Adam, it was your video I watched like two years ago that first showed me not-equal temperament tunings. I think it was, anyways. ...are there any options for guitars to try these without buying a new fretboard? Seems that guitar is very equal-temp designed.
There is a lot of inaccurate information in this video, David. Almost all Middle Eastern modes are cousins of the Medieval/Liturgical modes. I have 2 videos on the topic. Look up Persian and Greek modes. Bayati is just Phrygian with a raised 2nd degree, Bayati in E : E F+ G A B (B-) C D E. In fact your image at 7:28" shows that Sikah, Bayati and Rast are all modes of the same scale, Your 3 lines are the shifted versions of each other. And These were just a few of the issues. There are no 12 versions of Ek, as the interval between C and Ek should have been measured and not just the pitch of the Ek. There are a lot of different C-D intervals in the history of Western music as well. There is more variability in the C to D interval than C to Ek. The interval between D to F+ is 340 cents in Persian music plus minus 4 or 5 cents! and closer to 150 cents in Arabic and Turkish music as they intentionally tried to temper the scales for modulation after a conference in Cairo 90 yrs ago or so.
@@goodcyrus To be honest, Western musicians don't really understand modes anyways... It all ends up being just major or minor with extra sharps or flats (especially once you lay down the harmony). In particular, the Sikah/Huzam kind of mode makes no sense whatsoever from a Western music kind of perspective.
This video is so good I've watched it several times by now and I have no intent of stopping. I've also sent it straight to all my Iranian friends (I'm not Iranian at all, and frankly I couldn't relate less, but that's the whole point, innit). So far they've all been commenting back how exceptionally well-put-together it is. No surprises there. Thank you, Bruce. (Edit: sorry, David, of course. You can tell just how agitated I am. It's just that privately I always call you "that Bruce composer guy" all the time. Sorry again.)
I mean. Bruce sounds more badass. There's Bruce Wayne and Bruce Lee. Bruce is a badass name. King David vs Goliath is good too. But I still prefer Bruce. Because the Bruce's of the world kick ass.
That last point about multiple instruments is key. The amount of opportunities for polyphony available in Turkish or Arabic music is limited. It is harder to have multiple instruments play different things, let alone an entire orchestra if you are playing music based on maqam. This can probably be overcome with some ingeniuity, but it is really not in the tradition. When I listened to Ben Johnston's string quartets, I realized that it is possible to somehow use microtonal tunings with multiple instruments. It does require some nontrivial musical genius (like Johnston) to do it, though.
I wish that Chebotarian's book on Aram Khachaturian's counterpoint were translated. There are many ways to introduce counterpoint to Eastern music. I would say the typical one is to start a countermelody on the ripercussa of the scale, that is in a distictively different division of the measure.
There is one big difficulty that arises with counterpoint in Middle Eastern music. It is meter. It is very difficult to compose a counterpoint to a melody not knowing when it is going to end beforehand.
It's not quite as cool as using "real" instruments, but technology makes it very possible to play microtonal music along with other people! Just a few weeks ago I told my bandmate "ok, I'm gonna break your brain for a minute", tuned both our MIDI keyboards to 17edo, and told him to sit down and just experiment. I played chords and followed along with whatever he was doing. This was his first ever experience with microtonal music, and he had a blast-- and played some stuff that sounded pretty awesome, as well!
Awesome video. Loved it. People need to talk about this stuff more. The influence on the industrial revolution on and mass production really "fiinished off" a lot of regional tuning systems. You hear a lot about the 440 vs 432 hertz "conspiracy" but rarely about the more obvious 12 tet "conspiracy whose hegemony has made most of the world use a single truning system.
