Thanks for your comments and questions! The 21st century seems to be an amazing transition period in music. On one hand, mechanical era limitations are being supplanted by developments in electronic music. On the other hand, in this early phase, modern electronic instruments are still operating within the limitations and restrictions of the mechanical era. (i.e. traditional keyboard design: flat, rectangular, chromatic, one pitch-region per key switch; also, the stagnancy of old digital protocols in music during a rapidly evolving technological era: MIDI circa 1983, 'legacy' hardware limitations programmed into new software systems).
Are you the total inventor of this instruments, which you compose for?! Did you design the keyboard, invent the tune system, and built it?! Welllll... I can't imagine, how, but..... You are GENIOUS! RESPECT!
I doubt you'll see this, but on the off chance you do, I am extremely interested in microtones and want to find a midi keyboard/synth that I can use to express my microtonal arrangements. Do you have any suggestions for this? I'm looking at the Seaboard Block right now and wondering if it's the best all-around choice. Super amazing talk by the way!
You might like the LinnStrument. Its hardware and firmware are open source. The downside is that it doesn't yet have an editor app for customizing micro-pitch and color layouts... so you will have to do some programming (i.e.MAX/MSP). Roli Blocks are great for sound shaping applications (triggering loops, samples, effects etc).
Many years ago I studied microtonality as a student with Easley Blackwood at the University of Chicago. While I fell in love with it back then, I've found over the years that it's been extremely difficult, often downright impossible, to explain the world of microtonal music to others. I want to say thanks to you for giving this wonderful and easy to understand talk, with so much passion and enthusiasm, and sharing your music and discovery with the rest of us (and the world). I found your other clips on your TH-cam channel to be inspiring too. Words can't describe the sense of wonderment that they make me feel! :)
Patrick Lau microtonality: when there was only the pentatonic scale, the notion of 'semitone microtonality' was made necessary by the notion of the major3rd(5th partial) of the dominant chord being pulled up to the root(fundamental) of the tonic chord. the direction for which we learned of this "new" semitonal microtonality is called overtonal. now all of this happened the exact same way in the reciprocal direction with the exception of: if the low to high pitch fundamental is C , then the high to low pitch fundamental is E. we mistakenly call this triad the relative minor of the major scale thereby never recognizing that the dominant chord of " the relative minor" is not a 5th above the 'a' note but instead a 5th below the E note.ITS ALL TOTALLY REVERSED. anyway, the dominant resolution logic that lead to the notion of a semitone resolution gave us the idea to treat the semitone as the smallest interval and to try and split the octave into as many semitones as it would allow , eureka! the 12 tone equal tempered scale. however it is that you modulate thru all 12 keys harmonically, the major3rd of the dominant leading to the root of the tonic will always be ,... ... THE HARMONIC RESOLUTION THAT GIVES YOU A NOTION OF AN EVEN SMALLER INTERVAL FOR WHICH TO DIVIDE THE OCTAVE EVENLY. even when you have 1200 equally divided notes in an octave the most sensible tones to the human ear will always be THE 5 THAT WE FELL IN LOVE WITH FIRST. CTHUMB,DINDEX, EBOW,FRING,GPINKY,CTHUMB.
Well the way to explain is the concept of color and the shades of colors the spectrum is just more increased with this range of extra notes more detail if you will a higher resolution
Woow i love easley blackwood! His x-Tone etudes are really cool. I'd have loved to be a student of a microtonalist, just like Maddie Ashman was to Michael Harrison (grr that luck)
This was 5 years ago and still groundbreaking! Hopefully lands with the right people and truly forge a new music for the 21st century. I have hope as MIDI 2.0 comes on board and MPE becomes more widely used in the traditional 12 note system. These 2 things will at least help broaden the expressive capabilities of electronic music. May composers also seek out these polychromatic ideas as well!
As a mathematician and amateur musician, I like to look also at the mathematical aspect of our 12-tone (duodecatonic?) scale. Why did we wind up with 12 tones, not 5 or 10 or 29 or whatever? The short answer is 3 things: 1. Harmonics 2. Logarithmic scaling 3. Continued fractions 1. Harmonics are the integer multiples of a base frequency. Double the frequency (i.e., the 2nd harmonic) and you have an octave. Triple it (3rd harmonic), and you get the fith in the next octave; etc. These small ratios of frequency tend to be pleasing to our ears. 2. Logarithmic scaling is how we perceive changes in pitch - equal frequency ratios sound to us like equal musical intervals. 3. Continued fractions (CF) is where this gets into some mathematical nitty-gritty. It's basically a way of optimizing a fraction, b/a, to approximate a real number, x, be it rational or not. Optimization here is taken as simultaneously minimizing the error (b/a - x) *and* the terms, a and b. This is a repetitive process, in which ever larger terms produce ever more accurate approximations. And by adopting the octave as a standard, you look at the next harmonic. The ratio of these is 3/2, so with the octave as our unit of change, and logarithmic scaling, this fifth interval is expressed as the logarithm (base 2) of 3/2: log₂(3/2) = (log3)/log2 - 1 = 0.5849625... where the unspecified logs are in the same base, which can be arbitrarily chosen; it won't affect the value. It is *this* value which now becomes the subject for CF analysis. The resulting succession of "best" fractions goes*: 1/1, 1/2, 3/5, 7/12, 31/53, 179/306, 389/665, ... What each of these means is, in an even-tempered division of the octave into "a" parts, a perfect fifth is best approximated by "b" of those parts. And the one that got picked is 7/12 - in a 12-step chromatic scale, 7 steps make a fifth. Note that the next fraction is 31/53, which calls for a 53-step chromatic scale. What Dolores (or whoever she got the idea from) has done, is to split these in half, probably because that gives pretty much the smallest change in pitch perceptible to human ears. (If the reason was something else, maybe she can tell us.) And the rest of that list yields truly indistinguishable pitch changes, so no point in going any further. * Math afficionados - those familiar with the standard way of doing CF's: Take note that my method is a bit different, in that when I invert each residual, I take the *closest* integer, + or -, so as to avoid getting fractions that, while technically "best," can be improved substantially with a modest increase in terms. This leads to a sequence of coefficients whose absolute values are never less than 2. It also shortens the path to a given "best" fraction.
Very interesting analysis! I was wondering if you could address an intuition that I am not sure fits into this type of mathematical perspective of pitch. I think of pitch as a seamless continuum and when I hear of (pitch, sound, hearing) analyses based upon integer-multiple harmonics, I wonder about all the pitch-space between those integer harmonics. I would imagine, that theoretically, as a Fourier analysis approaches infinity, the harmonics would be so infinitesimally close together as to be almost seamless. I started thinking about theoretical vs practical implications of our conception of harmonics when synthesizers evolved into samplers to approximate complex acoustic sounds, instead of becoming fourier synthesizers.
ffggddss I think the continued fraction approximations would go 1/2 2/3, 3/5, 5/7, 7/12, 17/29, 24/41, 31/53 The real question that makes me want to rip my hair off my head is how do you find an EDO (equal division of the octave) that satisfies log2(3), and log2(5) (fifth harmonic) at the same time. Not to mention the 7th harmonic and beyond. It's easy to construct a continued fraction and get results for approximating one harmonic, but to me, finding an EDO tuning that minimizes the combined inaccuracies of several harmonics (without just doing a computer search, and no I don't mean a Google search) is a mystery.
@@dolomuse Exactly. You see that mR. ffggddss 'probably' thinks within his 'academical' and 'mathematical' window. What harmonics ? In sound engineering and science not only 128 harmonics are important. Transients, Amplitude, SPL, Voltages, reflections, acoustica, day/night, even weather and much much more. How do you explain Line Array sound systems ? Any idea what I talk about sir ? 20 years ago, you would be nailed down for such theories. Today it is a fact and common use and is against all basic behavior of sound as we knew like 30 years ago. Strange that as a mathematician, you did not mention Fourier. There are harmonics we can not hear, probably can not measure with today's laboratory equipment, but certainly define sound. That's why we DAC's at 192 Khz, 32-bit and more... Check Kyma X. Check Acxel Technos Resynthesizer. Check PPG Wavetherm, Realtime sample morph....We talk much more than tuning, sir. A dog whistle ??? It's not because we can not hear, it's not present. On top, and does not ask any mathematical approach : Perception (way beyond math to me) of sound, tuning and others depend not only on the individual, but also time, place, season, gender, and other factors that still need to be discovered and defined. There is much more than mathematical approach and I kinda get upset with these kind of answers... again it shows how limited, (also some academical) people think. That's what prevents humanity from progress !!!
Thank you Dolores for when you started playing I closed my eyes and my ears got socked in joy with the colour pitch of the sounds. we thought the sun had only one colour but it has seven and the possibilities are truly endless.
wow... even with my limited knowledge of western music, THIS- somehow tickles my brain the way this old brain had been kicked the first time i listened to ELP, i think it was the Love Beach album (a long time ago on an isolated island in the pacific vast...back when we were naive). i've never heard of polychromatic music- but yes, i've listened to hours of bird and nature's music all around me and wished...
by the way, if i hadn't cast a passing glance at Marco Parisi's take on 'Purple Rain' on the Seaboard Rise, i wouldn't have noticed the intriguing first comment... i'm gonna follow up closely
Sadly, the designer of the Tonal Plexus (Aaron Hunt) has stopped building them. I hope that others with a passion for electronics and instrument design will pick up the torch. I can't wait to see (and hopefully hear and play) the new multidimensional controllers which are created in the next few years!
Fascinating stuff. I came to this TEDtalk via listening to Glenn Branca. However, the 12 note scale is not any type of enigma or mystery that needs solved. The 12-note scale is a refinement of hundreds (1000s?) of years of western culture composers experimenting with what is MOST pleasing to the human ear (pop music). I learned a lot about eastern music in ethno-musicology classes in college, and about different scales and the sharing of these musics and their instruments around the globe between cultures. Just studying the emergence of, development, and cultural differences in what we now have as a basic acoustic guitar is mind blowing. I am a fan of music that most would call noise; Indie, Bop Jazz, Dubstep & Ambient House, and there is so much music out there that does't fit the mold. Pop music is generally innocuous, forgettable, and fails to engage the listener, but that is how most people like their music. The music business loves it that way! Even classical music has elements of this sometimes cacophonous polychromaticism, and most people hate it! But cheers to creating outside the box! I have to get some work done now.
Interesting talk. I can understand how this could open up a lot of new possibilities for musicians and composers. But just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the worth of micro-tonal music is in the listening. On that front I'm waiting for some micro-tonal music that I truly love. Most of this music that I've heard sounds to me like it belongs in a modern art exhibition: abstract sounds to match abstract art. Also some electronic music which is kind of interesting but not earth shattering. I guess it's still a case of 'watch this space' for me.
This is basically due to the fact that microtonal music is still a new frontier. Chromatic music has had such widespread use that pretty much everything has already been figured out.
Check out "Sevish". Gleam is a particularly interesting track to me, it sounds like an acid jazz approach using microtonality. The harmonic motion of fourths/half steps down is doubled due to the expanded pitch pool. Like, ii, V, bbii, bbV, I. If that makes any sense
I have come to the show 2 years late. Listening to the piece called 'Slipstream' from 10 minutes into the video, there are a couple of parts that grabbed my attention. I can definitely hear a human voice quality in those parts. That's what I would like to develop more knowledge of - how to make instruments sing like people. I know how to make a native American flute and want to make a pentatonic scale flute with an extra drone hole running through it. The plan was to make the drone hole of equal length to the main hole so with no fingers on the flute, breath running through both holes would produce the same note. Now I'm curious about ending the drone hole the right fraction of micro tones short of the main hole, to get something like the human quality I heard in parts of 'Slipstream'.
