Is "Equal Temperament" necessary in electronic music?

[girevik]

 

Personally - I'm not sure I want to adapt my ear into some mode where tuning or singing or playing always has to be tonally "perfect". Unless I could still remain content with the inherent imperfections of tempered scales, not to mention imperfect artists, and the wonderful wide world of playing or singing a bit sharp or flat as another expressive method. I'd hate to see that sort of thing become "wrong" or "sounds bad" due to some idea that things have to be mathematically "perfect" to be good or right. As just another way of doing things, just intonation is great, sure. But it's a very small sort of genre (if that's the right word) and I kind of hope it stays that way:) nat whilk ii

 

 

Unfortunately, if you want to play a bowed string or wind instrument or sing in a piano-less ensemble (eg. an acapella choir or an orchestra - its typical to only have a fixed-pitch instrument like piano or vibraphone for part of the program rather than the entire program), dynamic just intonation is a reality you have to live with. I've sat in rehearsals where we had to sit and wait for the director to fix the intonation of, say, a French horn section, because somebody was playing out of tune in that group, and it made the intended chord sound pretty bad.

 

String sections tend to get away with imperfect intonation because of frequent use of vibrato. It's a running joke among string players that we use vibrato to cover up not hitting a pitch perfectly.

 

The good news though: "Play a chord in just intonation" just means play the chord without any of the pitches beating against the others. Its not that hard to achieve in an ensemble setting, unless you're playing a fixed-pitch instrument.

[MargeHowel]

 

Oh, I don't doubt that it works to some extent to address the inherent inharmonicity of steel strings when properly set up. It's just that I've checked in there a few times over the years and don't recall ever seeing an explanation of it that made sense to me. That said, it seems like they're currently (for the last six years anyhow) just sort of avoiding any sort of tricky explanation... Basically just saying it works -- balancing your intonation. (And that last avoids absurd claims like 'perfect' intonation. So, maybe a happy medium after all.)

 

 

I thin htat's basically it. FWIW pianos do it too, it's called "stretch tuning" -- it sort of sits on top of the temperament and, while tempering deals with inherent problems of definition of harmonic intervals, the stretching deals with strings not being perfect oscillators

[girevik]

My idea was to put it together as a max4live plugin so I can just make it do what I want without trying to combine stuff other people made together into a component collage I was gonna try doing it like this-- Here would be the main function of the actual instrument: Midi in ---> MTOF ----> analyser---> reactor ------> synth (oscillators, etc) MTOF being midi to other frequency, analyzer being a block of code that will take frequency data as input and organize it into realtime chord and key information, reactor being a block of code that takes the key/chord information and root note from the analyzer and outputs adjusted frequency data to the oscillators and to a head unit on the master track Then on the master track you could have a kind of virtual head unit that takes in the data from all the slave instruments' analyzers and forces them to work together. Doing it inside Max would alleviate the need for a certain type of controller Do you think that's feasible?

 

 

This work might already be done for you. Check out Max Magic Microtuner: http://www.cycling74.com/forums/topic.php?id=17509

 

There was also an excellent product called Lil Miss Scale Oven for Mac users, but it seems that the business owner shut down the site after repeated harassment/abuse from a particular individual (according to the site). LSMO could generate Max tuning objects, use MIDI sysex tricks to force some theoretically non-tunable hardware synths into alternate tunings, and had other cool tools.

[girevik]

actually you can go further. I know the Uof Mich has done some work on actual dynamic intonation (the intonation gets adjusted on-the-fly, not per-piece/movement)

 

 

Hermode Tuning also does dynamic intonation. The Hermode site claims this technology appears on several popular products:

http://www.hermode.com/html/products-practice_en.html

[blue2blue]

I found this also, and have quoted part of it: http://www.guyguitars.com/eng/guyguitars/feitentest.html

Right. That's the kind of nonsense. "Normally the guitar is intonated according to the mathematical model which assumes that the intervals are all the same size, and you find yourself in conflict with the natural note row - what the ear "wants" to hear to experience intervals as harmonious."

 

WTF? Is the writer talking about the harmonic problems that are part of the compromise of 12TET? And same size? There's someone who doesn't quite get the equal in temperament, one guesses. Whatever, the Feiten System doesn't address that.

 

Reading between the lines, of course, it seems they're talking about the native inharmonicity of strings (particularly wire strings) which diverge from the simple Pythagorean formula because of the physical nature of metal strings -- even though they can't bring themselves to say stretch tuning.

 

And, of course, since there's no way of truly predicting the inharmonicity from one design of string from another, this exact calculations business seems to be nonsense as well.