Throughout my life, I was only ever exposed to 12-TET. I was never even told that other tunings existed, so I never thought of notes as anything other than fixed frequencies of 440 Hz times 2 raised to the power of some whole number multiple of 12. Or 24. I had developed "perfect pitch" and deluded myself into thinking that it was some kind of superpower. Come late 2022, and I finally got back into classical music on my own, during which I learned about the history of tuning in Western music. It was here that I discovered tunings such as 19-TET and 31-TET which are the modern equivalents of historical 1/3-comma and 1/4-comma meantone, and since then, microtonality and xenharmony have become my main interests within music as a whole. Since then, I've fundamentally changed the way I think about music. I've also become increasingly disdainful towards how the terminology and concepts that most people are taught are specific to 12-TET, especially how there's no mention whatsoever that they're specific to 12-TET. People are being "locked in" to one tuning and they don't even get to know about alternatives.
I've had a similar experience, but on a much smaller scale (pun not intended), to your Iranian friend. I keep my harpsichord tuned to Young's temperament. A few years ago I took part (as a flautist) in a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 3. The piano was in equal temperament, of course, and I found it excruciating at first to hear all those wide thirds. I tried to bribe the tuner (who also tunes my piano to Young's temperament) £50 to secretly put the concert hall's Bösendorfer into Young's. Unfortunately he refused.
Being an active member of the early music community I am glad the topic of tuning is being brought up in this fantastic channel!. The input from other cultures is a welcome and illuminating one but, as you briefly mention at the end, only looking at our western musical tradition we already see the issue. As a harpsichord player, I can say that one of the most appealing acoustic features of the instrument over modern keyboards (with equal temperament) is the common practice to use baroque temperaments on them, which tend to have much more accurate thirds and sixths in central keys. These intervals are the "souls" of triad chords and their inversions; one easily sees that they have served as the foundation of the emotional language of western tonal music for the most of modern history. Until I learnt about temperaments (when I had to tune my own harpsichord) I couldn't really tell why some pieces sounded so much richer and exciting on the harpsichord versus on the piano. As much as I love the piano, my favourite instrument of the western classical tradition by far, I think that it is a little tragedy that they are commonly tuned to equal temperament. I highly recommend the book "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony: And Why You Should Care" by Ross Duffin on this topic, it reads lightly and it gives a very good overview of the history of western temperaments. I feel this reference adds nicely to the points being raised in your video, David. Thanks for the amazing job on your channel!
As a fanatic for Renaissance & baroque music, I really appreciate what you wrote. It would take years of listening to quality HIP before my brain began to understand why my ears were drawn to certain recordings much more than others. A lot of this, turns out, would have to do with specialized tunings specific to composition & instrument. "Why do I LOVE that sound so much ___? What IS that going on there?" I'm still on the very front end of figuring this all out, but what a fun journey of discovery. On that note, I'll be picking up the book you brought up. This isn't the first time someone has recommended it, so I think it's time I finally read it. Have you heard of the YT channel, "Early Music Sources"? Wonderfully researched & nicely-produced content. They have a vid series on historical tunings / temperaments which I think you'd very much enjoy. Be blessed
There's a small tradition in the U.S. coming from Harry Partch and, competely separately, the early microtonalists including Terry Riley and La Monte Young, of tuning to pure intervals but incorporating much higher harmonics into the harmonic language than people typically see. Riley's "The Harp Of New Albion" is a great example of re-tuning a piano and taking advantage of the resulting unequal relationship between keys. Also, when the strings in a piano harp are tuned to resonate more strongly with each other, the sound just becomes ridiculously rich. I'm also a big fan of the string quartets of Ben Johnston, who is a student of Partch's.
Yup! Other massive works for piano specifically with this idea in mind that I know of are La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano, Michael Harrison's Revelation, and Kyle Gann's Hyperchromatica. Although, that last one is not for traditional piano, but is for 3 Disklaviers.
