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Why micro-tuning is important

124

Comments

  • Prevent lawsuits..... ;)

  • @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

    @TheoryNotes said:
    Yeah, check it out, it's definitely interesting.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Édouard-Léon_Scott_de_Martinville

    Wow, that's pretty cool. It's certainly not something you can infer anything about tuning practices from though. He sings the major third flatter than et, and the fifth sharper than et. thus suggesting just intonation, but he's really too bad of a singer to make much of that.

    I do agree the vocal scale sounds more like just intonation to me but pretty rough recording.

  • @palm said:

    @ecou said:
    Here is a true temperament guitar with squiggly frets vs a standard guitar. It sounds so weird to be in tune 😂😂

    as pointed out in the video, that guitar is simply tuned to equal temperament a bit more precisely. It's not some different tuning system. just means that it will be more in tune with already out-of-tune system that is 12tet.

    It's interesting that the "out-of-tune system" turns out to be an integral part of the sound of the guitar for me.

  • @syrupcore said:

    @palm said:

    @ecou said:
    Here is a true temperament guitar with squiggly frets vs a standard guitar. It sounds so weird to be in tune 😂😂

    as pointed out in the video, that guitar is simply tuned to equal temperament a bit more precisely. It's not some different tuning system. just means that it will be more in tune with already out-of-tune system that is 12tet.

    It's interesting that the "out-of-tune system" turns out to be an integral part of the sound of the guitar for me.

    it's a pretty fun system.

  • @TheoryNotes said:
    "Listen to any acapella music, string quartet, music from most anywhere in the world before the early twentieth century..."

    Where does one do this?

    sorry, worded this poorly. (Although ethnographic recordings from around the world very quickly point to the fact that 12tet was far from standard. A good starting place might be the Secret Museum of Mankind series as it covers a lot of ground. Among the hundreds of tracks from around the world, a very low percentage of them are in Equal Temperament.)

    you don't need to find old recordings.. just old music played in the old traditions. Indian classical music isn't in 12tet. It would be silly to use 12tet as it's modal music. Turkish classical, same. Gamelan music would sound pretty messed up in 12tet as well. Sardinian and Georgian polyphonic volcal music, oof those tight harmonies are what make it so powerful.

    For a lot of music, 12tet is not the best solution.

    It's a fine system for some music, but certainly not the end all be all some like to claim it to be. Some music cannot be played in this system.

    I think by settling with 12 arbitrary pitches, we lose a lot of potential. if you think that's elitist.. fine. I think it's arrogant to suggest that 12tet is the king of all harmonic systems. If it is, I'll happily do my part to overthrow this absurd and lazy monarchy.

    By lazy, I'm not talking about musicians tuning pianos. I'm not saying you are lazy. I mean collectively, we've seemingly given up on the problem of tuning and settled for something that's "close enough", because we haven't had to think about it much.. I don't play pianos and I don't particularly like pianos. I'm talking about 21st century solutions to tuning rather than settling with the one from one hundred years ago.

    I'm talking hermode tunings, which exist on a few instruments..
    and fluid tuning that can retune instruments in the same way that tempo is synced across devices (ala TuneUp by Audiokit), and midi controllers with very fine pitch control per note, bringing it closer to the realm of unfretted instruments or even the human voice.

  • edited August 2019

    @TheoryNotes said:
    Also, the tomato analogy doesn't work for me. Its easy to convince yourself that this one unbelievably natural tomato is the greatest in the world if you haven't had one before, but as you soon may find out if you seek them out, there are different regions that have equally tasty natural tomatoes that have a different flavor because of the soil and climate and many other factors that make them unique and equally delicious.

    I personally feel that way about all tone combinations and systems.

    for me the analogy still works, but I agree that it may not be the best analogy.

    As you gentlemen I was thinking about this topic more often than usual, as we are in this very interesting conversation (although I cannot contribute much). What came to my mind - as an even better analogy - was language.

    We have such beautiful and colourful languages, any language, be it Portuguese, English, French, etc., but today people often just use simple sentences and phrases for the sake of communication, only rarely for the sake of beauty. Which is also a bit sad. We, as humans, as a culture, often content ourselves with flat colours and shapes of something that has so much more to provide. Language has become something different, so as music has become something different. Music is a language.

    @TheoryNotes: you tune pianos? My deepest respect. I would never even try to attempt to do such a thing.