 

 

More on inharmonicity... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inharmonicity

[UstadKhanAli]

He does say this, which I suppose might have some merit. I do know that a good piano tuner doesn't tune strings exactly right on pitch.

 

 

We started studying the system that is used on the piano carefully, and then we calculated a series of formulas for optimising the guitar's intonation, to eliminate or minimise the dissonances. You can't follow the piano's model exactly, but you can use the same principles of tuning the octaves successively sharper the further you get from Middle C and tuning them slightly flatter the further down you go. Strangely enough, no-one has done this from a scientific approach earlier - not for the guitar. Since you are working with very small differences you have to intonate with a strobe tuner, but once the intonation has been set you can tune normally with a tuning fork or a tuner.

 

[Anderton]

There's also that Swedish guitar with the non-linear frets: http://www.truetemperament.com/site/index.php

 

Mats Nermark likes it a lot...go to the 11 minute mark or so, where he talks with the inventor.

 

 

[nat whilk II]

This is a fun thread. Now...somehow I'm being interpreted as somebody who is nervous about this "new" idea of just intonation....hey, read closer, my beloved fellow posters

 

The talk began with electronic music as a perhaps a genre that could benefit from using just intonation. Since the instruments are not physically restrained in the same way as a synth or especially some software sourced noise maker.

 

That notion made me think, "what a limiting notion, 'tho. In terms of being a musician". I mean, are you going to set your software or programmable synths to just intonation, and then if you introduce an acoustically tempered instrument, somehow have the software "auto-just-intonate" your acoustic instrument??? And if you modulate, are all the notes now in just intonation in the original key? Or the new key?? What, exactly, am I going to benefit from in this complicated exercise???

 

It seemed a problematic idea, and more of a limiting sort of notion than a freeing one, rather than one would lead to new creations worth the effort.

 

So my basic response was this - just intonation was a pain in the butt for everyone before tempered instruments were developed and for good reason. Modulation was more than a little hampered. Tempering was a huge step forward. So you've got to convince me that going back to just intonation is justifiable. It's got to lead to something new, not just constrict, as it used to do.

 

OTOH, I can see just intonation as totally justifiable in ambient music like Robert Rich's. I own 17 of his albums - I've met him, I've heard him live, he's one of my icons, I know most of those albums like the back of my hand. But in ambient, with the slow, slow changes and the long meditations on single sounds and single notes or simple intervals, you can totally work with just intonation. And with the noise elements of ambient, it's obviously not an issue. But it's a very specialized context. It's about as far from, say, a Coltrane complex modal/key kalidescope as you can get. Or a complex Bach concerto, either.

 

Now some level of subtle, artistic, dynamic intonation adjustments makes sense in say, a string quartet context. For one thing, with the small number of instruments, the "beating", the "out of tune" thing, is so noticeable. So you bend here and there, and doing so sweetens the sound and more importantly, keeps the audience (or conducter) from wincing. Maybe you even "go just" for a while in a remote key to enhance tension vs the original key. All good. But that's a very specialized context. And a long way from the OP about electronic music. That's where I had my doubts.

 

But the "chorusing" effect is, in my opinion, one of the very greatest tools available (among the subtler musical tools.) I don't just mean your Small Stone guitar pedal - but all instances where being a bit out of perfect tuning is the spice to the sauce, the sizzle that sells. YOU go listen to one oscillator on A440 - and I'll listen to two, with one detuned, and we'll see who goes crazy first:)

 

Tempering makes "chorusing" or "slightly flat/sharp" in this broader sense a permanent issue to deal with. It makes for a richer plot of soil from with to grow your musical garden than a justly-intonated set of strictly determined tones. It brings atmosphere into the most basic elements of music - the simple scale. The tempered instrument major scale is already in tension, ready to be unpacked. It's very imperfection is just what we need. At the same time, it sort of democratically spreads the imperfection around, so we can go to practically limitless places harmonically and it still works.

 

I understand and agree with what Marge said about the tyranny of the keyboard. The tyranny of just intonation is in my book, even more onerous. That's why I'm ready to hear any experiment with it, but not any nonsense about it being somehow "more right" or "better" than tempering.

 

Here - I'll say it uncategorically - tempering is a true, absolute advance in musical technology, hands down. Just intonation is an old idea that we can ask to play a bit part here and there with all due respect, but it can only handle supporting, minor roles anymore.

 

nyah.

 

nat whilk ii

[rasputin1963]

The equal temperament of synthesizers can produce a certain "dead" tone, as we know. Nothing wrong with it.... except your individual melodic notes are liable to lack... I dunno, "urgency" or emphatic expressiveness, y'know?