We are already there....Look at Amon Tobin, he is a wizard of sound. He got a lot of works which are outstanding progressive, just one that is my favorite: Amon Tobin - Clear for Blue
@@SamTahbou I never got the sense of brutality from the music played here. But just minor chords are “sad” chords Im sure in some crazy custom tuning would exist ratios where the chords create a feeling of heaviness or brutality.
Great stuff! I'm really pleased that you are getting recognition about this, and that the new "language" of polychromatic music is being introduced to people! :-)
This is fascinating! We already combine parts of melodies from other songs to mix things up. But now we can slip entire songs inside of new songs! What an excellent development this is.. Good job planet earth!
I’m a young musician, fresh out of high school. i’ve been composing in 12tet since i began. microtonality is the future of music and i’m 100% ready to dive in and discover everything is has to offer. I absolutely love the idea that there’s this entire side to music, undiscovered. It’s almost like the europeans discovering the new world. Yes, people lived there already, but they unfortunately did not have the tools available to become as prosperous as the europeans, much like composers in past generations like Ben Johnston or Charles Ives. This generation, with our brand new, shiny technology, have the potential to discover things that no one has ever heard, or even thought could be heard. 106tet HEAR i come ;)
Dolores you we are soulmates!!! I live in Brasil but I share the same feelings about music evolution everything has been done it is time to explores timbre in new ways and since sound is vibration and light is too why not mix them to create a palette with more sound hues. It is not just about the aesthetic value of the music but also about it`s contribution to allow for new and creative was of expression. We definitely don`t live in a black and white world. A flat 9th chord in the early 20th C was considered a wrong chord and today everyone plays it and likes it or at least tolerates it, especially in Brazilian music. I also would like to explore the possibilities that these sounds have in their application to Music therapy with people with different ways of expressing. I do not know if this is the futures of music but i certainly belief that it is in the right path. Sound phenomena is under explored, and it certainly has the potencial to push human consciousnesses forward. Please come to Brasil with all your gadgets and blows our sound minds away do not be discouraged by tonal conservatism. I do not like veggies but I know they are good for me, your music is good for everyone who believe in expanding our music consciousness. Thank you for your work, keep it up.
I've thought about this much myself its great to see the real work going into organising new dimensions in musical theory. I'm working on a music sequencer and sampler that i intend to embody a syntax for micro tonal systems, developing a visually intuitive way of expressing harmonics and progression, its inspiring to see your work put into practice ideas i've only begun to imagine.
I first came across your music back when you had only one or two tracks on you channel - I'm so excited to catch up with your new compositions; and this talk was great!
Here’s what I find interesting: as someone with a strong learned pitch, I find this music incredibly liberating to listen to. But the myth goes that, someone ‘born with’ perfect pitch, would find it intolerable: it suggests that perfect pitch, even in people with a “born in” capability, is a matter of acculturation, not innate ability or absolute perception. For instance, if someone has perfect pitch, would they have a preference between just intonation and equal temperament? And if so, wouldn’t they find the opposite just as disturbing as this music? If they do prefer one to the other, what is there to suggest which one is more “naturally” correct, as they both result from scientific developments and musical trends? I do believe one day this will be the modern trend in music, and 12 tone scales will be the “legacy” of our current epoch... and there will probably still be people bragging about their ability to hear perfect pitch
I think your assumption is perfectly right except for the fact that I doubt people with perfect pitch would hate this kind of music. If anything they’d probably be glad they are finally listening to all of these other sounds they tend to not be exposed to, that they can actually differentiate as opposed to most of us that have been far more affected by the cultural bias (by not having ears sensitive enough to recognize actual frequencies by simply hearing them). That’s just my opinion tho obviously
@Tom R! Funny! I guess this is good individual experience in the favor of “what you learn is what you like”. I have to make the assumption they are al from the west hemisphere of our planet, aren’t they? Because of the apparent preference for equal temperament. But who knows! Anyway, great info thanks.
@Tom R Well, Jacob Collier for example arranges a lot of his music with just vocals in order to make more exact intervals than on standard instruments, and experiment with pitch color and microtonality. To him, a perfectly tuned piano produces harmony that is out of tune, which is true. I stopped tuning mine over a decade ago, and I think it sounds great.
I want to dive further into the world of microtones, even though I know my compositions will one day be viewed as old-fashioned, simple or not reguled by the new dominant micropolytonal pitch division/ratios
As a musician I can understand this concept of the poly-chromatic tones it's been demonstrated as the band teacher would talk about the distinct tones between the c and c# but with this poly-chromatic concept at this point only one instrument at a time could play because the notes that could only be produced the poly-chromatic instrument would not come so easy for conventional instruments. A band or orchestra trying to pull this off would sound like a ball of noise due to the poly-chromatic notes going against the key, harmonies, and scale of the song, and most instruments would not fair well if they had to make the tuning adjustment on the fly, or play in tune with the poly-chromatic electronic instrument thing. It's a beautiful concept but may need it's own environment for a while for this sound to be appreciated, personally I like the poly-chromatic electronic music thing I probably could do some cool stuff with it!!!
Its really good that people are becoming aware of the possibilities now of microtonal music and I'm glad of that and anyone who advocates it. I don't want to be too critical, this is a good talk but I want to make a point. At 7:33 "the real value in the study of music comes from the practice" it might be good to examine that statement "where we develop awareness and a diversity of perspective" implies that we are not aware without practicing arpeggios for zillions of hours and that sitting in a room we develop "diversity of perspective" ... Most microtonal composers are obsessed with 2 things pitch and virtuosity. A very European outlook. Its a little ironic that she advocates high resolution pitch color then ignores all the other high resolution possibilities available to us now, like timbre, meter, rhythm, spatial location. - What is really important in music? Proving that one can play something that's hard?... Or imagination and creativity? Computers have made changing tunings easy now, and they've made a lot of other possibilities easy. What's hard and rare is compositional imagination. We don't listen to Beethoven because he could play an arpeggio faster than other people... we listen because his ideas were revolutionary and his concept of music was completely different.
Thanks for your perspective. There are two different aspects of ‘practice’ referenced here: craft and art. Technical development is a means by which an artist’s imagination and creativity can be fluently expressed, both in performance (technique) and in written musical language (theory). These areas of a musician’s development are more closely related to a practice of the craft of music. The ‘practice’ of music also encompasses far more than technical and theoretical development. It involves the unique personal growth and maturity of an artist, gained through life experience, emotional awareness, perceptual refinement, curiosity, knowledge, imagination, intuition, creativity, aesthetic insight, etc.
Very cool! Very informative! and VERY Emotional! I love everything about this Ted Talk. Easily one of my top 10 Ted Talks of all time. Thank you Dolores!
I defretted a couple of guitar a decade ago (was it THAT long ago!) but, despite a little bit of playing around in microtonal, I'm so locked into a 12 tone mindset it's fairly rare that I intentionally venture outside unless I'm just sliding through. The rare experiments I make are probably mainly within a puny 24 notes. I'd love to play around more with the extra notes but just don't really have any framework to understand what to do with them. Maybe a starting point would be to work on some simple microtonal scales but I couldn't imagine consciously handling, or even distinguishing, 106 notes per octave.
Microtones just end up messing music up. If you add even a quarter tone to a complex chord of the 12 tone chromatic scale you get a mis-match and then have to find other quarter tones to cancel out the harmonic beating. There is a world of great music out there based on the 12 tones that sounds great. Momentary bending of notes is pleasing because of the resolve when the notes fall back into place. aka blues , jazz and other examples. Although other systems like baroque(largely discarded) , Indian, Arabic and others, they just keep coming back to the 12 et. Its like they're the letters of the language and there is multitude of variations exemplifying chord movement in modern jazz and modern classical music that create and release tension in the most beautiful way. I don't think we are done with the 12 et. Music needs to speak from the vocabulary.
I get it that this notation and this instrument and the pitch color paradigm that Dolores explores, offers the lifetimes of exploration. For example, why something that not adheres to classic tuning can sound pleasant? This is not as much of musical instrument now, as than the prototype of idea. Thinking scientifically, you first have to isolate the phenomena you are exploring. Using synthetic sounds actually benefits the understanding of wtaf is happening, because you can reproduce same experiment (e.g. some interval) over and over, with consistent results, whereas on a violin you could definitely try doing exactly same things and even more, but it would take you ages to find DO actually harmonics of C orange - F violet sound good, before you would decide to add it to your musical vocabulary, because you are not isolating variables. Did you mess up by half a millimeter on a string, or it just sounds awful? And that's just one subdivision, while the pitch is not discrete but continual. As the resolution increases, in this case to 106edo, it takes more advanced technologies to be applied to have a complete model and to understand offerings of each new subdivision of HD soundscape. The framework is essential, this way we will be able to create, train, notate, record and reproduce such music, and only at record and reproduction stage you will finally take a violin, skills and, for example, 106 chromatic sheet music paper, and play it. Improvising in those enormous possibilities of pitch continuum without language or an idea is simply walking in the dark. Thank you, Dolores, for moving the art+science hybrid forward. Those harmonies captivated me, and many of us. Still don't understand why these harmonies sound so familiar, something since being a kid.
This particular development of music is interesting, as it opens numerous questions and debates about the limits of pitch perception, oscillations and beats, heterodyne and spacial effects... But is this the future classical music? I'm still thinking about the acculturation and limits of our society, and the facts that there is very little space for a massive audience of any form of evolved music. And for the happy few with a musical education, the question is also to fight against centuries of chromatic intervals, and what you could call perfect pitch. Some notes played here sound right, other completely disturbing, and that depends of the auditor, and eventually of it's audio equipment! Guess 99,9% will certainly consider this absurd or no way out gadget, like many dodecaphonic last century movement, repetitive or cluster music, but who knows? Thinking about oriental tonal fundamentals, Hindi or Pakistanese music is somewhat sounding strange, as our classical music could sound strange as using different tonal divisions for their proper cultural approach. Maybe I'm of the 0,1% happy to ear something different and applauding in this refreshing view and new notation approach that could be the future 21st century classical music? And I wish Dolores Catherino a great success in this fundamental adventure!
Great video! it is surprising that modern music has not developed more towards microtonality. Although I guess everyone has been to occupied with serial 12-tone music..
How well established is polychromatic music in the modern musical scene? Would you be a pioneer of this kind of technical complexity or are you discovering the facets of it yourself personally?
+CarlinDream15 The polychromatic system is a new musical language and foundational framework. I initially developed it as a means of intuitively studying and composing with 106 notes per octave. The more I work with it, the more I appreciate the implications of the polychromatic system as a possible unifying musical framework to work with and teach the many notationally incompatible microtonal pitch systems presently in use.
Absolutely not, the first thing about Holdsworth is that he always had an amazing talent for beautiful melodies which are completely absent in this composition. Then comes the complexity of the harmony, often executed with gracious voice leadings (again absent in here). Holdsworth sounded "alien" mostly because of his guitar tone (or synthaxe) and the utterly unusual guitar lines with wide intervals, but his music was beautiful. The only Holdsworth's work that really sounds off is "Flat tire", but it stands out from everything else he have done in his career.