@@furmanarrangements I use Dorico. Yes it is. I think that some people are a bit skeptical of it's limitations compared to Johnston notation, but IMHO the limitations aren't a big deal. A fairly common approach is to set the custom tonality to 1200EDO and just set pitches according to cent deviations, and to add accidentals as you need them. Dorico only recognizes one accidental per note, so (for example) if you want both a -A and a --A, you will need to create one accidental for '-' and another for '--'. I don't think that's really much of a hassle, because once you create a 'compound' accidental, it's there and you don't have to recreate it. And there won't really be *that* many unless you're doing some really funky modulations like in Johnston's String Quartet No. 7.
I was a part of my University's gamelan Ensemble, and it was actually very important that the tunings between instruments were offset enough to allow a shimmering texture.
Even common practice period (western) music was tuned to 5-limit temperaments, sometimes with more than 12 pitch classes, sometimes with only 12. Hearing a meantone harpsichord is much different to a 12-edo one.
When I was at Michigan State University in the late 70's, the music school's resident piano tuner (Owen Jorgensen) put on a tour-de-force concert one night, with at least 7 (perhaps 9?) pianos on the stage, all tuned differently. A short piece was played on each to illustrate something of its temperament. This was at the very beginning of the period instrument bandwagon, with its historically-correct tunings. The highlight of the evening was the premiere of a piece written for him by the head of the composition department (James Niblock, if I recall). Jorgensen called it "seven and five" tuning. The seven white notes of the piano were tuned in an equidistant fashion (from each other), and the five black keys similarly equidistant from each other. But the tunings of the white and black notes didn't have anything to do with the other color, except to follow one rule: as one went up a "chromatic" scale on the keyboard, going from a white to black note (or vice-versa) the up/down "direction" was never violated -- that is, going from say, F to F# could not go DOWN in pitch. Some of the adjacent-note intervals were vanishingly small, only a handful of cents. I don't recall Jorgensen mentioning anything about those equidistant tunings in your video; my recollection is that he came up with this tuning merely as an intellectual exercise. I also don't recall getting anything from the evening other than a bit of a chin-scratch, and something to talk to the other theory nerds about.
A similar analysis in terms of frequency ratios would be even more interesting as consonance between notes is based on the resonance of their audible overtones.
Regarding the xylophone tunings of central Africa and Java, what are the overtone series from the traditional instruments? Western music cares about dividing the octave in large part because our traditional instruments (strings, woodwinds) have fairly clean overtone series. But the instrument shown at 10:40 has fairly thick-looking bars, and the sound decays quickly after the instrument is struck. In that case, the natural harmony for the first overtone might not be the octave. If my uninformed supposition is correct, it could go a way towards explaining why the traditional tuning schemes place less emphasis on the octave as a fundamental unit of pitch division.
Overtone series are pretty much the same for every instrument within the given laws of physics and atmosphere of the planet we happen to inhabit. "Western music cares about dividing the octave" not because of the instruments, but because it was difficult to play in ensembles while different instruments were tuned justly to different fundamentals thus creating dissonance while playing the same note.
> Overtone series are pretty much the same for every instrument within the given laws of physics and atmosphere of the planet we happen to inhabit. Yes, but I'm wondering about non-idealities. Pianos are tuned with a Railsback curve because of inharmonicity due to string thickness/stiffness, and as a result the octave on a piano is ever so slightly sharp. The instruments depicted here seem to be non-ideal, hence my speculation. It may be that one of our classic tunings (say a Pythagorean tuning) would result in noticeable dissonance with these instruments, even when playing with itself rather than as part of an ensemble.
@@chethelesser The overtone series for a note on a given instrument isn't the same thing as the harmonic series for a given pitch. Strings (and presumably, thick xylophone bars) have inharmonicity as Majromax said, tuning Caribbean steel drums involves tuning the overtones as well, and ordinary metal bells have inharmonic overtones. Or take this video as an example: th-cam.com/video/v4ELxKKT5Rw/w-d-xo.html The overtones on this rubber "drumskin" is 1, 1.92, 2.64 and 2.76 times the base frequency.
