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On 10 Mar 2006, at 4:37 pm, D. Michael 'Silvan' McIntyre wrote:
The glasgow-pitch-tracker people might have some work in this area
worth
checking out. I've never actually done anything with their branch,
but it
sounded like they were trying, among other things, to get RG to play
quarter
tones by inserting appropriate pitch bends. We'd need something like
that
for true just intonation.
That's probably another one of those three years from now gravy things
though.
Dougie's stuff really is working right now, and is moving towards
release-ready; at the moment the way it's being used is with fluidsynth
as a rehearsal aid for 19ET tunings: that is 19 equal divisions of the
octave. The way Graham is writing for this scale considers it
diatonically, with 7+12 chromatic notes making up the octave instead of
the 7+5 we are used to.
I'm working away on our web site when time permits, but until that's
ready, I've put a snapshot I took here:
http://www.polonius.uklinux.net/rcm.jpg of a rehearsal session in the
basement of the Royal College of Music, London. Personnel: Left to
right, Prof Richart Parncutt, Systematic Musicologist, University of
Graz; Dougie McGilvray, Postgraduate Student, Centre for Music
Technology; Dr Ingrid Pearson, Clarinettest, Director of the
Postgraduate School of the Royal College of Music; Prof Graham Hair,
Composer, The University of Glasgow (and Virgina, Canberra, & Sidney)
and Amanda Morrison, Soprano, Scottish Voices, BBC Singers, Steve
Reich's Musicians and others. Both Amanda and Ingrid are amongst those
rare people who can now sing and play in (as far as I can tell) perfect
19ET, which throws up a whole bunch of musical posibilities. For
example, since a major scale is made up of 3/3/2/3/3/3/2 small tones
(can't call them semitones any more!) it's possible to divide a perfect
4th into four equal divisions instead of the usual necessarily unequal
ones. Possible, that is, but hard. I've tried to sing it, and I just
can't!
The notation we're using is based on normal notation (without
quatertones). We were thinking about using "nearest quartertone"
notation to start with, but it was just too confusing. The idea of G#
and Ab not being the same is already very familiar to musicians, we
we've gone with that. In mean-tone tuning, they are nowhere near the
same, but there not equally spaced either.
When we do our talk, we often demo a piece by the English composer John
Bull called (somewhat unimaginatively) "Ut re me fa sol la". This uses
18 of the 19 tones. It wouldn't have been played originally in 19ET of
course, but almost certainly neither in 12ET, so such a performance is
really quite interesting. Prof John Butt from the Glasgow Dept of Music
is, being an organist of high calibre, capable of playing it on our
retuned 19-to-the-8ve MIDI keyboard in spite of the ridiculous spans
that result -- an octave occupies an octave and a fifth on the keybard!
- -- and with fluidsynth we can switch temperaments at the drop of a hat.
All interesting stuff.
We're doing our London seminar on 18th May if anyone wants to come (at
the RCM). I don't know where people on this list are IRL.
Nick/.
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