    Which explains why you and @palm have this different perspective. Like I wrote in my last post, it's the experience and surrounding that shapes our perspectives, and in that light it is almost a logical deduction that someone who is experienced in piano tuning must have a different perspective than someone who has a different approach to music like @palm.

  • edited August 2019

    @Phil999 said:

    @TheoryNotes said:
    Also, the tomato analogy doesn't work for me. Its easy to convince yourself that this one unbelievably natural tomato is the greatest in the world if you haven't had one before, but as you soon may find out if you seek them out, there are different regions that have equally tasty natural tomatoes that have a different flavor because of the soil and climate and many other factors that make them unique and equally delicious.

    I personally feel that way about all tone combinations and systems.

    for me the analogy still works, but I agree that it may not be the best analogy.

    As you gentlemen I was thinking about this topic more often than usual, as we are in this very interesting conversation (although I cannot contribute much). What came to my mind - as an even better analogy - was language.

    We have such beautiful and colourful languages, any language, be it Portuguese, English, French, etc., but today people often just use simple sentences and phrases for the sake of communication, only rarely for the sake of beauty. Which is also a bit sad. We, as humans, as a culture, often content ourselves with flat colours and shapes of something that has so much more to provide. Language has become something different, so as music has become something different. Music is a language.

    @TheoryNotes: you tune pianos? My deepest respect. I would never even try to attempt to do such a thing.

    Which explains why you and @palm have this different perspective. Like I wrote in my last post, it's the experience and surrounding that shapes our perspectives, and in that light it is almost a logical deduction that someone who is experienced in piano tuning must have a different perspective than someone who has a different approach to music like @palm.

    I've tuned many pianos over the years to various tunings. I'm more excited about tuning harpsichords and organs and synths though.

  • Much respect to anyone who has to tune piano to nonstandard tunings. From what I understand of Persian piano music, they leave some notes in 12TET and tune others to the desired quartertones. In the late 19th century, pianos began to be available for sale in Tehran, and one of the first buyers happened to be a master of the Persian santoor.

    an article on the tuning used for this piece - Dastgah Segah

    https://majnuunmusicanddance.com/dastgah-segah-persian-music/

  • @GovernorSilver said:
    Much respect to anyone who has to tune piano to nonstandard tunings. From what I understand of Persian piano music, they leave some notes in 12TET and tune others to the desired quartertones. In the late 19th century, pianos began to be available for sale in Tehran, and one of the first buyers happened to be a master of the Persian santoor.

    an article on the tuning used for this piece - Dastgah Segah

    https://majnuunmusicanddance.com/dastgah-segah-persian-music/

    hot damn!

    thanks for sharing, this is absolutely beautiful.

  • edited August 2019

    @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
    If your song is in one key there’s no reason to use 12et. JI sounds so much better.

    This is totally incorrect. I think perhaps what you could say is, if your song is modal -- and you intend to keep the bass droning with simple intervals all throughout... then sure. But even then be careful because as soon as you start stacking more notes and creating new intervals, new harmonic layers, or complex harmonies etc., you're going to be sounding extremely out of tune. This is why 12-tone equal temperament is superior, because it frees up a player to play in more modern styles with unrestricted freedom of expressivity. :smiley:

    @palm said:
    the fact that we're using 12TET in the 21st century is sheer insanity.

    Software could fix the problems of temperament, but people are so desensitized to the fact that the tuning system we've adopted (only for the last 100 years or so, mind you) that we can no longer hear that it's out of tune. It's pure laziness.

    It's not "insanity", that is a little dramatic! One could say digitally produced equal-temperament tones create a more "videogamey" type of sound. But remember equal temperament tuning/frets on acoustic instruments (guitar, piano, etc) is not as bad because of the instruments' various imperfections, subject to dynamics of the player's pressure/touch, complex resonances, etc. It sort of "tricks" the ear into feeling the music based on its dynamic energy and not be utterly obsessed with just one single element such as tuning (which is the point of good music IMO!)

    Sure if we could create perfect tuning in electronic music using software, that would be really interesting; but we have to realize that the level of tuning for that to match what we want to be able to do with music today would involve highly complex, and potentially infinite layers of real-time mathematics. The harmonic series is very finely laid out, but we don't yet have the understanding of what happens with harmonics with complex music making.