@@Majromax Have you heard of "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale" by William Sethares? It's a book about how the timbre of an instrument relates to what intervals played on it sound consonant or dissonant. I haven't read it yet, but from what I know about it, it seems sort of like you're talking about the same kind of thing. If anything, take a listen to the sound samples on the web page, they're really interesting. sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html
@@chethelesser The harmonic series only applies to things which are very long in one dimension and very narrow in the other two, like strings or air pipes. Resonators of a different shape will have a different series of overtones. For example, the overtones of a drum are far from the harmonic series because the resonator is a flat sheet of material. The overtones of a xylophone will also be different again, because the resonator is a thick bar of material.
Very interesting: I was not aware that Central Africa has tunings much like Indonesian-Gamelans’ “Slendro” (approximately 5TET) and “Pelog” (approximately 7TET)! Thanks, Bruce.
@@mr88cet Most sources I've read online say that Pelog can be approximated by a 7-note subset of 9TET instead of 7TET. And in both Slendro and Pelog, octaves are often stretched.
In iranian traditional Music they use something almost similar to modes called "Dastgah" "دستگاه". In which they tune some degrees almost a forth step lower which is called "koron" "کرن" and some degrees almost a forth higher which is called "sori" سری" This way the song feeling depends a lot on the Dastgah we choose to play in ( way more than classical music). And there books that explain which Dastgah gives which feeling.
In the Byzantine Chant tradition we have both systems coexisting next to each other. We use our modern day descendants of what are the ancient Greek modes. Doric - for example - is still rendered and sung in its "soft diatonic" way (and not hard, which corresponds to ET). definition: a ET full tone interval (ex. from C to D on the piano) would be cutup in 12 microtones the soft-diatonic Doric mode starting from D would be rendered like this: D to E would be 10 microtones, so it sounds a little bit darker. (the ET would have 12) E to F is 8 microtones, rendering F in its familiar ET place. F to G is 12 - standard ET G to A is also 12 - standard ET but A to B is again 10 microtones, mimicking in what is called "tetrachord relationship" the distance of D to E in a 10 microtones interval; this B would sound a bit darker/bluesier if you will B to C is 8 microtones, placing C in it's familiar ET place, and C to D is again 12 microtones, rendering the higher D in it's perfect octave as we know it
Amazing!! The Central African xylophone part was the most interesting thing I've heard in a long time. As more time passes, I become more and more convinced ethnomusicology is the most interesting part of the study of music :D
Awesome video as usual! I'm not quite sure but there's a theory about "quarter tones" in arabic music saying that the closer the country is to the equator, the lover the quarter tone interval (used by the majority of the locals) tends to be. a good comparison can be done on the difference between Turkish quarter tones and Egyptian.
Probably a bit late to the comments but Sethares's work on relating harmony to timbre it is rly fascinating and a nice culture-independent approach to analyzing harmony and tuning. Would love to see a video about it at some point.
THIS is the video I've been looking for, for YEARS. Great intro to understanding different tunings with examples. Now I can properly show friends and family why the music I often listen to sounds "off".
This is fascinating. However, using cents to describe the tunings is less that illuminating. I would like to know more about how these systems are tuned by ear and the relationships to the overtone series.
google "ratio to cents". I've made lots of spreadsheets, and learned how to do things like that myself systematically. I would encourage anyone to do the same. Then you won't depend on anyone else telling you the maths. Once you have accurate measurements of discreet pitches (cents) you can do loads of fun stuff with the numbers.
Love the mention of Balinese gamelan! You should definitely have mention the pengumbang/pengisep paired tuning system, it's very fascinating. Also Selonding and Gong Luang tunings are out of this world - they preserve a much older tuning style that was borrowed from Java in the 14th century, but is now not often heard in Java. Also, the most common kind of tuning in Bali (Pelog Selisir) has the same concept of narrow, medium, and wide intervals but includes ~100c intervals, semitones; so you get hemi-tonic pentatonic scales!