Hello, I think this is a really great talk. This idea of polychomatic music is fascinating to me, resenting on a deep level. I'm curious if you had considered color deficiency when designing your new notation? Being a person who is color deficient to red and green, I feel like it might be hard to read this notation if certain shades of reds and greens were included. It is possible to choose a color scale that is perceivable by folks with my kind of color deficiency? Anywho, thanks for sharing your work with us. I'm excited about what future this musical language holds for us.
I would imagine that colors like black/white, brown and grayscale could be substituted for any specific color perception deficiencies that a musician might face. With digital notation displays (iPad and the like) and on-demand printing, scores could be immediately customized to accommodate for color blindness. This would be a great feature in polychromatic scoring software… when it exists.
A thing I want to add: musical languaje is not defined by the number of sounds we have, but by the use and relation of those together, and it's evolution on time.
Ok, I get it, it's just a matter of resolution of the scale, but isn't a violin or any fretless instrument a microtonal instrument? obviously if you want to play chords you can't with a single instrument. Also while having more resolution is in theory great, isn't always the case in practice as I think the best human creations usually come from limited resources, be it color palettes, materials, tools or fixed scales. we tend to find beauty in complex things made from simpler ones, not so much in complex things making even more complex things, which to most people tend to find cacophonic. Too much information can result in a lack of focus and too vague, that's why I think fixed scales will last forever in music. Who would want to listen to a 2 hours whale singing concert? But it is very interesting and enlightening.
At some level, it seems that an unending search for new knowledge is essential to the creative process (and vice versa), whether in art or science. The motivation to expand awareness and understanding of new ideas and more complex perspectives is necessary to the evolution of arts and sciences. The challenge has always been to present new and complex ideas in as simple a manner as possible. That is, to express a reductive clarity for the general understanding of the many, rather than obscure the fuller expression of creative ideas in esoteric language, accessible only to a few. I have found that a polychromatic system applied to music simplifies and makes more intuitive, the exploration of vastly more complex musical languages. It is my hope that in challenging the listener’s auditory perception, intelligence and imagery, the complexity of the polychromatic system will eventually become increasingly accustomed - more easily discerned and understood. Music (and art) offers a method of expression not limited by formal linguistic constructs and semantic ambiguities. As an abstract language, its form of expression and knowledge lie in a realm beyond words and quantitative concepts. Yet there is also an overlap in experience and perception of audible phenomena, which can be incompletely described/interpreted in scientific and discursive language. But this 'translation' occurs at a cost of using reductive methods to express only those aspects of an integrated whole that each language has the capacity to describe. Maybe this ultimately hints at the sense that our ‘reality’ is, and will always be, limited by our language.
Juan Romero - as a double bassist: Yes we are microtonal - and many times not even deliberately! But we often push notes to be sharp or pull back flat - and everyone in an 'ensemble' is doing that - thus the richness - never the same twice. However, a formalised 106 notes between an octave.....I couldn't do it. And on a violin? Mind you - I would love to hear something like that - it would have to be mechanical but hearing it on acoustic instruments. Well - there's my thesis. LOL
You are correct. Fretless instruments are capable of microtonal playing. However it might take a lifetime of playing to get good at playing a bass... and if you are a composer you might just want to have a calliope sound play in Wendy Carlos' non-octave tunings during a certain passage... and you'll never be able to do that unless you get good at a keyboard too... and you might want to have a Crumhorn sound play in Just Intonation during a segment... but you'll need to get good at crumhorns and acquire one somehow... OR you could acquire a DAW and use midi to achieve the above fairly easily... of course there's a trade off, you can play the nuances of the bass the DAW can't match... but DAWs are getting closer...
As for limiting your palettes... one should try to be aware that the way you perceive music is a result of your enculturation. People in Bali perceive music differently than European conservatory musicians or Indian Raga singers or German rave composers. The beauty of the modern world is that a composer can pick and choose what they feel is best now, from any culture, in a passage within the context of what came before and what comes after that passage. No classical orchestra has the tumbrel capability of a DAW where one can switch from a Koto to a Gamelan to a Moog to a sarod at any moment, and with a DAW one can design sounds that would be virtually impossible for humans to duplicate on analogue instruments, for example an instrumental passage in 11/8 juxtaposed against another in 17/8... you might think that could never work musically... I don't.
Maybe in the future, small amounts of microtonal sounds will be in music as additive features of music, sort of like a echo, a kind of accompaniment. If there are examples, never mind.
This sounds like you're using the harmonic purity of 53 EDO with the addition of 'tones in between the tones'. Might I ask what you're looking for in those in between tones?
In working with higher levels of auditory pitch-resolution, the ear’s pitch discrimination improves and nonlinear characteristics of pitch perception become prominent. Because of this, musical intervals become relatively defined (i.e. octave, major 3rd etc.) based on harmonic context and frequency range. This means that scale/chord intervals change slightly over progressive octaves and in relationship to other harmonic intervals. A pitch resolution of 106 notes per octave enables a wider freedom to explore these nonlinear musical relationships. Another use of the in-between pitches is to play combinations of these small intervals, creating fascinating auditory effects of movement and multidimensionality in the interaction of component pitches and harmonics.
Thaaaat's what has been stopping the music development - the absence of a pitch resolution of 106 notes per octave. Now i see. From now on everything would be completely different... Thank God for these 1000 and smth button instruments. Ldy Gaga, Kanye West and other mass culture standing in the line can't wait to get them... I guess it's hard to be that fundamental optimist believing that "500 years old" (c) music theory and instruments were the cause..
Hello, i was playing only the black keys on my 88 key- board. strings or organ, it sounded kind of perfect and I wondered : is there an instrument with only the black keys , disregarding the white ones. In my opion it can open up new musical ways and overnight I could not stop thinking about it. In my search I saw your video's (TEDx) and was amazed. maybe now i now why I didn't like piano lessons afteral ! btw, the 106 pitch per octave instrument, is it a special or common available? love it !
The black keys of a piano form a pentatonic scale. This scale and its modal derivations were prevalent in the early development of the music systems in nearly all cultures. You can program isomorphic keyboards/surfaces (hardware or software) for this type of pitch layout. The pentatonic scale was initially based on the compilation of 5 perfect (pure) fifths and you can tune a controller’s pitches in this way. With the piano, equal temperament gives you a very close approximation of perfect fifths (F#/C#, G#/D#, C#/G#, D#/A#) but the major third/minor 6th interval relationship (F#/A#, A#/F#) is quite sharp. This meterstick-yardstick (perfect 5th-major 3rd) interval tuning anomaly is present in both the Pythagorean and equal temperament tuning systems. With higher pitch-resolution (micropitch) languages, this tuning anomaly is surpassed.
Besides tuning, there is are also sound morphing, realtime resynthesis, and much much much more - check i.e. Technos Acxel Resynthesizer / Canadian product !! On top, sensing or experiencing 'music' depends not only on the individual, but also time, place, season, gender and many factors that could not even be defined today. We try to, but...Science ? Way beyond...probably.
I think a big reason it sounds so weird is because of the fact it is so new. if you were born listening to it, imagine all of the nuances in feeling it could bring. Also, if the instrument was changed, layered, and chords were understood better.
Dolores, “The ghost notes...these new harmonics...we can hear in our ears... can’t be seen or measured with technology” - My spectrum analyzer, “Am I a joke to you?“
very interesting, this is much like different between analogous (polychromatic) and discrete (diatonic/pentatonic) in the analogous mostly dissonance sound although in diatonic it can also but by design it always to get the harmony..🤔
If you ran a Jimi Hendrix improvisation through a pitch corrector it would take out about 90% of the content of the music. This is also true of most of the blues in general, its true of much of swing and jazz, especially the music of woodwind and horn ensembles. In addition the majority of traditional world music is not at all restricted to 12 equal. Very few singers confine themselves to 12 equal because that removes most of the expression, country singers typically deviate rather extremely from 12 equal. Most musicians do not use music notation and so are not limited by it, its only classical that insists on 12 equal only, there is no such prohibition in most other forms of music. Very few instruments can play chords, the keyboard and the guitar are pretty much it for popular solutions so the search is not for the microtonality that is already in use anyway, but for a better keyboard or guitar to allow individuals to better handle complex microtonality instead of just ensembles. Guitar strings can be tuned at will and they can be bent even if the frets are in 12 equal plus many synthesizers have pitch bend wheels. Most music is performed using voice and monophonic instruments are often the accompaniment, chords come in as part of the monophonic ensemble. Most monophonic instruments have microtonal capabilities so much ensemble work is quite microtonal No one speaks in 12 equal and unless a singer is classically trained singing is not usually restricted to 12 equal ether. Our ears are already quite accustom to the microtonal music that spontaneously comes form our throats from childhood on, it is the design of our chord playing instruments that is inadequate to the task of letting individuals play microtonal chord progressions. Microtonality should not be framed as the original providence of they who are bored with music who want "more", that is not the proper motivation or description, microtonality is already well established, not even a piano is in 12 equal because its stretch tuned. What is not well established is a means for individuals instead of ensembles to play and notate microtonal music, for example Duke Ellington had to rely on seat of the pants knowledge of performers to get the right tonal inflections into the ensamble work because such inflections were not written in the notation , we know because we have the scores and yet can hear constant deviant pitch inflections in the recordings.
Innovators are motivated to explore beyond the conventions of the past, toward new possibilities of the creative imagination, not because they are 'bored' by the limits of the present.
bill wesley that's not how it works. 90% of people on this planet will struggle to deviate from 12TET because it's the music that we grow up with and the only thing we can melodically understand
I always find Dolores Catherino's work very interesting, sincere and timely - but for me it's the choice of electronic voices that I have difficulty with - very basic wave forms. At least with everything I have seen so far.? Is this a limitation? I mean are the rich harmonics (and subsequent interactions) of a more complex waveform too much for 106 notes per octave? Enquiring minds need to know. Any links to other examples gratefully received!
These are early compositions exploring micro pitch-color. The synth sound is fairly basic, with a rich upper harmonic content that doesn't sound 'brittle' or sacrifice a timbral 'warmth'. Intuitively, it seems more important at this stage to create music which helps to develop pitch-color awareness and perception, in the most direct way possible. Soon, the complexities of integrated sound-color/design (timbre) will be an amazing addition. Composing with pitch-color is a very difficult process for me and the world of sound-color (timbre, sound design) seems just as complex. I look forward to collaborating with sound designers in the future!
+dbadagna Yes, the pitch layout is 106 EDO (equal divisions of the octave). Within this framework, unequally divided pitch 'palettes' (scales) can be created.
I began exploring 53 edo (equal divisions of the octave) as one of the oldest theoretical tunings in existence. While working with that level of auditory pitch-resolution, I found that minor 3rd and major 6th intervals sounded ‘off’ in a harmonic (polyphonic) context.. As a result, I doubled the resolution to 106 edo because this seemed to be the maximum pitch-resolution possible with the pitch layout systems that I created for the Tonal Plexus keyboard.