    And it doesn't even have to be jazz fusion or crazy audacious harmonic progressions or whatever. Look at something as old-school as Bach. When musicologists and avid fans of theory study Bach, they like to use Schenkerian analysis, which is great as it allows for one's command of musical analysis to basically support any argument they deem fit for how the music ought to be interpreted. It can be pretty cool for another person's particular analysis to open your ear to hearing a phrase in a completely different way; you are literally able to "see" what another listener is hearing. And in this style of analysis, you can analyze elements of music based on lower/middle/higher levels or multiple levels all at once to build an argument. Shit, you could even get experimental and as long as the argument is good and the analysis is sound, no one could tell you you're wrong that Bach secretly wrote the ending of the piece in the first three notes. Except then someone will point out something like, "ah, but in that era, it is commonly known that composers composed preludes in this way... blah blah." Anyway, I digress.

    So my point is that although the idea of tonally perfected music is attractive, it is just near impossible and the notion should be swiftly let go of. It's simply not human to go through and make this kind of stuff automatic. If we want to perfect tuning, we need to make MIDI controllers more responsive and utilize things like aftertouch, etc. Or play analog instruments. Incorporate things that make tunings less noticeable is the key. But keep in mind if you're using multiple instruments, or basically making music that is more than just chants/droning, you're going to want 12-tone equal temperament as your basic tuning system.

    It's been my experience that people who study ear-training in a formal setting learn to listen on many different levels and creatively just as one might do Schenkerian analysis. They don't obsess over temperament or even out of tune stuff. The more you learn to listen, the more you find you can listen to, and then particular recordings such as the RHCP in the video above are uniquely delightful wonderments. Sounds are just as they are. But yea, if its too videogamey (i.e. just a sequencer sending MIDI to software) it will definitely always have that low ceiling.

  • edited August 2019
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited August 2019

    @Max23 said:

    @palm said:

    @[Deleted User] said:
    Having perfect pitch does not mean you think 12tet A440 is correct, rather than all tones are correct which is cool 😎

    lol, ah.. my only experience with perfect pitch was with a woman who could call out the note names of 12tet. If a piano was tuned to anything other than 440, or the record was playing slightly faster or slower, the whole thing sounded "out" to her.

    most with perfect pitch hearing seem to fixed at the 440 hz base A.
    there is nothing significant about 440hz at all, its just a thing our brain is used to, trained by listening to a lot of music in standard western tuning.
    often goes along with synesthesia - perceiving pitch as color, taste, pattern ...
    must be pretty irritating to listen to something a little out of tune like this

    an interesting read about the more divided octave
    http://www.wendycarlos.com/resources/pitch.html

    Actually its the opposite, having perfect pitch means you care less about 440

  • edited August 2019
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • @Max23 said:

    @[Deleted User] said:

    @Max23 said:

    @palm said:

    @[Deleted User] said:
    Having perfect pitch does not mean you think 12tet A440 is correct, rather than all tones are correct which is cool 😎

    lol, ah.. my only experience with perfect pitch was with a woman who could call out the note names of 12tet. If a piano was tuned to anything other than 440, or the record was playing slightly faster or slower, the whole thing sounded "out" to her.

    most with perfect pitch hearing seem to fixed at the 440 hz base A.
    there is nothing significant about 440hz at all, its just a thing our brain is used to, trained by listening to a lot of music in standard western tuning.
    often goes along with synesthesia - perceiving pitch as color, taste, pattern ...
    must be pretty irritating to listen to something a little out of tune like this

    an interesting read about the more divided octave
    http://www.wendycarlos.com/resources/pitch.html

    Actually its the opposite, having perfect pitch means you care less about 440

    I know 2 ppl that hear perfect pitch, one is an old music prof, the other plays the violin.
    If I play them something more out there they tell me it feels unpleasant to them.

    Not my experience, as long as the instrument is tuned it doesn't matter if its 440 or 441. If you are playing with other instruments then of course they need to be tuned to each other.