 

 

The best synth arrangements I ever did was on my SY99, where I was able to tweak the cents' value of each note. If you have a focal, urgent, plaintive high string note? Damn right you're going to want it to screech sharp a little bit, like an animal or baby in distress.

 

Now, in-the-box, I've tried to achieve this, or something similar, and it's much harder to do. There is that freeware proggie called SCALA, allegedly allowing you to set your MIDI to different tunings, but damn! You have to be Richard Hawking to figure out how ta use that program.

[ryan7585]

This is a fun thread. Now...somehow I'm being interpreted as somebody who is nervous about this "new" idea of just intonation....hey, read closer, my beloved fellow posters The talk began with electronic music as a perhaps a genre that could benefit from using just intonation. Since the instruments are not physically restrained in the same way as a synth or especially some software sourced noise maker. That notion made me think, "what a limiting notion, 'tho. In terms of being a musician". I mean, are you going to set your software or programmable synths to just intonation, and then if you introduce an acoustically tempered instrument, somehow have the software "auto-just-intonate" your acoustic instrument??? And if you modulate, are all the notes now in just intonation in the original key? Or the new key?? What, exactly, am I going to benefit from in this complicated exercise??? It seemed a problematic idea, and more of a limiting sort of notion than a freeing one, rather than one would lead to new creations worth the effort. So my basic response was this - just intonation was a pain in the butt for everyone before tempered instruments were developed and for good reason. Modulation was more than a little hampered. Tempering was a huge step forward. So you've got to convince me that going back to just intonation is justifiable. It's got to lead to something new, not just constrict, as it used to do. OTOH, I can see just intonation as totally justifiable in ambient music like Robert Rich's. I own 17 of his albums - I've met him, I've heard him live, he's one of my icons, I know most of those albums like the back of my hand. But in ambient, with the slow, slow changes and the long meditations on single sounds and single notes or simple intervals, you can totally work with just intonation. And with the noise elements of ambient, it's obviously not an issue. But it's a very specialized context. It's about as far from, say, a Coltrane complex modal/key kalidescope as you can get. Or a complex Bach concerto, either. Now some level of subtle, artistic, dynamic intonation adjustments makes sense in say, a string quartet context. For one thing, with the small number of instruments, the "beating", the "out of tune" thing, is so noticeable. So you bend here and there, and doing so sweetens the sound and more importantly, keeps the audience (or conducter) from wincing. Maybe you even "go just" for a while in a remote key to enhance tension vs the original key. All good. But that's a very specialized context. And a long way from the OP about electronic music. That's where I had my doubts. But the "chorusing" effect is, in my opinion, one of the very greatest tools available (among the subtler musical tools.) I don't just mean your Small Stone guitar pedal - but all instances where being a bit out of perfect tuning is the spice to the sauce, the sizzle that sells. YOU go listen to one oscillator on A440 - and I'll listen to two, with one detuned, and we'll see who goes crazy first:) Tempering makes "chorusing" or "slightly flat/sharp" in this broader sense a permanent issue to deal with. It makes for a richer plot of soil from with to grow your musical garden than a justly-intonated set of strictly determined tones. It brings atmosphere into the most basic elements of music - the simple scale. The tempered instrument major scale is already in tension, ready to be unpacked. It's very imperfection is just what we need. At the same time, it sort of democratically spreads the imperfection around, so we can go to practically limitless places harmonically and it still works. I understand and agree with what Marge said about the tyranny of the keyboard. The tyranny of just intonation is in my book, even more onerous. That's why I'm ready to hear any experiment with it, but not any nonsense about it being somehow "more right" or "better" than tempering. Here - I'll say it uncategorically - tempering is a true, absolute advance in musical technology, hands down. Just intonation is an old idea that we can ask to play a bit part here and there with all due respect, but it can only handle supporting, minor roles anymore. nyah. nat whilk ii

 

 

Well what you said about starting in a remote key and then "going just" is exactly what I was suggesting. And the acoustic instruments would sound fine in standard tuning on top of it. I'm suggesting this as way to get more pure synth tones.

 

And you could get very sophisticated tones from a dynamic/justly tuned synth. You can even get the same tone as from an equal-tempered synth. It's just that on the justly tuned one you have the option of pure tone, and on the equal-tempered synth you do not.

 

The equal temperament of synthesizers can produce a certain "dead" tone, as we know. Nothing wrong with it.... except your individual melodic notes aee liable to lack... I dunno, "urgency" or emphatic expressiveness, y'know? The best synth arrangements I ever did was on my SY99, where I was able to tweak trhe cents' value of each note. If you have a focal, urgent, plaintive high string note? Damn right you're going to want it to screech sharp a little bit, like an animal or baby in distress. Now, in-the-box, I've tried to achieve this, or something similar, and it's much harder to do. There is that freeware proggie called SCALA, allegedly allowing you to set your MIDI to different tunings, but damn! You have to be Richard Hawking to figure out how ta use that program.