I look at the pitch layout of 106 EDO (equal divisions of the octave) as a simplified pitch continuum or matrix from which different types of pitch palettes can be derived. Currently, I am exploring very basic aspects of high pitch-resolution musical languages. I am focused on auditory qualities such as intervallic relativity, nonlinear aspects of pitch perception, and their use in the creation of new musical compositions. I look at these preliminary compositions as ‘bridge’ compositions - working in an overlapping area between a conservative pole of radical innovation and a radical pole of conventional musical understanding. I think that as the ear becomes accustomed to this new musical framework, amazing new possibilities will emerge in the restructuring of melodic and harmonic pitch palettes, and this will generate even greater levels of freedom to move beyond other entrenched conventions in music. Unequally divided pitch palettes (scales) are something I look forward to exploring eventually!
The strength of the polychromatic system is in its flexibility. We currently have many incompatible microtonal notation systems which can all be encompassed polychromatically. As a result, explorations of pitch systems which are not derived from the 12 note chromatic system are not only possible but also easily interchanged, using the same musical language. This allows us to move beyond implicit chromatic assumptions and redefine new intervallic, polyphonic and harmonic (overtone) relationships.
I have a question of why 106 pitches per octave, the traditional octave being 12 semitones, or 1200 cents span is not evenly divisible by 106, and being that the smallest pitch difference that humans can hear is 5 cents should the number of notes per octaves be a more divisible number say 120 (ten cents per interval) or 240 (5 cents per interval) instead of 106 (11.3207... cents per interval)
The pitch resolution is based on the limitations of the keyboard design. I started out with 53 edo, and found certain intervals to be missing (to my ears) within different harmonic contexts. Because of this I doubled 53 edo to 106 edo. A new Tonal Plexus model is in development which could support 120 edo, and I'm looking forward to exploring the harmonic implications of this pitch collection! I think of the ‘natural’ state of pitch as being a continuum. So any method of dividing the pitch continuum is a "temperament", or metaphorically a palette of pitch-colors.
porque nadie hace referencia a Julián Carrillo, músico mexicano, el dividió la octava musical en más de 96 sonidos, esto no es nada nuevo. Pero me asombra que incluso ya los sintetizadores pueden lograr los 16 avos de tono
this music sounds great! but i would like to hear microtonal music on a clear sound not that Sci-Fi sound that hide the pure tone of each step. Will be outstanding hear a microtonal piece with piano sound, fast arppegios and huge scales. Thank for sharing your work Dolores.
Dolores, it's so great to watch this presentation with such great passion of yours. It's so touching and inspiring. I've translated this into Japanese language on my tumblr mewomihi. Is it okay to make Japanese subtitle on this TH-cam as well? mewomihiというtumblrに日本語訳を掲載致しましたので、日本語訳を読みい方は是非見てみてください。
+H.Wakabayashi Thank you Hidekazu! I think that would be wonderful. The TEDx videos are creative commons, and multilingual subtitles or closed captioning options are encouraged via TED's open translation project: www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/ted-open-translation-project
I'm aware of the microtonal keyboard, but what software/VSTi is being used to generate the tones and chords? I've just become aware of ZynAddSubFX, but its limited to 12 notes per octave. Looking around for something more extensive, especially able to handle chords. Over a decade ago I was able to use SCALA with Sound Blaster LIVE! card for any scale any JI or temperament with any number of notes per octave. What are people using these days?
For microtonal pitch assignment of the keys on any midi controller, I use the custom scale editor (CSE) by Aaron Hunt. hpi.zentral.zone/cse It has been difficult finding VST (virtual sound modules) which support multitimbral channel-independence of pitchbend. Without this, you have to run 16 tracks, one midi channel per track, of a single VST instrument or end up with strange pitch averaging anomalies. Kontakt, in omni mode, can support up to 16 midi channels per track and microtonal tunings can be programmed in the script editor. Omnisphere is another excellent option which supports up to 8 midi channels per track. It is ironic that multi channel-independent pitchbend was a standard feature of multitimbral hardware sound modules of the 1990’s and is unimplemented in many current software multitimbral VST’s.
Oh! I was wrong about ZynAddSubFX, it can handle up to 128 notes per octave. :D And handles multiple channels on the one instance assignable to any of the voices you choose, very flexible.
But It is still based on 12 tone scale. I think in order to take full potential of microtonal 'scale' or system or others even 19tet, one should completely break away from traditional 12tone based system
Polychromatic music and pitch color are part of a new theoretical paradigm and way of conceptualizing high-resolution, auditory pitch varieties. As awareness of high-resolution pitch gradations is developed, new auditory differentiations emerge which we have no words for. Yet, at some level, they are analogous to visual differentiations we call colors. English seems to be a visually based language (i.e. no auditory equivalents for envision, appearance, shape, visualize, etc). In conventional music theory, tone ‘color’ has been used in a vague sense to convey timbre. Visual color denotes qualia, defined as: the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena. As we learn to hear pitch differentiations at more refined levels of pitch-resolution, we need to create descriptive words to express these these new pitch qualities in language. In the meantime, pitch ‘color’ seems the closest metaphor.
Dear Dolores, Thank you for the poetic response. I've been enjoying the tracks on your webpage. Are pitch colors single frequencies in between 12-tone frequencies? Or are they like chords, blending multiple frequencies with a musical relationship to a base frequency? Also, the number 106 tones per octave is not divisible by 12, indicating that the number of tones in between halftones is not always the same. What is the progression of frequencies within an octave? On a conventional 12 tone scale, pitches are essentially single frequencies spaced by factors of 2^(1/12). If color tones are single frequencies, are they spaced by 2^(1/106)? Is the scale still tuned to A440?
The idea of pitch ‘color’ applies to both individual notes (in isolation) and the auditory influences/effects of interacting sonic ‘shapes’ and multidimensional aspects of harmony and harmonics (in context). In terms of pitch frequency values, the polychromatic system is a dynamic and ‘relatively’ defined system (influenced by polyphonic and harmonic/overtone context) that can be applied to ANY pitch language that a composer chooses or creates. It’s pitch-color values are open-ended and adaptable - not absolutely/statically defined (like chromatic systems). With 106 notes in the octave each pitch is programmed as 1/106, 2/106, 3/106, etc. It is not divisible by 12, but the pitch-space between each consecutive pitch is the same (1/106). My compositions so far have used a global frequency of A:yellow = 432 Hz. With increasing pitch resolutions, this global pitch determination can become stylistically unique and user-defined (not conventionally defined) point(s) of pitch reference upon which to base any new pitch ‘palette’. Sorry for the complicated response. For me, these ideas seem to be more easily expressed in music than language.
Beautiful words, unimpressive music. We already have instruments which are polychromatic in that sense (like violins and other string instruments). And we don't need a new transcription system to achieve the slide effect between notes during performance. And she didn't say anything about new chords which would be possible with 48 or whatever notes per octave. How many of them would actually sound good and would actually be new?
Samplers and drum machines can not correctly emulate a real instrument. A real violin always sounds more dynamic and expressive than a sampled one. And the way that orchestral music meets in the air above the performers greatly affects it's sound.
Thing is, that this notation and this instrument and the pitch color paradigm that Dolores explores, offers the lifetimes of exploration. For example, why something that not adheres to classic tuning can sound pleasant? This is not so much of musical instrument now, then the prototype of idea. Thinking scientifically, you first have to isolate the phenomena you are exploring. Using synthetic sounds actually benefits the understanding of wtaf is happening, because you can reproduce same experiment (e.g. some interval) over and over, with consistent results, whereas on a violin you could definitely try doing exactly same things, but it would take you ages to find DO actually harmonics of C orange - F violet sound good, before you would decide to add it to your musical vocabulary, because you are not isolating variables. Did you mess up by half a millimeter on a string, or it just sounds awful? And that's just one interval, and there is infinite continuum. As the resolution increases, in this case to 106edo, it takes more advanced technologies to be applied to have a complete model and understanding of each new subdivision of HD soundscape. This way we will be able to create, train, notate, record and reproduce such music, and only at record and reproduction stage you will finally take a violin, skills and, for example, 106 chromatic sheet music paper, and play it. Improvising in those enormous possibilities of pitch continuum without language or an idea is simply walking in the dark.
I love what Dolores is doing in the world of harmony. She seriously needs to ditch the synth patch she's using. Her music may be poly-chromatic, but it's very mono-timbral and the timbre she's using is not the best suited for subtle chords- it's like playing major 7th chords thru a distortion box. Can't she slap a nice sound font on her keyboard or get something like FL Studio's "Sakura" synth?
Thanks for your comments and questions!
The 21st century seems to be an amazing transition period in music. On one hand, mechanical era limitations are being supplanted by developments in electronic music.
On the other hand, in this early phase, modern electronic instruments are still operating within the limitations and restrictions of the mechanical era.
(i.e. traditional keyboard design: flat, rectangular, chromatic, one pitch-region per key switch; also, the stagnancy of old digital protocols in music during a rapidly evolving technological era: MIDI circa 1983, 'legacy' hardware limitations programmed into new software systems).
Thank you for this talk! You are an idol to me, and what you're doing is incredible. Keep at it!
thank you got taking the leap of music forward, which is long over due.
Are you the total inventor of this instruments, which you compose for?! Did you design the keyboard, invent the tune system, and built it?!
Welllll... I can't imagine, how, but..... You are GENIOUS! RESPECT!
I doubt you'll see this, but on the off chance you do, I am extremely interested in microtones and want to find a midi keyboard/synth that I can use to express my microtonal arrangements. Do you have any suggestions for this? I'm looking at the Seaboard Block right now and wondering if it's the best all-around choice. Super amazing talk by the way!
You might like the LinnStrument. Its hardware and firmware are open source. The downside is that it doesn't yet have an editor app for customizing micro-pitch and color layouts... so you will have to do some programming (i.e.MAX/MSP). Roli Blocks are great for sound shaping applications (triggering loops, samples, effects etc).
Many years ago I studied microtonality as a student with Easley Blackwood at the University of Chicago. While I fell in love with it back then, I've found over the years that it's been extremely difficult, often downright impossible, to explain the world of microtonal music to others. I want to say thanks to you for giving this wonderful and easy to understand talk, with so much passion and enthusiasm, and sharing your music and discovery with the rest of us (and the world). I found your other clips on your TH-cam channel to be inspiring too. Words can't describe the sense of wonderment that they make me feel! :)
Look up King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard - Microtonal Banana. Trust me!
Patrick Lau
microtonality:
when there was only the pentatonic scale, the notion of 'semitone microtonality' was made necessary by the notion of the major3rd(5th partial) of the dominant chord being pulled up to the root(fundamental) of the tonic chord.
the direction for which we learned of this "new" semitonal microtonality is called overtonal. now all of this happened the exact same way in the reciprocal direction with the exception of: if the low to high pitch fundamental is C , then the high to low pitch fundamental is E.
we mistakenly call this triad the relative minor of the major scale thereby never recognizing that the dominant chord of " the relative minor" is not a 5th above the 'a' note but instead a 5th below the E note.ITS ALL TOTALLY REVERSED.
anyway, the dominant resolution logic that lead to the notion of a semitone resolution gave us the idea to treat the semitone as the smallest interval and to try and split the octave into as many semitones as it would allow , eureka! the 12 tone equal tempered scale.
however it is that you modulate thru all 12 keys harmonically,
the major3rd of the dominant leading to the root of the tonic will always be ,... ...