  • edited August 2019
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited August 2019

    @Max23 said:

    @[Deleted User] said:

    @Max23 said:

    @[Deleted User] said:

    @Max23 said:

    @palm said:

    @[Deleted User] said:
    Having perfect pitch does not mean you think 12tet A440 is correct, rather than all tones are correct which is cool 😎

    lol, ah.. my only experience with perfect pitch was with a woman who could call out the note names of 12tet. If a piano was tuned to anything other than 440, or the record was playing slightly faster or slower, the whole thing sounded "out" to her.

    most with perfect pitch hearing seem to fixed at the 440 hz base A.
    there is nothing significant about 440hz at all, its just a thing our brain is used to, trained by listening to a lot of music in standard western tuning.
    often goes along with synesthesia - perceiving pitch as color, taste, pattern ...
    must be pretty irritating to listen to something a little out of tune like this

    an interesting read about the more divided octave
    http://www.wendycarlos.com/resources/pitch.html

    Actually its the opposite, having perfect pitch means you care less about 440

    I know 2 ppl that hear perfect pitch, one is an old music prof, the other plays the violin.
    If I play them something more out there they tell me it feels unpleasant to them.

    Not my experience, as long as the instrument is tuned it doesn't matter if its 440 or 441. If you are playing with other instruments then of course they need to be tuned to each other.

    hm, I have a long background in synthesis of sound so a little beating of frequencys against each other sounds pleasing to me under the right circumstances, lol
    if everything is in tune with each other I can't tell 440 from 441 apart, nothing has changed except base pitch, the intervals are still the same meaning they are not more distant or closer to each other ...
    (its a little like speeding a record up or down, it doesn't matter, except for the formant artifacts)

    Exactly, 440 has no bearing on much. i can hear if a c note is 14 cents flat but if the whole instrument is tuned 14 cents flat its fine. It not like im going this sounds bad.

  • @cnsg_music said:

    @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
    If your song is in one key there’s no reason to use 12et. JI sounds so much better.

    This is totally incorrect. I think perhaps what you could say is, if your song is modal -- and you intend to keep the bass droning with simple intervals all throughout... then sure. But even then be careful because as soon as you start stacking more notes and creating new intervals, new harmonic layers, or complex harmonies etc., you're going to be sounding extremely out of tune.

    First, 90% of the folks in here couldn't do that if they wanted. Electronic music is nearly always very simple stuff, harmonically. Also, if you're playing complex chords and changes, then you're probably not staying in the same key for an entire piece.

    Second, the question of whether a dense chord is "extremely out of tune" or not is exactly what we are talking about. Some people like those flavors. "Out of tune" is a subjective concept. There is no standard. The tuning machine clipped onto your guitar is a lie created to separate you from your money. There is only sounds good to me or doesn't sound good to me.

  • edited August 2019
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited August 2019
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • @[Deleted User] said:

    @Max23 said:

    @[Deleted User] said:

    @Max23 said:

    @[Deleted User] said:

    @Max23 said:

    @palm said:

    @[Deleted User] said:
    Having perfect pitch does not mean you think 12tet A440 is correct, rather than all tones are correct which is cool 😎

    lol, ah.. my only experience with perfect pitch was with a woman who could call out the note names of 12tet. If a piano was tuned to anything other than 440, or the record was playing slightly faster or slower, the whole thing sounded "out" to her.

    most with perfect pitch hearing seem to fixed at the 440 hz base A.
    there is nothing significant about 440hz at all, its just a thing our brain is used to, trained by listening to a lot of music in standard western tuning.
    often goes along with synesthesia - perceiving pitch as color, taste, pattern ...
    must be pretty irritating to listen to something a little out of tune like this

    an interesting read about the more divided octave
    http://www.wendycarlos.com/resources/pitch.html

    Actually its the opposite, having perfect pitch means you care less about 440

    I know 2 ppl that hear perfect pitch, one is an old music prof, the other plays the violin.
    If I play them something more out there they tell me it feels unpleasant to them.

    Not my experience, as long as the instrument is tuned it doesn't matter if its 440 or 441. If you are playing with other instruments then of course they need to be tuned to each other.

    hm, I have a long background in synthesis of sound so a little beating of frequencys against each other sounds pleasing to me under the right circumstances, lol
    if everything is in tune with each other I can't tell 440 from 441 apart, nothing has changed except base pitch, the intervals are still the same meaning they are not more distant or closer to each other ...
    (its a little like speeding a record up or down, it doesn't matter, except for the formant artifacts)

    Exactly, 440 has no bearing on much. i can hear if a c note is 14 cents flat but if the whole instrument is tuned 14 cents flat its fine. It not like im going this sounds bad.

