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Agreed i think it would sound better

I hadn't really thought of it that way, but you could consider these "borrowed" chords in the pitch axis scheme.

care to elaborate?

Sorry, see you on Discord!

Can you point me to some transcriptions or sheet music for modern harmonized Egyptian music? I'd really like to take a look at what they're doing.

@@quartertoneharmony7100 I don’t have sheet music in mind ( because this technique of harmonization is mainly used in pop songs ) For example this song th-cam.com/video/amrf_YDzsTg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=FOtJ4jHfjwQpTaid The scale is Phrygian mode but with a quarter tone on the second degree , it’s called maqam bayat However the chords used in this chorus aren’t normal Phrygian chords, here there’s a twist I don’t know but is as if chords were properly chosen :)

th-cam.com/video/67KXbypsHow/w-d-xo.htmlsi=fLR7jPw0un0eAs70

Arabic music and its relatives like Turkish and Persian use non-equal quartertone scales. Arguably blues as well.

8:10:11:14 is rough in 24 although I'd think the clash between the high 10 and the low 14 is likely the biggest issue. But I haven't compared it to a just version, so you may be right. The 19th is pretty good in the harmonic minor; the worst harmonic is the 13th (the 26). But I think a big part of the harmonic 13th is its ambiguity; it can easily be an approximation to a just chord and an altered diminished seventh (10: 12:14:19) at the same time. I think ambiguous chords are more musically important than you'd think just by looking at just chord approximations. For example, I think the ambiguity between 5:6 and 16:19 is very important for the sound of the minor third in 12 and 24edo. I think the 5:6 makes it sound smooth and the 16:19 makes it sound sad.

Unfortunately no. The best I could suggest is get a synthesizer program that can do quarter tones.

They normally mean the same thing. Quartertone notation is not standardized, and there are several different ways to indicate the same accidental. I think standardization is developing (in this case to the mirrored flat) but it's not there yet.

It works for melody, and for playing much traditional music that works. Not so much if you want to harmonize. Blues musicians generally achieve quarteatone-ish notes by bending pitches; is that possible for what you want?

@@quartertoneharmony7100 It probly is .. thanks for the reply, good luck :)

First: if you are trying for a Middle Eastern sound then, yes, a 3/4 step is great. And of course sometime it can't be avoided but it's manageable with something in my bag of tricks. Very occasionally I *do* like a 3/4 step, even in a prominent voice. I really can't say why, although my impression is that it's usually when returning to the home field and ending a phrase.

I generally run these long progression fast because I'm afraid people will get bored. But you aren't the first person to ask to have these things slower. I hadn't heard of tonality flux but I have already juggled those kinds of ideas in their quartertone versions. I've been finding I like a tonality flux approach for fourths and fifths (stepping by single quartertones in contrary motion) but parallel motion for thirds and sixths. I will definitely get that Hear Between the Lines album. I love their stuff.

You can't beat 31 for smooth triads among EDOs low enough to plausibly play on fretted or keyboard instruments. The unique thing about quartertone as a "gateway EDO" is that you can slip just a little quartertone into an otherwise completely 12 tone piece. I haven't been exploring that, but it's there.

@@quartertoneharmony7100 Yeah I envy the people who can afford a Lumatone for that high edo goodness. I know you can play 31 on a regular keyboard since Zhea Erose commented so on one of her videos but still can't play both chords and melody at the same time unless you use studio magic. 24 is much easier to do.

@@BellXllebMusic For this, I'm trying to understand more abiout 12-NEJI Zheanna is using, it looks like a good compromise to use JI consonnance with a 12 notes keyboard !

Certainly timbre makes a difference; quartertone steps sound much better in some instruments (like the clarinet) than others (the piano). And, yes, sometimes the sound file makes a difference. But I think that's largely independent of pitch; I notice the effect of pitch in basically all instruments.

Glad you like it!

Do it! I thought about some of the things I am doing for decades and I so wish I'd tackled them sooner. There's a lot of interesting stuff being written in 22 but lots of opportunity to find fresh possibilities.

