example of a piece that was considered dissonant but no longer seems that way.
100% with @espiegel123. You can stretch your ears a lot if you do not resist. Our musical prejudices keep us in a box. A pretty box, but still a box. I guess it depends what you want from a musical experience... adventure or comfort. You can have both but we often limit ourselves to the known. The “other” is not just people.
I wouldn't call them 'prejudices', just 'taste'. I like to explore atonal stuff, but probably less than 5% of the time I spend digging for new music. I wouldn't call the OP's track atonal, but I did enjoy it.
@oat_phipps, in your case that might be true, but I posit that a lot of what goes for “taste” is simply habit. For example, a lot of folks have a “taste” for baloney on white bread ( I am fond of it myself, tho I prefer my baloney on a baguette with whole grain mustard). Well, of course they like it... that's what they grew up with probably. It is hard to break out of old habits. Sushi is a great example. Raw fish was deplorable, even in the coastal US cities, once upon a time, but now... widely accepted. A taste for discordant sound is no more difficult than developing a taste for cheese stronger in taste than Velveeta. And inagrer, @McD s track is totally tonal.
Nice‘n‘Moody
But something is missing... Is it me? What’s that over there? whaaaa it is coming....
CLOSEUP
_end
Atonal is defined as "not written in any key or mode." I made conscious decisions to pick notes
that don't belong in a specific key... just using tritones or stacked minor thirds will do this.
Sometimes I'll ask the @Linearlineman what the chord progression is behind some tonal sounding piece and he'll tell me, I don't know. Then he can listen to it and name the chords that fit. Most of his music avoids specific scales and sometimes he'll declare a piece to be atonal as a tribute to someone like Charles Ives.
You have good ears sir. What key or scale are you detecting or are you using tonal in the chromatic scale sense? It makes perfect sense to me that you would hear music with this definition because you hear music as a layering of melodies and tend to ignore accidental chord patterns and those "rules" of voice leading. Your voices are always working in a localized sense driven by a quest for discovery.
It's not a good idea to declare the 12 tones/chromatic scale to be "tonal". it's the "well-tempered" compromise we made a few centuries ago to allow us to play in all 12 keys from a single keyed and most modern instruments (sax, clarinet, brass, etc) were adapted to allow the same tricks to play in all keys. So, the chromatic scale is a compromise of pitches to enable this feature of modern music. Ancient instruments did not have these features and were typically pitched to a specific mode (scale).
It's a bit of a puzzle for a classically trained musician to evaluate a collection of notes and see if it happens to fit a specific "harmonic" framework. Sometimes it just doesn't and they might try to make small changes to make it fit somewhere into a tonal arrangement.
To break free of "tonality" in a more liberal sense you venture into "micro-tonality" with quarter tones as a first step with a note placed between each of the 12 tone 1/2 steps. Adding a 4th value to a trumpet (or any brass instrument) allows this capability. Quarter tone pitched percussion is common for gamelan orchestras and modern music outfits like Sun Ra piloted.
Non-western classical music adopted many scales that just don't fit into the 12 step organization and the Wilsonic App catalogs these options and the AudioKit D1 Synth can import the pitch assignments so that's non-tonal in this world music sense but calling it atonal would re-defining the word.
Avoid pitch all together which MPE based MIDI control allow (though the pitch starts and ends will typically use the well-tempered starting points).
To really get outside tonality it's often the case of just using knobs to control pitches (oscillators) without and specific notch points on the knobs. It wouldn't be hard to just define a frequency division to make a new "scale" based upon some even choices or even just randomized pitch selections from the audible range of human hearing.
Btw, the traditional theory behind discussions of tonality and key centers was based on Western classical music....and requires some reinterpretation when applied in modern times. For instance, a lot of jazz would be "atonal " if strictly applying 19th century notions of tonal centers. But if you re-align your view, they aren't atonal...as jazz introduced more complex frameworks.
"Atonal" isn't as useful a term as it was in 1906
Most jazz has a tone center. I know you can offer up Ornette Coleman and some Coltrane in support of early atonal jazz but statistically it's hard to support it as anything more than a fraction of jazz as performed. A fraction many would not be willing to leave but might admit to being an avant garde minority of jazz as practiced as a genre. A local jazz player I know takes the boundaries on tonal jazz and insists "smooth jazz" is NOT jazz at all. Probably because it's simple minded jazz. I appreciate the effort he put in to what he can do and I give him the right to make the declaration but he does forget the audience which says "But I enjoy Kenny G. The rest of jazz bores me."
There are a few that played "outside" but even today students of jazz will learn a body of standards in well known keys so they can hold jam sessions and call from this holy collection of tunes and be ready to contribute. "The Real Book" is this jazz bible to memorize. They play the melody (the head) as a group with the clever players providing extra harmonic support and then line up for choruses of solos following the chord changes of the tune. Many hotel bands have turned this into a business model and book musicians for these filler gigs. Any collection of bass, drums, chords and 1-2 soloists will do and they all know the standards.