    I think what you're referring to is relative pitch. As far as I understand it, perfect pitch is rooted in 12tet a440. With good relative pitch, you can determine intervals, regardless of the base frequency.

  • edited August 2019
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited August 2019

    @Max23 said:

    @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

    @cnsg_music said:

    @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
    If your song is in one key there’s no reason to use 12et. JI sounds so much better.

    This is totally incorrect. I think perhaps what you could say is, if your song is modal -- and you intend to keep the bass droning with simple intervals all throughout... then sure. But even then be careful because as soon as you start stacking more notes and creating new intervals, new harmonic layers, or complex harmonies etc., you're going to be sounding extremely out of tune.

    First, 90% of the folks in here couldn't do that if they wanted. Electronic music is nearly always very simple stuff, harmonically. Also, if you're playing complex chords and changes, then you're probably not staying in the same key for an entire piece.

    Second, the question of whether a dense chord is "extremely out of tune" or not is exactly what we are talking about. Some people like those flavors. "Out of tune" is a subjective concept. There is no standard. The tuning machine clipped onto your guitar is a lie created to separate you from your money. There is only sounds good to me or doesn't sound good to me.

    @palm said:

    @GovernorSilver said:
    Much respect to anyone who has to tune piano to nonstandard tunings. From what I understand of Persian piano music, they leave some notes in 12TET and tune others to the desired quartertones. In the late 19th century, pianos began to be available for sale in Tehran, and one of the first buyers happened to be a master of the Persian santoor.

    an article on the tuning used for this piece - Dastgah Segah

    https://majnuunmusicanddance.com/dastgah-segah-persian-music/

    hot damn!

    thanks for sharing, this is absolutely beautiful.

    Looks like don’t try to play chords with me ...
    It’s 2 flats

    Yes, Persian piano music was influenced by music for santoor, because one of the first piano buyers in Tehran was a santoor player. Santoor is a hammered dulcimer. I believe it is played with only one mallet in each hand. No idea how hard it would be to double up the mallets like the modern vibraphone and marimba players do.

    Must respect to those who have to tune pianos, and it must be a challenge to tune one for Persian style.

  • edited August 2019
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited August 2019

    …are now under threat from the rise of equal temperament. Bear in mind that when you hear some of these as they may sound unusual and different to you, but if they sound weird what you're really hearing is your own equal temperament conditioning. I had a really good insight into this when I was working with an Iranian musician who was fluent in both cultures. So he would travel back to Iran to play Iranian music and spend the rest of his time in the West surrounded by equal-tempered music.
    Now Iranian music just like Arabic music, which we'll come to in a moment, has notes, which to those of us used to equal temperament, sound out of tune, and what this guy told me was that his ears took several days to acclimatize each time he moved between cultures. And I mean both ways. So when he was in the West, and surrounded by equal temperament, then Iranian music did sound out of tune to him, but then after a few days back in Iran the western music sounded out of tune.

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  • Love this microtonal dreamscape.
    Key shifts make it sound like warped vinyl in places; great vocal harmonies too. From the comments:
    "First in E, then in F 'shat' (half-sharp), then in F, then in F 'shat' again and then back to E.
    The coda goes to C minor instead of E."
    There's a 24 edo fretboard on the guitar.

  • @rcf said:
    Love this microtonal dreamscape.
    Key shifts make it sound like warped vinyl in places; great vocal harmonies too. From the comments:
    "First in E, then in F 'shat' (half-sharp), then in F, then in F 'shat' again and then back to E.
    The coda goes to C minor instead of E."
    There's a 24 edo fretboard on the guitar.

    Very nice, thanks.

  • Gorgeous

  • Yeah that was cool...

  • @rcf said:
    Love this microtonal dreamscape.
    Key shifts make it sound like warped vinyl in places; great vocal harmonies too. From the comments:
    "First in E, then in F 'shat' (half-sharp), then in F, then in F 'shat' again and then back to E.
    The coda goes to C minor instead of E."
    There's a 24 edo fretboard on the guitar.

    Based on this comment, they pitch-shifted the keyboard part in a DAW after recording? So what they heard while they were recording is different from the final result.

    "we're just pitch shifting the upper one (+50ct., get it?) inside my DAW"

  • edited June 2020
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
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