Man David, that was the most insightful, respectful and tempered (no pun) take on various tunings that I have heard. The emphasis on other tunings not being "imprecise" or "inferior" is so important - without losing track and calling all tunings interchangeable - equal temperament is not the standard by accident (unlike, say, English as the standard international language). One would wish for a balance where this standardization wouldn't necessarily force other tunings into obscurity. But I guess that is the downside to globalization.
2:44 reminds me of how when I started to play a second instrument it used to take me a minute to switch between them (alto sax and bass clarinet, witch are very similar, but are both transposition instruments) because I had to remember that in the lowest octave they play different, but now I hardly have to think when I switch, other than scales sometimes.
I adore this, thank you so much! Sharing now. I'm a big fan of classical Indian music but I don't know much about the tuning systems. Maybe look into that?
Gold. Your humor notwithstanding. The section on central African xylophones (synchronistically at 10 mins?) reminds me of the roots of rock-n-roll itself. Aside from our Peter Gabriels and Paul Simons helping bridge the sophistication of a land of 200+ gods for the drum alone (see Harry Belafonte video on rhythm).... I personally would die to put out the best ever *reggae* music from a white boy in a new genre similar to what the Police attempted to do after being introduced to the African tradition. Sorry to delve into rhythm but you covered harmony and melody so well. ;)
I love the challenge you pose to my ear! I use GarageBand app and my favourite scales are the Klezmer and “Japanese” scales. But, you’ve opened me up to so many new scales. Thank you for waking me up!
Great to see Toumani Diabate here! I discovered him many years ago and was amazed and delighted by his first album. In recent months I encountered a "musician" who insisted that there were only 12 notes, no matter what kind of music they were used for. I knew better and tried to explain to him that different scales exist, but he didn't get the idea.
nice vid. Curious that harmonics, unequal temperaments, and Just Intonation were not mentioned.. Also, people often assume that 'western music' has long used the equal tempered scale, when in reality, it only came to standard use in the Romantic Era. Bach didn't write in equal temperament contrary to popular belief.
you should check out transcriptions of traditional persian music. they divide the octave into 24 quater tones. they include quater sharps/flats in the key signature.
Really great content! Thank you so much! I do see a Dugga drum in one of the shelves behind you. How come you’ve not included the microtonal musical practice in Indian music? A point I was longing for was - ‘sustain’ of notes becomes deciding factor when we are judging the consonance between them. I think that is the reason majority of Indian drum instruments also need quite precise tuning to the tonic.
woah, i had no idea dorico had that functionality! in addition to free meter, it's amazing they managed to cram such incredibly progressive and unorthodox/non-western concepts into an app that is effectively created for the purpose of allowing western musicians to write music in a western/orthodox format
I recently became aware of music in other tunings than the usual 12 EDO we hear in almost all western music, and it opened up an entirely new world of music to me. There are so many harmonics and chords that cannot be expressed in 12 EDO. Most of all I like 22 EDO. This is also an equal temperament tuning, but the octave is divided into 22 tunes, instead of the 12 tunes we are used to. I'm still struggling to fully understand 22 EDO, but I like the challenge, and like the new harmonics possible. For example I hear two different kinds of minor chords in 22 EDO, where I only know of one in 12 EDO.
I've been playing music since I was 4, and I picked things up fairly quickly. I also gained what most people call "perfect pitch" from a young age. But my "ability" to identify notes without a reference combined with me having only ever been exposed to 12-TET for most of my life resulted in me thinking of notes as absolute frequencies and intervals as fixed mathematical constants, which I was able to get away with for most of my life. While I am classically trained, in mid-to-late 2021 I started getting into singing, and my gateway into singing was actually contemporary worship. The very simple, strictly diatonic nature of most CWM was a big culture shock to me, but I was still thinking in terms of 12 firmly placed pitches in each octave. However, late last year, I got back into classical music and discovered historical tunings (in particular, meantone tunings flatter than 12-TET and unequal well temperaments) and their modern equivalents, during which I realised that approaching music from a purely absolute perspective was completely wrong. After listening to much music in 31-TET, 19-TET, and a piece played in 43-TET, I personally think that CWM's simplicity and strictly diatonic nature lends itself perfectly to flatter-than-12 meantone tunings, and I can already see many non-classical songs (in particular, pop and CWM) sounding much better in 31-TET instead of 12-TET. I have some songs in 19-TET and 31-TET in my music collection, and I've showed them to a lot of my friends. I also love to blow their minds when I tell them how B and C♭, F♯ and G♭, or C♯ and D♭ can be different pitches, and how this distinction can actually be very useful in many cases. Want a darker sound? Use D♯ minor. Want a brighter sound? Use E♭ minor.