 

Yeah I love experimenting with frequency interaction and timing, doing thinks like you said about the high strings... Or like how Jon Bonham would speed up or slow down certain parts of the beat for emphasis. That kind of stuff is all too absent in most electronic music and there's no excuse because it can all still be done

 

SCALA seems like it would work, but not really be worth the trouble. I like the idea of it happening automatically

[ryan7585]

but yeah that justonic site seems to be it at first glance, i'll have to look into that further

[Lee Knight]

 

 

Now that^^^... is a cool video. It also reminds me that Just Intonation sounds funny to my ears. I was listening a jazz station. Mingus and Coltrane sound so much more interesting that Brecker or the Yellowjackets, et al. The sense of pitch with 50's and 60's jazz players is hip and interesting. The smooth 70's and beyond strive for ironing out those kinks in rhythm, dynamics... and pitch. I LIKE THE RUB. I like the rub in that video from tempered as well. The chords have an aliveness that the just version doesn't. To me at least.

[girevik]

So my basic response was this - just intonation was a pain in the butt for everyone before tempered instruments were developed and for good reason. Modulation was more than a little hampered.

 

 

Before tempered instruments, hardly anybody wrote music that modulated into other keys anyway, with an interesting exception being composer Carlo Gesualdo, who lived around the time that temperaments were being introduced to Western music. Gesualdo used chromaticism in ways that must have been shocking to his contemporaries. BTW, Bach (who you mentioned) did not use equal temperament. Scholars don't seem to agree which tuning he used (Werckmeister III vs Valotti vs. whatever) but it wasn't modern equal temperament. His modulations were intended to highlight the sounds of different keys on the keyboard instruments - F major really did sound different compared to C major in his time. I suspect he simply used whatever tunings were available on the organs and harpsichords to which he had access. His choral works of course would not have highlighted those key differences a much because of the natural inclination of trained singers to sing in tune (beatless chords) with each other.

 

It does seem that modern composers that use just intonation lean towards ambient music. But some have also explored the powerful dissonances one can get with just intonation by deliberately modulating to "unpleasant" keys. I recall composer Kraig Grady discussing this - he followed the path set by Harry Partch.

[girevik]

 

There is that freeware proggie called SCALA, allegedly allowing you to set your MIDI to different tunings, but damn! You have to be Richard Hawking to figure out how ta use that program.

 

 

Scala is great because it comes with 3000+ alternative tunings, stored in SCL and KBM files. The SCL file has the tuning, and the KBM file has the keyboard mapping (in MIDI terms) for the tuning. The easiest to use tunings for keyboard players are the 12 note/octave ones, with the trickier ones having more than 12 notes/octave (eg. 19-tone and 31-tone equal temperament). There are 3rd party tools that load Scala files and are easier to use, like Max Magic Microtuner. A lot of softsynths also load Scala files directly - you don't have to use Max Magic Microtuner for those. There are also tools that convert Scala files to MIDI Sys Ex files for loading into certain hardware synths like the old Yamaha FM synths. I did a bit of testing for the G2ools suite, that included a Scala file loader, for the Nord Modular G2 synth. G2ools is a set of conversion tools that convert DX7 patches, Scala files, etc. into G2 patch files. Unfortunately, proper support of KBM files was never implemented in G2ools.

[girevik]

Here's a useful site: http://www.microtonal-synthesis.com/

[blue2blue]

He does say this, which I suppose might have some merit. I do know that a good piano tuner doesn't tune strings exactly right on pitch.

As I noted with regard to the inherent inharmonicity of different types of strings, particularly those formed of metal.

[blue2blue]

 

The equal temperament of synthesizers can produce a certain "dead" tone, as we know. Nothing wrong with it.... except your individual melodic notes aee liable to lack... I dunno, "urgency" or emphatic expressiveness, y'know? The best synth arrangements I ever did was on my SY99, where I was able to tweak trhe cents' value of each note. If you have a focal, urgent, plaintive high string note? Damn right you're going to want it to screech sharp a little bit, like an animal or baby in distress. Now, in-the-box, I've tried to achieve this, or something similar, and it's much harder to do. There is that freeware proggie called SCALA, allegedly allowing you to set your MIDI to different tunings, but damn! You have to be Richard Hawking to figure out how ta use that program.