Is there a good source discussing the actual tuning of those traditional scales? Obviously they're not originally in 12edo but you'd never know that from Wiki.

Well there is the lumatone. And I imagine expensive niche pianos.

@@quartertoneharmony7100 Native speaker here. I'm by no means an expert in traditional Japanese music theory, but flipping through resources and papers that I can find online, it seems that we've been exposed to Chinese influence long enough that those traditional scales were already analyzed in terms of Pythagorean tuning / 12edo long before the Western influence. (Pythagorean tuning was well known since antiquity in China, and there is a book published circa 100 BC that explicitly mentions how to make a musical scale by either truncating or extending a string's length by one third)

Quartertone gives you a really nice range. You can write music that's almost 12-tone but with a little extra spice, or you can write something completely different from 12-tone. My stuff leans to "close to 12-tone" because it's written mostly for people unfamiliar with microtones but there's so many other options.

Who else has noticed this? I'd like to give credit.

@@quartertoneharmony7100 idk i was just happy that you said that because it always confuses me that microtonality is weird on the piano

@@zecaaabrao3634 it's so sad, because I like the sound of a piano, but not for this purpose :(

I know about that. Music is not, and has never been, *just* about doing things that have been done before.

@@quartertoneharmony7100 Good response to a rather pretentious and narrow minded comment!

#1 gives the ranking of step sizes; #11 gives (relatively) good targets within a key. In C the blue note targets would be E-, F+, G-, and B-. So C to E- would be seven quarter tones to a blue note and good by both; C to B- would be three quarter tones to a blue note, so rough by #1 and smooth by #11, and C to D- would be 3 quarter tones to a non-blue note and rough by both.

@@quartertoneharmony7100 I guess this isolates the t4 (Ft in the key of C) as perhaps one of the better options, seeing as it's a blue note and its only medium-rough by the standards of #1, though perhaps it can be better approached downwards from a natural 6 since the natural 6 forms a neutral third with the t4.

I find t4 is a very useful note for pivoting; it's a blue note, the base of the XI harmonic and a minor 3rd for IX ,it's one quartertone up from the fourth degree (F in key of C), seven up from the second degree, and in a major scale 7 down from the sixth degree (A in key of C). That said, I find -5 similarly or even more useful; it's also a blue note, base of XII, minor third for X, plus fifth of XV, one quartertone down from the fifth degree (a preferable.direction), and 7 quarter tones up from the third degree in minor.

@@quartertoneharmony7100 It's true that d5 is similarly useful to t4, however, I think I should point out that the directional preference for how to approach quartertones seems to be conditioned on how you build your tonality as well as how closely a given tuning follows the harmonic or subharmonic series. If you build tonality from the bass-up, then going down generally works better, with going up generally working for following the harmonic series, but building it from the treble-down makes going up work better with going down working more for following the subharmonic series. Regarding chords built on the dV, I find it harder build such chords and stay relatively in-key when I'm working in Major, but, oddly, I find that I can use chords built on tV in Major instead, as it is easily approached from the third degree in major, and how you construct the chord is more flexible. Oddly, enough, chords built on tV even seem to have something similar to a dominant effect, though not quite the same since it depends on a diminished fourth rather than a major third, and the voice-leading is different.

About 2 years of actually working on it. I had thought about it occasionally for a lot longer than that - about 30 years - but when I actually started writing things and listening to them I found my earlier expectations were mostly wrong.

Yes, these are just guidelines and nothing is always necessary. It's more a matter of using enough of them to sound good. In the case of pedal tones I assume they are bass notes and guideline #2 (prefer lower pitches) is a very strong one and often enough all by itself. Is there any way to listen to the examples you're talking about?

@@quartertoneharmony7100 I just made a Soundcloud account to post this as an example (I don't really know of a more convenient way offhand): soundcloud.com/cortaigne-gmail-com/24-germanium-test

@@quartertoneharmony7100 I actually use pedal tones in the higher register in some variants of the Simul cadence- I've posted the examples of these on Discord in DM.