This is interesting. Equal tempered tuning is wonderful and amazing. But I've been telling people for years that it's a "cancer". People look at me strange when I say that, but I explain that when other cultures find it, they seem to adopt it and lose their own music in it. I've been getting into Flamenco lately, and I've noticed that the vocals sound "unusual" as if they're influenced by the middle east. I'm wondering if there is a micro-tuning going on there as well. I would think the focus on the guitar would tend to force equal tempered tuning. And I know the guitar is typically playing phrygian dominant. But it sounds to me like the vocals are stepping outside of even the middle eastern sound of phrygian dominant.
@@Anonymous-df8it The big advantage of equal temperaments, whether they use 12, 19 or 53 tones is that they enable interval-preserving modulation. You can play any tune in any of the possible keys without it changing. Those three numbers also happen to produce some of the purest intervals.
12:00 love it it really sounds much better that way. there is a Sikah-Hijaz maqam that's an in-between version of a Double Harmonic scale 1 3 1 2 1 3 1 and a Sikah (tetrachord) type 1,5 2 1,5 2 1,5 2 1,5. So there is also 3 types of intervals, four smaller then a semi-and-a-quarter tone, two bigger then a whole tone and one aprox. a whole tone. By the way there is also the concept of all the pitches not being fixed and moving (most of the time) inflections, within Carnatic and North Indian music. Thanks very much for sharing the name of the composing software will have to check it out since my focus is very much on non standard tuning latetly.
The thing is that equal temperament tunings are able to switch keys and retain the same intervals, while they change if its not equal temperament. My favorite tuning system is 19 equal temperament, because it has better tuned 3rds and 5ths that are closer to the simple ratios they are based on, it has major and minor but also supermajor and subminor, and it just adds more flavour. 12 tone equal temperament music can also be translated well to 19 tone by using subset of 19 tone.
@@keegimujaltold1454 A subminor third, for example, is between a major second and a minor third. A neutral third is halfway between a minor and major third. A supermajor third is between a major third and a perfect fourth.
DBC This is a really good effort. Please, continue. One issue I would like you to pursue is how the tuning is done. My sense is that most music is tuned with the overtones of a string. Yet, gamelan (and related music) has different tuning with an ear to the overtones of metal, the gong. I would not be surprised if the tuning in Central Africa relates to the overtones of a drum.
Something ive started to notice is that guitar intonation and tuning is very unique to the individual. It's sort of like they all have their own version of what in tune is for them but because guitars are always a trade off it gives each player their own "thing". All guitarists do this to some degree but for me personally, i constantly adjust the intonation of the notes with my fretting hand in conjunction with picking velocity to get the result im looking for and I always tune by ear based on what i need to do. When Im playing im not thinking about "changing the pitch" as much as "this note will need to be 'brighter'" or this chord will need to "blend in" (tends to be closer to "just intonation"). I suppose my idea of "in tune" is "as close as i can get the note to the frequency it needs to be for what im trying to express"; which is sometimes "out of tune" (flatter thirds in rock music, slightly brighter #9s in blues, flatter b9s for darker sounds). For one friend of mine its "everything is green when i hit the open string" and im a bit envious of that because they get this huge, rich and 'consistent' sound. But its a little different for everyone.