Students of jazz just play straight from the real books in C, Bb, and Eb editions. If someone makes a "Free Jazz Real Book" it might have a whole different approach and might have many blank pages or even jumps in page numbering to call up the missing page #42... which fits the meaning of jazz.
I think music that has voice leading tendencies, you can feel a note is being anticipated and either delivers or avoids that expectation, makes it tonal music. Those predictions come from classic cadences and stepwise resolutions in the melody. Most books on jazz harmony approach the subject from tonal centers.
You can make pretty atonal music mathematically by using symmetric divisions of the 12 tone scale:
Root + 6 + 12 (tritones)
Root + 3 + 6 + 9 + 12 (diminished chords or stacked minor 3rds)
Root + 2 + 4 + 6 + 8 + 10 + 12 (whole tones) There are 2 sets of stacked major 3rds in there.
Shift the root at some point to up or down a 1/2 step and you'll make some poor soul with perfect pitch seasick. I knew a piano player that needed to stop playing if the piano was not tuned to A=440. Perfect Pitch can also be a curse.
Making a Mozaic Script to generate atonal music would be pretty easy... just adding these integer offsets in positive and negative values for notes in the scale and dropping anything outside the base set of notes. Instant atonal sounding harmonic textures and shifting the roots at randomizer the course of a piece would make it even more ethereal. I'll leave this to the interested student of MIDI Programming as an extra credit course option.
@McD: I think you missed my point. The whole notion of tone center and tonal harmony requires a significant adjustment of the concepts from pre-jazz western musical tradition. In a lot of respects, Debussy pushed the boundaries and jazz exploded them. Same is true of music like blues where dominant 7s can be used so freely.
The fact that we hear something like Giant Steps or Cherokee or Blue in Green as completely consonant and recognize them as tonal shows how fluid those notions are.
As we become accustomed to new ways of organizing sound, what is tonal and what isn't changes... and in many regards, the whole notion is based on a limited musical tradition and a mistaken belief that there are fixed rules...rather than descriptions of changing conventions.
Did Schoenberg actually use "atonal" or was it twelve tone music. "All tonal" might be more accurate.
I get your point. Breaking established musical conventions sounds "wrong". I have a nephew that creates mashups and some of the results cause me great pain because he freely mixes "root centers" and doesn't hear a problem. He overlays conflict chords. Not a big deal for his listening experience.
Now. Atonal is defined as "not written in any key or mode." If you can't feel a root then it's probably atonal by design. If you can stop the music a hum a resting note then it probably wasn't atonal at all. That's my point. I should actually listen to my post and hit stop a few times. I intended atonality but might have added a tonal center out of habit. It's pretty easy to change the name of the piece in the first few days but the conversation is still useful to think through the ideas and discuss musical history in this context.
Debussy: Clare de Lune (around) 1890
Stravinsky "Rite of Spring" 1913
Jazz history follows a similar arch from early harmonic devices to where is is today.
They flow from the choice of african derived scales underneath the harmony. The roots are
seriously grounded. The scales being used just conflict with western traditions. Allowing both major and minor 3rds to be used to create powerful emotional tensions.
If you switch the conversion to dissonant versus consonant then this where I point out we're talking about different things: root centers versus harmonic choices.
Atonality can use purely consonant harmonic choices but never betray a root preference.
I bring up symmetrical scales to make this point. With a pure symmetry there is not enforced root in the use of the scale.
See. You've switch to discussing tonality as "sound organization" which is the consonant versus dissonant conversation which is perfectly valid and worth discussing. My point is that I'm not talking about that... I'm just referring to tonal centers in the musical design.
I think I'll go perform that test for any obvious roots in the music I added "tentionally" for extra drama.
Oops. It feels like C minor... so I'm full of shit as usual. It's really tonal: those long stretches of B are just aching to resolve up to C. I milked that ache as a crutch. The piece fades on a long C in the strings and feels happy to do so. I'm sure I felt that at the time after thinking I was Mr. Random Tonal-Plucker. What a fool.
Being a self trained pianist I tend to play everything around C as a root just as a function of not learning to play well all keys and how to use proper technique.
OK. Moving on... nothing to see/hear? My bad.
@McD. No self lambasting, please . Tonal is as tonal does. I called it and I know nothing.
Nice discussion going on here.
I have always liked Oliver Messiaen’s take on tonality (and rhythm,melody).
Google “Messiaen tonality” for starters.
https://www.academia.edu/994517/A_Brief_Survey_of_Olivier_Messiaen_s_Harmonic_Practise
https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2014/mar/25/rufus-wainwright-why-i-love-messiaen
http://uir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/16695