Actually, I wouldn't say it's a dead tone so much a noisy one -- the beat frequencies produced by slightly-to-rather out of tune intervals. As has possibly been noted here, the only interval int 12TET that is mathematically accurate is between octaves. Perfect 4ths and 5ths are next-closest at only 2 cents off. But most are in the teens -- and, depending on how one calculates intervals, the 7th can be as much as ~31 cents off. (Working from memory, here.) The beat tones produced by the interaction of those notes creates dissonant content. Most of us, apparently, get quite used to it -- to the extent that most of the keyboardists in that long-ago thread on the then-new Justonics system I referenced earlier thought this talk about keyboards having out of tune intervals was nutty.

 

 

In the 80s, on the Cazio CZ-1000 I bought from a friend of a friend you could -- laboriously -- tune each of the 8 oscillators individually. And in EM or something I found chart that had values for a Just scale. It took me a long time to do it and the result was... interesting. But not really usable for anything I could come up with.

[girevik]

This is also worth a look: http://www.dynamictonality.com/

Dynamic Tonality doesn't sound exactly the same as adaptive just intonation (which is what the OP wants), but it's an interesting approach. The site has links to a Dynamic Tonality physical modeling synth, Spectral Toolbox, etc. Apparently William A. Sethares is behind this website - he's written a book and articles about using spectral analysis to determine possible tunings for a given instrument, particularly those that are heavy on inharmonicity (eg. the metallophones used in gamelan music).

[UstadKhanAli]

As I noted with regard to the inherent inharmonicity of different types of strings, particularly those formed of metal.

 

You did indeed. I'm just pointing out that there's some merit in what he's saying (IOW, he's not completely fruity with his description ).

[TallKite]

Hi all, nice thread. Here's the U of Michigan paper:

"Modelling Ensemble Performance: Dynamic Just Intonation"

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/icmc/bbp2372.1992.011/1/--modelling-ensemble-performance-dynamic-just-intonation?view=image

It's about software called TuneUp that is unfortunately non-real-time. It's from 1992, so TuneUp wouldn't run on modern computers any way. Nice name, though.

 

I wrote a midi plug-in, alt-tuner, which does dynamic just intonation:

http://www.harmonycentral.com/forum/forum/Keyboards/acapella-18/31223120-alt-tuner-a-microtonal-midi-plug-in

 

Alt-tuner does everything the OP asked for, and then some. Unlike Hermode tuning, it works with almost every softsynth and keyboard. It does traditional 5-limit JI as well as modern 7-limit JI, and also 11-limit, etc. It uses a point-and-click interface, much easier to use than Scala.

[onelife]

Just started looking at Pythagorean Temperament... Apparently there's a big new thing people are talking about saying that 432hz is the frequency of the "cosmic hum" of the rotating planets... and that this is the natural temperament for music and that it was always understood to be so until equal temperament was brought into use.

 

My band "accidentally" tuned to 432 one day and decided to stay there for a year or so (including one CD) until we decided to get back in step with the crowd.

 

136 Hz has been reported as the sound of OM, the beginning of the universe. Much Indian music is in the key of C# relative to A=432 which is 136Hz. The Beatles' "Within You, Without You" is also an example.

 

[inversound]

i don't think it matters that much...on my virus you can change from equal temperment, theres like dial in from equal all thre way to pure...anti aliasing takes care of the excess tones it i think...unless im not understanding anti aliasing.

[blue2blue]

I became acquainted with Prent Rodgers' JI and microtonal compositions in the late 90s. There's some pretty neat stuff that shows off what some of the true harmonic intervals stack up like. I like it as music, but it's interesting besides.

 

 

Most of his work is done using CSound and some tools he coded himself and released through various social media music sites like Soundcloud -- but he does have an album in syndication:

Spotify: Music of the Hoh River Valley by Prent Rodgers on Spotify

Google Play Music (and All Access): https://play.google.com/music/m/Byju...4wtapcundypjvm

(He's got a YT channel, but it seems to be mostly family and political stuff. No music at all.)

 

 

Of course, probably the best known just intonation/microtonal experimenters are the Residents. They're a bit all over the map but the ideas of Harry Partch and others laid a heavy hand on their weirdness, seems to me. http://thequietus.com/articles/15069...versary-review

[1001gear]

Have the default frequency of each keyboard key line up with what it should be in equal temperament. As chords are formed, keep the root note's frequency the same, but shift the rest of the chord into just temperament, eliminating the unwanted harmonics

Imagining this I can already see some benefits and problems this might cause when it comes to composition and performance. But I think I'm onto something here and I think the problems can be ironed out.

 

In bands choirs and orchestras most intonation is to the lowest sounding note. This allows for optimizing the harmonic color of the moment.