THE HARMONIC RESOLUTION THAT GIVES YOU A NOTION OF AN EVEN SMALLER INTERVAL FOR WHICH TO DIVIDE THE OCTAVE EVENLY.
even when you have 1200 equally divided notes in an octave the most sensible tones to the human ear will always be THE 5 THAT WE FELL IN LOVE WITH FIRST.
CTHUMB,DINDEX, EBOW,FRING,GPINKY,CTHUMB.
I no longer believe I’m off tune. My brain has melted after years of frequently listening to microtonal music😅
Well the way to explain is the concept of color and the shades of colors the spectrum is just more increased with this range of extra notes more detail if you will a higher resolution
Woow i love easley blackwood! His x-Tone etudes are really cool.
I'd have loved to be a student of a microtonalist, just like Maddie Ashman was to Michael Harrison (grr that luck)
This was 5 years ago and still groundbreaking! Hopefully lands with the right people and truly forge a new music for the 21st century. I have hope as MIDI 2.0 comes on board and MPE becomes more widely used in the traditional 12 note system. These 2 things will at least help broaden the expressive capabilities of electronic music. May composers also seek out these polychromatic ideas as well!
so very excited for our future
As a mathematician and amateur musician, I like to look also at the mathematical aspect of our 12-tone (duodecatonic?) scale. Why did we wind up with 12 tones, not 5 or 10 or 29 or whatever?
The short answer is 3 things:
1. Harmonics
2. Logarithmic scaling
3. Continued fractions
1. Harmonics are the integer multiples of a base frequency. Double the frequency (i.e., the 2nd harmonic) and you have an octave. Triple it (3rd harmonic), and you get the fith in the next octave; etc. These small ratios of frequency tend to be pleasing to our ears.
2. Logarithmic scaling is how we perceive changes in pitch - equal frequency ratios sound to us like equal musical intervals.
3. Continued fractions (CF) is where this gets into some mathematical nitty-gritty. It's basically a way of optimizing a fraction, b/a, to approximate a real number, x, be it rational or not. Optimization here is taken as simultaneously minimizing the error (b/a - x) *and* the terms, a and b. This is a repetitive process, in which ever larger terms produce ever more accurate approximations.
And by adopting the octave as a standard, you look at the next harmonic. The ratio of these is 3/2, so with the octave as our unit of change, and logarithmic scaling, this fifth interval is expressed as the logarithm (base 2) of 3/2:
log₂(3/2) = (log3)/log2 - 1 = 0.5849625...
where the unspecified logs are in the same base, which can be arbitrarily chosen; it won't affect the value. It is *this* value which now becomes the subject for CF analysis. The resulting succession of "best" fractions goes*:
1/1, 1/2, 3/5, 7/12, 31/53, 179/306, 389/665, ...
What each of these means is, in an even-tempered division of the octave into "a" parts, a perfect fifth is best approximated by "b" of those parts. And the one that got picked is 7/12 - in a 12-step chromatic scale, 7 steps make a fifth.
Note that the next fraction is 31/53, which calls for a 53-step chromatic scale. What Dolores (or whoever she got the idea from) has done, is to split these in half, probably because that gives pretty much the smallest change in pitch perceptible to human ears. (If the reason was something else, maybe she can tell us.)
And the rest of that list yields truly indistinguishable pitch changes, so no point in going any further.
* Math afficionados - those familiar with the standard way of doing CF's:
Take note that my method is a bit different, in that when I invert each residual, I take the *closest* integer, + or -, so as to avoid getting fractions that, while technically "best," can be improved substantially with a modest increase in terms. This leads to a sequence of coefficients whose absolute values are never less than 2. It also shortens the path to a given "best" fraction.
Very interesting analysis! I was wondering if you could address an intuition that I am not sure fits into this type of mathematical perspective of pitch. I think of pitch as a seamless continuum and when I hear of (pitch, sound, hearing) analyses based upon integer-multiple harmonics, I wonder about all the pitch-space between those integer harmonics. I would imagine, that theoretically, as a Fourier analysis approaches infinity, the harmonics would be so infinitesimally close together as to be almost seamless. I started thinking about theoretical vs practical implications of our conception of harmonics when synthesizers evolved into samplers to approximate complex acoustic sounds, instead of becoming fourier synthesizers.
ffggddss I think the continued fraction approximations would go
1/2 2/3, 3/5, 5/7, 7/12, 17/29, 24/41, 31/53
The real question that makes me want to rip my hair off my head is how do you find an EDO (equal division of the octave) that satisfies log2(3), and log2(5) (fifth harmonic) at the same time. Not to mention the 7th harmonic and beyond. It's easy to construct a continued fraction and get results for approximating one harmonic, but to me, finding an EDO tuning that minimizes the combined inaccuracies of several harmonics (without just doing a computer search, and no I don't mean a Google search) is a mystery.
But those 12 notes only aproximates the harmonics. The major third is way sharp
@@dolomuse Exactly. You see that mR. ffggddss 'probably' thinks within his 'academical' and 'mathematical' window. What harmonics ? In sound engineering and science not only 128 harmonics are important. Transients, Amplitude, SPL, Voltages, reflections, acoustica, day/night, even weather and much much more. How do you explain Line Array sound systems ? Any idea what I talk about sir ? 20 years ago, you would be nailed down for such theories. Today it is a fact and common use and is against all basic behavior of sound as we knew like 30 years ago. Strange that as a mathematician, you did not mention Fourier. There are harmonics we can not hear, probably can not measure with today's laboratory equipment, but certainly define sound. That's why we DAC's at 192 Khz, 32-bit and more... Check Kyma X. Check Acxel Technos Resynthesizer. Check PPG Wavetherm, Realtime sample morph....We talk much more than tuning, sir. A dog whistle ??? It's not because we can not hear, it's not present. On top, and does not ask any mathematical approach : Perception (way beyond math to me) of sound, tuning and others depend not only on the individual, but also time, place, season, gender, and other factors that still need to be discovered and defined. There is much more than mathematical approach and I kinda get upset with these kind of answers... again it shows how limited, (also some academical) people think. That's what prevents humanity from progress !!!
sK3LeTvM Wow. Well written. Thank you for truly thinking outside the dimensions of the mathematical box.
thank you @dolomuse , the bird intro was on point. hopefully more open instruments like this soon
Thank you Dolores for when you started playing I closed my eyes and my ears got socked in joy with the colour pitch of the sounds.
we thought the sun had only one colour but it has seven and the possibilities are truly endless.
Omar Saad the sun has a nearly infinite amount of color frequencies
106 note octave!!!!!!!!! 2:26 Fascinating, amazing, I want to understand this. Thank you.
i love the subtitles when Dolores plays.
It says: yeah yeah yeah...
Even subtitles seem fascinated
@@cactusowo1835 u got me
11:10 *Holy Moly that chord slapped*
wow... even with my limited knowledge of western music, THIS- somehow tickles my brain the way this old brain had been kicked the first time i listened to ELP, i think it was the Love Beach album (a long time ago on an isolated island in the pacific vast...back when we were naive). i've never heard of polychromatic music- but yes, i've listened to hours of bird and nature's music all around me and wished...
by the way, if i hadn't cast a passing glance at Marco Parisi's take on 'Purple Rain' on the Seaboard Rise, i wouldn't have noticed the intriguing first comment... i'm gonna follow up closely
Fascinating. I usually only watch the science and tech talks, but this one merged that with art. I'd love to see more talks about this stuff.
have you checked her channel?
Superb ma'am... Awesome
A truly inspiring speech and woman... I am going to try and get my hands on a tonal plexus! And play it, after much practise and persistence I'm sure!
Sadly, the designer of the Tonal Plexus (Aaron Hunt) has stopped building them. I hope that others with a passion for electronics and instrument design will pick up the torch. I can't wait to see (and hopefully hear and play) the new multidimensional controllers which are created in the next few years!
I can’t believe I’m just noticing this now. This is completely fascinating.
she would make a great sci fi church organist of the future
The Holy Orthodox Catholic Church of the Future
I feel like there will be fewer/none churches in the future
@@PrimeCarrot but what if it's a SPACE church? but yeah i get what you're saying
@@awelotta Yeah, I just can't see such a scientifically progressive society having that many places of religious worship. It doesn't align.
The future is now!
Fascinating stuff. I came to this TEDtalk via listening to Glenn Branca. However, the 12 note scale is not any type of enigma or mystery that needs solved. The 12-note scale is a refinement of hundreds (1000s?) of years of western culture composers experimenting with what is MOST pleasing to the human ear (pop music). I learned a lot about eastern music in ethno-musicology classes in college, and about different scales and the sharing of these musics and their instruments around the globe between cultures. Just studying the emergence of, development, and cultural differences in what we now have as a basic acoustic guitar is mind blowing. I am a fan of music that most would call noise; Indie, Bop Jazz, Dubstep & Ambient House, and there is so much music out there that does't fit the mold. Pop music is generally innocuous, forgettable, and fails to engage the listener, but that is how most people like their music. The music business loves it that way! Even classical music has elements of this sometimes cacophonous polychromaticism, and most people hate it! But cheers to creating outside the box!
I have to get some work done now.
Interesting talk. I can understand how this could open up a lot of new possibilities for musicians and composers. But just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the worth of micro-tonal music is in the listening. On that front I'm waiting for some micro-tonal music that I truly love. Most of this music that I've heard sounds to me like it belongs in a modern art exhibition: abstract sounds to match abstract art. Also some electronic music which is kind of interesting but not earth shattering. I guess it's still a case of 'watch this space' for me.
This is basically due to the fact that microtonal music is still a new frontier. Chromatic music has had such widespread use that pretty much everything has already been figured out.
Check out "Sevish". Gleam is a particularly interesting track to me, it sounds like an acid jazz approach using microtonality. The harmonic motion of fourths/half steps down is doubled due to the expanded pitch pool. Like, ii, V, bbii, bbV, I. If that makes any sense
I have come to the show 2 years late.
Listening to the piece called 'Slipstream' from 10 minutes into the video, there are a couple of parts that grabbed my attention. I can definitely hear a human voice quality in those parts. That's what I would like to develop more knowledge of - how to make instruments sing like people.
I know how to make a native American flute and want to make a pentatonic scale flute with an extra drone hole running through it. The plan was to make the drone hole of equal length to the main hole so with no fingers on the flute, breath running through both holes would produce the same note. Now I'm curious about ending the drone hole the right fraction of micro tones short of the main hole, to get something like the human quality I heard in parts of 'Slipstream'.
We are already there....Look at Amon Tobin, he is a wizard of sound. He got a lot of works which are outstanding progressive, just one that is my favorite: Amon Tobin - Clear for Blue
simply brutal. I allways agree with microtonal music and east music included!
Brutal?
@@SamTahbou I never got the sense of brutality from the music played here. But just minor chords are “sad” chords Im sure in some crazy custom tuning would exist ratios where the chords create a feeling of heaviness or brutality.
Great stuff! I'm really pleased that you are getting recognition about this, and that the new "language" of polychromatic music is being introduced to people! :-)
This is fascinating! We already combine parts of melodies from other songs to mix things up. But now we can slip entire songs inside of new songs! What an excellent development this is.. Good job planet earth!
I’m a young musician, fresh out of high school. i’ve been composing in 12tet since i began. microtonality is the future of music and i’m 100% ready to dive in and discover everything is has to offer. I absolutely love the idea that there’s this entire side to music, undiscovered. It’s almost like the europeans discovering the new world. Yes, people lived there already, but they unfortunately did not have the tools available to become as prosperous as the europeans, much like composers in past generations like Ben Johnston or Charles Ives. This generation, with our brand new, shiny technology, have the potential to discover things that no one has ever heard, or even thought could be heard. 106tet HEAR i come ;)
Dolores you we are soulmates!!! I live in Brasil but I share the same feelings about music evolution everything has been done it is time to explores timbre in new ways and since sound is vibration and light is too why not mix them to create a palette with more sound hues. It is not just about the aesthetic value of the music but also about it`s contribution to allow for new and creative was of expression. We definitely don`t live in a black and white world. A flat 9th chord in the early 20th C was considered a wrong chord and today everyone plays it and likes it or at least tolerates it, especially in Brazilian music. I also would like to explore the possibilities that these sounds have in their application to Music therapy with people with different ways of expressing. I do not know if this is the futures of music but i certainly belief that it is in the right path. Sound phenomena is under explored, and it certainly has the potencial to push human consciousnesses forward. Please come to Brasil with all your gadgets and blows our sound minds away do not be discouraged by tonal conservatism. I do not like veggies but I know they are good for me, your music is good for everyone who believe in expanding our music consciousness. Thank you for your work, keep it up.
I've thought about this much myself its great to see the real work going into organising new dimensions in musical theory. I'm working on a music sequencer and sampler that i intend to embody a syntax for micro tonal systems, developing a visually intuitive way of expressing harmonics and progression, its inspiring to see your work put into practice ideas i've only begun to imagine.
I first came across your music back when you had only one or two tracks on you channel - I'm so excited to catch up with your new compositions; and this talk was great!
I'm going to love this system.
Here’s what I find interesting: as someone with a strong learned pitch, I find this music incredibly liberating to listen to. But the myth goes that, someone ‘born with’ perfect pitch, would find it intolerable: it suggests that perfect pitch, even in people with a “born in” capability, is a matter of acculturation, not innate ability or absolute perception. For instance, if someone has perfect pitch, would they have a preference between just intonation and equal temperament? And if so, wouldn’t they find the opposite just as disturbing as this music? If they do prefer one to the other, what is there to suggest which one is more “naturally” correct, as they both result from scientific developments and musical trends? I do believe one day this will be the modern trend in music, and 12 tone scales will be the “legacy” of our current epoch... and there will probably still be people bragging about their ability to hear perfect pitch
I think your assumption is perfectly right except for the fact that I doubt people with perfect pitch would hate this kind of music. If anything they’d probably be glad they are finally listening to all of these other sounds they tend to not be exposed to, that they can actually differentiate as opposed to most of us that have been far more affected by the cultural bias (by not having ears sensitive enough to recognize actual frequencies by simply hearing them).
That’s just my opinion tho obviously
@@EnriquePage91 Both of you, great reflections.
@Tom R! Funny! I guess this is good individual experience in the favor of “what you learn is what you like”.
I have to make the assumption they are al from the west hemisphere of our planet, aren’t they? Because of the apparent preference for equal temperament.
But who knows! Anyway, great info thanks.
@@NOCTUMSEMPRA thanks 😁 although mine might be quite wrong apparently! Haha
@Tom R Well, Jacob Collier for example arranges a lot of his music with just vocals in order to make more exact intervals than on standard instruments, and experiment with pitch color and microtonality. To him, a perfectly tuned piano produces harmony that is out of tune, which is true. I stopped tuning mine over a decade ago, and I think it sounds great.
great speech! I applaud what you do, I hope someday micro tonality catches on in the mainstream
Remarkable and compelling! You're a visionary!
... can't wait to see where all this leads...
I want to dive further into the world of microtones, even though I know my compositions will one day be viewed as old-fashioned, simple or not reguled by the new dominant micropolytonal pitch division/ratios
As a musician I can understand this concept of the poly-chromatic tones it's been demonstrated as the band teacher would talk about the distinct tones between the c and c# but with this poly-chromatic concept at this point only one instrument at a time could play because the notes that could only be produced the poly-chromatic instrument would not come so easy for conventional instruments. A band or orchestra trying to pull this off would sound like a ball of noise due to the poly-chromatic notes going against the key, harmonies, and scale of the song, and most instruments would not fair well if they had to make the tuning adjustment on the fly, or play in tune with the poly-chromatic electronic instrument thing. It's a beautiful concept but may need it's own environment for a while for this sound to be appreciated, personally I like the poly-chromatic electronic music thing I probably could do some cool stuff with it!!!
Its really good that people are becoming aware of the possibilities now of microtonal music and I'm glad of that and anyone who advocates it. I don't want to be too critical, this is a good talk but I want to make a point. At 7:33 "the real value in the study of music comes from the practice" it might be good to examine that statement "where we develop awareness and a diversity of perspective" implies that we are not aware without practicing arpeggios for zillions of hours and that sitting in a room we develop "diversity of perspective" ... Most microtonal composers are obsessed with 2 things pitch and virtuosity. A very European outlook. Its a little ironic that she advocates high resolution pitch color then ignores all the other high resolution possibilities available to us now, like timbre, meter, rhythm, spatial location. - What is really important in music? Proving that one can play something that's hard?... Or imagination and creativity? Computers have made changing tunings easy now, and they've made a lot of other possibilities easy. What's hard and rare is compositional imagination. We don't listen to Beethoven because he could play an arpeggio faster than other people... we listen because his ideas were revolutionary and his concept of music was completely different.
Thanks for your perspective. There are two different aspects of ‘practice’ referenced here: craft and art. Technical development is a means by which an artist’s imagination and creativity can be fluently expressed, both in performance (technique) and in written musical language (theory). These areas of a musician’s development are more closely related to a practice of the craft of music.
The ‘practice’ of music also encompasses far more than technical and theoretical development. It involves the unique personal growth and maturity of an artist, gained through life experience, emotional awareness, perceptual refinement, curiosity, knowledge, imagination, intuition, creativity, aesthetic insight, etc.
Very cool! Very informative! and VERY Emotional! I love everything about this Ted Talk. Easily one of my top 10 Ted Talks of all time. Thank you Dolores!
This is the future of music!
I defretted a couple of guitar a decade ago (was it THAT long ago!) but, despite a little bit of playing around in microtonal, I'm so locked into a 12 tone mindset it's fairly rare that I intentionally venture outside unless I'm just sliding through. The rare experiments I make are probably mainly within a puny 24 notes.
I'd love to play around more with the extra notes but just don't really have any framework to understand what to do with them. Maybe a starting point would be to work on some simple microtonal scales but I couldn't imagine consciously handling, or even distinguishing, 106 notes per octave.
Adam Howell What you probably did was 12 notes and retuned a couple of them on strong accents
Adam Howell Research just intonation
Interesting how these sounds make me think of celestial spaces and spectrum of colors that we cannot even see.
Microtones just end up messing music up. If you add even a quarter tone to a complex chord of the 12 tone chromatic scale you get a mis-match and then have to find other quarter tones to cancel out the harmonic beating. There is a world of great music out there based on the 12 tones that sounds great. Momentary bending of notes is pleasing because of the resolve when the notes fall back into place. aka blues , jazz and other examples. Although other systems like baroque(largely discarded) , Indian, Arabic and others, they just keep coming back to the 12 et. Its like they're the letters of the language and there is multitude of variations exemplifying chord movement in modern jazz and modern classical music that create and release tension in the most beautiful way. I don't think we are done with the 12 et. Music needs to speak from the vocabulary.
Beautiful sounds... reminds me of my Oberheim Matrix 12 when I turn it on and don't hit the auto tune. :) Seems a fascinating world to explore.
I get it that this notation and this instrument and the pitch color paradigm that Dolores explores, offers the lifetimes of exploration. For example, why something that not adheres to classic tuning can sound pleasant? This is not as much of musical instrument now, as than the prototype of idea. Thinking scientifically, you first have to isolate the phenomena you are exploring. Using synthetic sounds actually benefits the understanding of wtaf is happening, because you can reproduce same experiment (e.g. some interval) over and over, with consistent results, whereas on a violin you could definitely try doing exactly same things and even more, but it would take you ages to find DO actually harmonics of C orange - F violet sound good, before you would decide to add it to your musical vocabulary, because you are not isolating variables. Did you mess up by half a millimeter on a string, or it just sounds awful? And that's just one subdivision, while the pitch is not discrete but continual. As the resolution increases, in this case to 106edo, it takes more advanced technologies to be applied to have a complete model and to understand offerings of each new subdivision of HD soundscape. The framework is essential, this way we will be able to create, train, notate, record and reproduce such music, and only at record and reproduction stage you will finally take a violin, skills and, for example, 106 chromatic sheet music paper, and play it. Improvising in those enormous possibilities of pitch continuum without language or an idea is simply walking in the dark.
Thank you, Dolores, for moving the art+science hybrid forward. Those harmonies captivated me, and many of us. Still don't understand why these harmonies sound so familiar, something since being a kid.
This particular development of music is interesting, as it opens numerous questions and debates about the limits of pitch perception, oscillations and beats, heterodyne and spacial effects... But is this the future classical music? I'm still thinking about the acculturation and limits of our society, and the facts that there is very little space for a massive audience of any form of evolved music. And for the happy few with a musical education, the question is also to fight against centuries of chromatic intervals, and what you could call perfect pitch. Some notes played here sound right, other completely disturbing, and that depends of the auditor, and eventually of it's audio equipment! Guess 99,9% will certainly consider this absurd or no way out gadget, like many dodecaphonic last century movement, repetitive or cluster music, but who knows? Thinking about oriental tonal fundamentals, Hindi or Pakistanese music is somewhat sounding strange, as our classical music could sound strange as using different tonal divisions for their proper cultural approach. Maybe I'm of the 0,1% happy to ear something different and applauding in this refreshing view and new notation approach that could be the future 21st century classical music? And I wish Dolores Catherino a great success in this fundamental adventure!
It's time for us to explore more advanced music because the way we analyze and use it now is way too simple when compared to what it can be
Very fascinating!
The last chord could have stayed for minutes! beautiful
Thanks for the insight into this world. I look forward to perhaps Instruments that with a foot click we can retune.
Great video! it is surprising that modern music has not developed more towards microtonality. Although I guess everyone has been to occupied with serial 12-tone music..
...And here ends my youtube "zapping" session, with my mind blown.
"Zapping"?
How well established is polychromatic music in the modern musical scene? Would you be a pioneer of this kind of technical complexity or are you discovering the facets of it yourself personally?
+CarlinDream15
The polychromatic system is a new musical language and foundational framework. I initially developed it as a means of intuitively studying and composing with 106 notes per octave. The more I work with it, the more I appreciate the implications of the polychromatic system as a possible unifying musical framework to work with and teach the many notationally incompatible microtonal pitch systems presently in use.
Sounds awesome! Makes me think of Allan Holdsworth.
Absolutely not, the first thing about Holdsworth is that he always had an amazing talent for beautiful melodies which are completely absent in this composition.
Then comes the complexity of the harmony, often executed with gracious voice leadings (again absent in here).
Holdsworth sounded "alien" mostly because of his guitar tone (or synthaxe) and the utterly unusual guitar lines with wide intervals, but his music was beautiful.
The only Holdsworth's work that really sounds off is "Flat tire", but it stands out from everything else he have done in his career.
Hello, I think this is a really great talk. This idea of polychomatic music is fascinating to me, resenting on a deep level. I'm curious if you had considered color deficiency when designing your new notation? Being a person who is color deficient to red and green, I feel like it might be hard to read this notation if certain shades of reds and greens were included. It is possible to choose a color scale that is perceivable by folks with my kind of color deficiency?
Anywho, thanks for sharing your work with us. I'm excited about what future this musical language holds for us.
I would imagine that colors like black/white, brown and grayscale could be substituted for any specific color perception deficiencies that a musician might face. With digital notation displays (iPad and the like) and on-demand printing, scores could be immediately customized to accommodate for color blindness. This would be a great feature in polychromatic scoring software… when it exists.
This is wonderful.
Sounds so frickin good
The way of complexity. Why not ! Entropic music for an entropic World.
A thing I want to add: musical languaje is not defined by the number of sounds we have, but by the use and relation of those together, and it's evolution on time.
When will this be made worldwide? This thing sounds fantastic.
Its actually a midi controller, she seems to be using some sort of saw synth, but you could play a sampler loaded with any sound with this thing.
It's called a Tonal Plexus
Ok, I get it, it's just a matter of resolution of the scale, but isn't a violin or any fretless instrument a microtonal instrument? obviously if you want to play chords you can't with a single instrument. Also while having more resolution is in theory great, isn't always the case in practice as I think the best human creations usually come from limited resources, be it color palettes, materials, tools or fixed scales. we tend to find beauty in complex things made from simpler ones, not so much in complex things making even more complex things, which to most people tend to find cacophonic. Too much information can result in a lack of focus and too vague, that's why I think fixed scales will last forever in music. Who would want to listen to a 2 hours whale singing concert?
But it is very interesting and enlightening.
At some level, it seems that an unending search for new knowledge is essential to the creative process (and vice versa), whether in art or science. The motivation to expand awareness and understanding of new ideas and more complex perspectives is necessary to the evolution of arts and sciences.
The challenge has always been to present new and complex ideas in as simple a manner as possible. That is, to express a reductive clarity for the general understanding of the many, rather than obscure the fuller expression of creative ideas in esoteric language, accessible only to a few.
I have found that a polychromatic system applied to music simplifies and makes more intuitive, the exploration of vastly more complex musical languages. It is my hope that in challenging the listener’s auditory perception, intelligence and imagery, the complexity of the polychromatic system will eventually become increasingly accustomed - more easily discerned and understood.
Music (and art) offers a method of expression not limited by formal linguistic constructs and semantic ambiguities. As an abstract language, its form of expression and knowledge lie in a realm beyond words and quantitative concepts. Yet there is also an overlap in experience and perception of audible phenomena, which can be incompletely described/interpreted in scientific and discursive language. But this 'translation' occurs at a cost of using reductive methods to express only those aspects of an integrated whole that each language has the capacity to describe. Maybe this ultimately hints at the sense that our ‘reality’ is, and will always be, limited by our language.
Juan Romero - as a double bassist: Yes we are microtonal - and many times not even deliberately! But we often push notes to be sharp or pull back flat - and everyone in an 'ensemble' is doing that - thus the richness - never the same twice. However, a formalised 106 notes between an octave.....I couldn't do it. And on a violin? Mind you - I would love to hear something like that - it would have to be mechanical but hearing it on acoustic instruments. Well - there's my thesis. LOL
You are correct. Fretless instruments are capable of microtonal playing. However it might take a lifetime of playing to get good at playing a bass... and if you are a composer you might just want to have a calliope sound play in Wendy Carlos' non-octave tunings during a certain passage... and you'll never be able to do that unless you get good at a keyboard too... and you might want to have a Crumhorn sound play in Just Intonation during a segment... but you'll need to get good at crumhorns and acquire one somehow... OR you could acquire a DAW and use midi to achieve the above fairly easily... of course there's a trade off, you can play the nuances of the bass the DAW can't match... but DAWs are getting closer...
As for limiting your palettes... one should try to be aware that the way you perceive music is a result of your enculturation. People in Bali perceive music differently than European conservatory musicians or Indian Raga singers or German rave composers. The beauty of the modern world is that a composer can pick and choose what they feel is best now, from any culture, in a passage within the context of what came before and what comes after that passage. No classical orchestra has the tumbrel capability of a DAW where one can switch from a Koto to a Gamelan to a Moog to a sarod at any moment, and with a DAW one can design sounds that would be virtually impossible for humans to duplicate on analogue instruments, for example an instrumental passage in 11/8 juxtaposed against another in 17/8... you might think that could never work musically... I don't.
Maybe in the future, small amounts of microtonal sounds will be in music as additive features of music, sort of like a echo, a kind of accompaniment. If there are examples, never mind.
Jacob Collier
Unbound microtonality is not an effect, it's the way we should be thinking about music as a whole
This sounds like you're using the harmonic purity of 53 EDO with the addition of 'tones in between the tones'. Might I ask what you're looking for in those in between tones?
In working with higher levels of auditory pitch-resolution, the ear’s pitch discrimination improves and nonlinear characteristics of pitch perception become prominent. Because of this, musical intervals become relatively defined (i.e. octave, major 3rd etc.) based on harmonic context and frequency range. This means that scale/chord intervals change slightly over progressive octaves and in relationship to other harmonic intervals. A pitch resolution of 106 notes per octave enables a wider freedom to explore these nonlinear musical relationships.
Another use of the in-between pitches is to play combinations of these small intervals, creating fascinating auditory effects of movement and multidimensionality in the interaction of component pitches and harmonics.
Thaaaat's what has been stopping the music development - the absence of a pitch resolution of 106 notes per octave. Now i see. From now on everything would be completely different... Thank God for these 1000 and smth button instruments. Ldy Gaga, Kanye West and other mass culture standing in the line can't wait to get them...
I guess it's hard to be that fundamental optimist believing that "500 years old" (c) music theory and instruments were the cause..
Stephen lol she's probably trying not to temper out mercator's comma
Hello, i was playing only the black keys on my 88 key- board. strings or organ, it sounded kind of perfect and I wondered : is there an instrument with only the black keys , disregarding the white ones. In my opion it can open up new musical ways and overnight I could not stop thinking about it.
In my search I saw your video's (TEDx) and was amazed.
maybe now i now why I didn't like piano lessons afteral !
btw, the 106 pitch per octave instrument, is it a special or common available? love it !
The black keys of a piano form a pentatonic scale. This scale and its modal derivations were prevalent in the early development of the music systems in nearly all cultures. You can program isomorphic keyboards/surfaces (hardware or software) for this type of pitch layout.
The pentatonic scale was initially based on the compilation of 5 perfect (pure) fifths and you can tune a controller’s pitches in this way. With the piano, equal temperament gives you a very close approximation of perfect fifths (F#/C#, G#/D#, C#/G#, D#/A#) but the major third/minor 6th interval relationship (F#/A#, A#/F#) is quite sharp. This meterstick-yardstick (perfect 5th-major 3rd) interval tuning anomaly is present in both the Pythagorean and equal temperament tuning systems. With higher pitch-resolution (micropitch) languages, this tuning anomaly is surpassed.
Excellent!
Besides tuning, there is are also sound morphing, realtime resynthesis, and much much much more - check i.e. Technos Acxel Resynthesizer / Canadian product !! On top, sensing or experiencing 'music' depends not only on the individual, but also time, place, season, gender and many factors that could not even be defined today. We try to, but...Science ? Way beyond...probably.
Yay Dolores! Amazing!
I think a big reason it sounds so weird is because of the fact it is so new. if you were born listening to it, imagine all of the nuances in feeling it could bring. Also, if the instrument was changed, layered, and chords were understood better.
Dolores, “The ghost notes...these new harmonics...we can hear in our ears... can’t be seen or measured with technology” - My spectrum analyzer, “Am I a joke to you?“
Easily counted 9 harmonics from the first pair of notes
very interesting, this is much like different between analogous (polychromatic) and discrete (diatonic/pentatonic) in the analogous mostly dissonance sound although in diatonic it can also but by design it always to get the harmony..🤔
This sounds good for experimental new age music (with the off tone sequences) not entirely crazy about it but I guess some might like it :)
For me, the point of this talk is to be open to learning how to hear more notes, not just lump everything between the piano notes into ‘out of tune’.
I am thinking of Radiohead. They could use this and it should fit their genre. : )
If you ran a Jimi Hendrix improvisation through a pitch corrector it would take out about 90% of the content of the music. This is also true of most of the blues in general, its true of much of swing and jazz, especially the music of woodwind and horn ensembles. In addition the majority of traditional world music is not at all restricted to 12 equal. Very few singers confine themselves to 12 equal because that removes most of the expression, country singers typically deviate rather extremely from 12 equal.
Most musicians do not use music notation and so are not limited by it, its only classical that insists on 12 equal only, there is no such prohibition in most other forms of music. Very few instruments can play chords, the keyboard and the guitar are pretty much it for popular solutions so the search is not for the microtonality that is already in use anyway, but for a better keyboard or guitar to allow individuals to better handle complex microtonality instead of just ensembles.
Guitar strings can be tuned at will and they can be bent even if the frets are in 12 equal plus many synthesizers have pitch bend wheels. Most music is performed using voice and monophonic instruments are often the accompaniment, chords come in as part of the monophonic ensemble. Most monophonic instruments have microtonal capabilities so much ensemble work is quite microtonal
No one speaks in 12 equal and unless a singer is classically trained singing is not usually restricted to 12 equal ether. Our ears are already quite accustom to the microtonal music that spontaneously comes form our throats from childhood on, it is the design of our chord playing instruments that is inadequate to the task of letting individuals play microtonal chord progressions.
Microtonality should not be framed as the original providence of they who are bored with music who want "more", that is not the proper motivation or description, microtonality is already well established, not even a piano is in 12 equal because its stretch tuned.
What is not well established is a means for individuals instead of ensembles to play and notate microtonal music, for example Duke Ellington had to rely on seat of the pants knowledge of performers to get the right tonal inflections into the ensamble work because such inflections were not written in the notation , we know because we have the scores and yet can hear constant deviant pitch inflections in the recordings.
Innovators are motivated to explore beyond the conventions of the past, toward new possibilities of the creative imagination, not because they are 'bored' by the limits of the present.
bill wesley that's not how it works. 90% of people on this planet will struggle to deviate from 12TET because it's the music that we grow up with and the only thing we can melodically understand
I want to play Metroid now
Thank you
I always find Dolores Catherino's work very interesting, sincere and timely - but for me it's the choice of electronic voices that I have difficulty with - very basic wave forms. At least with everything I have seen so far.? Is this a limitation? I mean are the rich harmonics (and subsequent interactions) of a more complex waveform too much for 106 notes per octave? Enquiring minds need to know.
Any links to other examples gratefully received!
These are early compositions exploring micro pitch-color. The synth sound is fairly basic, with a rich upper harmonic content that doesn't sound 'brittle' or sacrifice a timbral 'warmth'. Intuitively, it seems more important at this stage to create music which helps to develop pitch-color awareness and perception, in the most direct way possible.
Soon, the complexities of integrated sound-color/design (timbre) will be an amazing addition. Composing with pitch-color is a very difficult process for me and the world of sound-color (timbre, sound design) seems just as complex. I look forward to collaborating with sound designers in the future!
My 12 tone ear is going to need some time to get used to this... Maybe with more theortical context it will grow on me
Microtonal music totally sounds weird at first. You actually feel the new feelings in it with repeat listening though.
Very interesting! Is the octave divided into 106 equal parts?
+dbadagna
Yes, the pitch layout is 106 EDO (equal divisions of the octave). Within this framework, unequally divided pitch 'palettes' (scales) can be created.
Why choose 106 notes in an octave?
I began exploring 53 edo (equal divisions of the octave) as one of the oldest theoretical tunings in existence. While working with that level of auditory pitch-resolution, I found that minor 3rd and major 6th intervals sounded ‘off’ in a harmonic (polyphonic) context.. As a result, I doubled the resolution to 106 edo because this seemed to be the maximum pitch-resolution possible with the pitch layout systems that I created for the Tonal Plexus keyboard.
Have you ever played with any non-equal divisions? What did you think?
I look at the pitch layout of 106 EDO (equal divisions of the octave) as a simplified pitch continuum or matrix from which different types of pitch palettes can be derived.
Currently, I am exploring very basic aspects of high pitch-resolution musical languages. I am focused on auditory qualities such as intervallic relativity, nonlinear aspects of pitch perception, and their use in the creation of new musical compositions. I look at these preliminary compositions as ‘bridge’ compositions - working in an overlapping area between a conservative pole of radical innovation and a radical pole of conventional musical understanding.
I think that as the ear becomes accustomed to this new musical framework, amazing new possibilities will emerge in the restructuring of melodic and harmonic pitch palettes, and this will generate even greater levels of freedom to move beyond other entrenched conventions in music.
Unequally divided pitch palettes (scales) are something I look forward to exploring eventually!
Why not 108 or 120 (or some other multiple of 12) so that all the familiar intervals of 12 TET are retained?
The strength of the polychromatic system is in its flexibility. We currently have many incompatible microtonal notation systems which can all be encompassed polychromatically. As a result, explorations of pitch systems which are not derived from the 12 note chromatic system are not only possible but also easily interchanged, using the same musical language. This allows us to move beyond implicit chromatic assumptions and redefine new intervallic, polyphonic and harmonic (overtone) relationships.
To each his own.
I have a question of why 106 pitches per octave, the traditional octave being 12 semitones, or 1200 cents span is not evenly divisible by 106, and being that the smallest pitch difference that humans can hear is 5 cents should the number of notes per octaves be a more divisible number say 120 (ten cents per interval) or 240 (5 cents per interval) instead of 106 (11.3207... cents per interval)
The pitch resolution is based on the limitations of the keyboard design. I started out with 53 edo, and found certain intervals to be missing (to my ears) within different harmonic contexts. Because of this I doubled 53 edo to 106 edo. A new Tonal Plexus model is in development which could support 120 edo, and I'm looking forward to exploring the harmonic implications of this pitch collection!
I think of the ‘natural’ state of pitch as being a continuum. So any method of dividing the pitch continuum is a "temperament", or metaphorically a palette of pitch-colors.
I think that polychromatic music opens up new doors......Only drawback as I see it is that such an instrument is very difficult to master.
It honestly sounds really busy and clustered. I find it really hard to follow but there is something really interesting and grabbing about it.
It calms me down but makes me feel like somethings off at the same time almost dizzy feeling
porque nadie hace referencia a Julián Carrillo, músico mexicano, el dividió la octava musical en más de 96 sonidos, esto no es nada nuevo. Pero me asombra que incluso ya los sintetizadores pueden lograr los 16 avos de tono
this music sounds great! but i would like to hear microtonal music on a clear sound not that Sci-Fi sound that hide the pure tone of each step. Will be outstanding hear a microtonal piece with piano sound, fast arppegios and huge scales. Thank for sharing your work Dolores.
Here are some excellent composers to check out: Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Ben Johnston, Julián Carrillo, Alois Hába.
Alejandro Rodriguez it's a saw wave man. What do u want
@@dolomuse Thanks!
Dolores, it's so great to watch this presentation with such great passion of yours. It's so touching and inspiring.
I've translated this into Japanese language on my tumblr mewomihi. Is it okay to make Japanese subtitle on this TH-cam as well? mewomihiというtumblrに日本語訳を掲載致しましたので、日本語訳を読みい方は是非見てみてください。
+H.Wakabayashi
Thank you Hidekazu! I think that would be wonderful. The TEDx videos are creative commons, and multilingual subtitles or closed captioning options are encouraged via TED's open translation project: www.ted.com/about/programs-initiatives/ted-open-translation-project
+dolomuse Thanks! I'll check how to do it.
I'm aware of the microtonal keyboard, but what software/VSTi is being used to generate the tones and chords? I've just become aware of ZynAddSubFX, but its limited to 12 notes per octave. Looking around for something more extensive, especially able to handle chords. Over a decade ago I was able to use SCALA with Sound Blaster LIVE! card for any scale any JI or temperament with any number of notes per octave. What are people using these days?
For microtonal pitch assignment of the keys on any midi controller, I use the custom scale editor (CSE) by Aaron Hunt. hpi.zentral.zone/cse
It has been difficult finding VST (virtual sound modules) which support multitimbral channel-independence of pitchbend. Without this, you have to run 16 tracks, one midi channel per track, of a single VST instrument or end up with strange pitch averaging anomalies. Kontakt, in omni mode, can support up to 16 midi channels per track and microtonal tunings can be programmed in the script editor. Omnisphere is another excellent option which supports up to 8 midi channels per track.
It is ironic that multi channel-independent pitchbend was a standard feature of multitimbral hardware sound modules of the 1990’s and is unimplemented in many current software multitimbral VST’s.
Tell me about it! And hardware.
When I first started exploring the Sound Blaster Live! was great at it. :D
Thanks for telling me about CSE. :)
Oh! I was wrong about ZynAddSubFX, it can handle up to 128 notes per octave. :D
And handles multiple channels on the one instance assignable to any of the voices you choose, very flexible.
But It is still based on 12 tone scale. I think in order to take full potential of microtonal 'scale' or system or others even 19tet, one should completely break away from traditional 12tone based system
Vadim Martynyuk Try dividing 106 by 12
I wonder whether Wendy Carlos also obtained a really original result for the Tron movie score by relying on microtonality?
Nice.
This is definitely (in terms of sound) what rhelm i want to be playing with. 106edo eh? Guess i gotta get programming
Music; the theory
I prefer the slide whistle.
In terms of music theory, what exactly are pitch colors?
Polychromatic music and pitch color are part of a new theoretical paradigm and way of conceptualizing high-resolution, auditory pitch varieties. As awareness of high-resolution pitch gradations is developed, new auditory differentiations emerge which we have no words for. Yet, at some level, they are analogous to visual differentiations we call colors. English seems to be a visually based language (i.e. no auditory equivalents for envision, appearance, shape, visualize, etc).
In conventional music theory, tone ‘color’ has been used in a vague sense to convey timbre.
Visual color denotes qualia, defined as: the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.
As we learn to hear pitch differentiations at more refined levels of pitch-resolution, we need to create descriptive words to express these these new pitch qualities in language. In the meantime, pitch ‘color’ seems the closest metaphor.
Dear Dolores,
Thank you for the poetic response. I've been enjoying the tracks on your webpage.
Are pitch colors single frequencies in between 12-tone frequencies? Or are they like chords, blending multiple frequencies with a musical relationship to a base frequency?
Also, the number 106 tones per octave is not divisible by 12, indicating that the number of tones in between halftones is not always the same. What is the progression of frequencies within an octave?
On a conventional 12 tone scale, pitches are essentially single frequencies spaced by factors of 2^(1/12). If color tones are single frequencies, are they spaced by 2^(1/106)? Is the scale still tuned to A440?
The idea of pitch ‘color’ applies to both individual notes (in isolation) and the auditory influences/effects of interacting sonic ‘shapes’ and multidimensional aspects of harmony and harmonics (in context).
In terms of pitch frequency values, the polychromatic system is a dynamic and ‘relatively’ defined system (influenced by polyphonic and harmonic/overtone context) that can be applied to ANY pitch language that a composer chooses or creates. It’s pitch-color values are open-ended and adaptable - not absolutely/statically defined (like chromatic systems).
With 106 notes in the octave each pitch is programmed as 1/106, 2/106, 3/106, etc. It is not divisible by 12, but the pitch-space between each consecutive pitch is the same (1/106).
My compositions so far have used a global frequency of A:yellow = 432 Hz. With increasing pitch resolutions, this global pitch determination can become stylistically unique and user-defined (not conventionally defined) point(s) of pitch reference upon which to base any new pitch ‘palette’.
Sorry for the complicated response. For me, these ideas seem to be more easily expressed in music than language.
Beautiful words, unimpressive music. We already have instruments which are polychromatic in that sense (like violins and other string instruments). And we don't need a new transcription system to achieve the slide effect between notes during performance. And she didn't say anything about new chords which would be possible with 48 or whatever notes per octave. How many of them would actually sound good and would actually be new?
11:20
Anyone have a tonal plexus I can buy? haha.
I want to hear a fugue in that tuning 😁
Ooh! I'm the 1,500th person who gave this video a "like."
Lisa Simpson in real life
Is this just a different way of microtonal notation?
Wiĺ this kind of music be called tonal music.
Can we identify theTonic or key of a composition by listening to this type of music?
where do you get this bananas synth? I want badly
Those "ghost notes" are called heterodyne, I believe.
Isn't there some kind of use of polychromatic in some other countries traditional music?
Middle eastern music.
@@2WheelsGood.01 and eastern music as well :)
Samplers and drum machines can not correctly emulate a real instrument. A real violin always sounds more dynamic and expressive than a sampled one. And the way that orchestral music meets in the air above the performers greatly affects it's sound.
Thing is, that this notation and this instrument and the pitch color paradigm that Dolores explores, offers the lifetimes of exploration. For example, why something that not adheres to classic tuning can sound pleasant? This is not so much of musical instrument now, then the prototype of idea. Thinking scientifically, you first have to isolate the phenomena you are exploring. Using synthetic sounds actually benefits the understanding of wtaf is happening, because you can reproduce same experiment (e.g. some interval) over and over, with consistent results, whereas on a violin you could definitely try doing exactly same things, but it would take you ages to find DO actually harmonics of C orange - F violet sound good, before you would decide to add it to your musical vocabulary, because you are not isolating variables. Did you mess up by half a millimeter on a string, or it just sounds awful? And that's just one interval, and there is infinite continuum. As the resolution increases, in this case to 106edo, it takes more advanced technologies to be applied to have a complete model and understanding of each new subdivision of HD soundscape. This way we will be able to create, train, notate, record and reproduce such music, and only at record and reproduction stage you will finally take a violin, skills and, for example, 106 chromatic sheet music paper, and play it. Improvising in those enormous possibilities of pitch continuum without language or an idea is simply walking in the dark.
I love what Dolores is doing in the world of harmony. She seriously needs to ditch the synth patch she's using. Her music may be poly-chromatic, but it's very mono-timbral and the timbre she's using is not the best suited for subtle chords- it's like playing major 7th chords thru a distortion box. Can't she slap a nice sound font on her keyboard or get something like FL Studio's "Sakura" synth?
What is this song at 3:10?
Heterodyne Horizon
Thank you much :)
TLDW: Pianist discovers intonation