Such a fascinating video - thank you! I'd love to know more about whether modulation or changing key has an equivalent in other tuning systems or if it is really only a device used with western/equal temperament music.
is it strange that while I don't really listen to a whole lot of world music (although I went through a Vas and Niyaz phase many years ago), but none of the examples in this video sound particularly 'off' to me, in fact, most of it, especially the Iranian examples are very pleasant. I guess my pitch isn't the greatest and maybe the closer you are to having perfect pitch, the more jarring and "out of tune" tunings that you are not accustomed to sound?
@alejandrothefader same here, I also have perfect pitch but because the majority of notes are either very close to 12tet or the relationship between them is so similar to what I'm used to it sounds very pleasant.
I don't think so... I don't have perfect pitch but it's not shabby either as I'm cery good at singing in tune and harmonising with others. And nothing except Arabic sounded off to me but that might be my unfamiliarity since the other examples I somewhat dipped my toes in. Gamelan is a curious case, to me the more I listen to it, the more of the "spooky" quality it has disappears and gets replaced with a peaceful trance like feeling. I think it's that you can have good "western" pitch but also understand other pitches well if you have a flexible mind and get used to em.
Great that you bring up the subject! Tuning diversity is indeed a worringly endangered aspect of music. But then I find it strange that you yourself use “equal-tempered tuning” as a synonym for 12-edo! There are lots of equal-tempered tunings that are completely different. Perhaps most relevantly, the 13-edt Bohlen-Pierce tuning divides the just-intonation 12th, i.e. the interval that triples the frequency (aka tritave) into thirteen steps, and can thus approximate the 3:5:7 chord much the same way 12-edo can approximate the 4:5:6 major chord. I personally think 31-edo would be an excellent standardised “default tuning”, since it can represent most Western music just as well as 12-edo (much of it arguably better, because closer to just intonation), plus 7-limit intervals (Barbershop harmonic seventh), in-between steps that might also be usable for Arabic and Persian melody, and even odd 11-limits intervals that would extend Bohlen-Pierce. Yet it would give the benefit of 12-edo that everybody can immediately play together without needing to first fine-tune a bunch of individual scale degrees.
Great video! Only tuning contribution I can think of is the Sikuri tradition near Lake Titicaca. It's a style that uses siku (panflutes) and drums. There's a lot of interesting features to it, but relevantly the sikus are not precisely in tune with each other. They are all slightly out of tune with one another, and this has the effect of thickening the sound. Similar to how in a strong ensemble the tiny intonation differences actual culminate in a thick texture.
4 ปีที่แล้ว
Great Video! A video on Japanese, Chinese and Korean traditional music tuning systems would be nice.
To be honest I definitely hear the "acceptable" equipentatonic scale you demonstrated as more pleasant than the first one, and the example of two instruments being turned differently just works. I won't pretend like I understand how it works or that I could replicate it, but I totally does imo.
Hi, one or comments, firstly many thanks for the video. I have taken slide guitar lessons with Michael Messer and it is common to have the slide play away from the fret position - this creates interest in the piece. Also the bending of strings to find notes inbeween the norm is common place. On a different point I have just acquired a double tracking effects pedal that enables two notes at different tunings to be added to the basic note. This creates a full and varying texture - the pedal is no constant in its double tracking, it varies during a single note! Finally, and on a different point the latest strobe guitar tuner I have bought has a sweetening facility which changes the open string tuning to try and bring the guitar more into tune up the neck. This is done as a normal guitar does not hold tuning up the neck by design. David
12 tone equal temperament is an oversimplified system that western composers used approximately for the last 100 years (I still don’t know why). I like the baroque’s well temperament idea that every scale has a different color for example g minor versus f# minor. Just one semitone away. Why we imprisoned ourselves to this @#$!! unmusical system is something I can not explain. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven didn’t use it (they preferred the well temperaments over the equal, that’s why in ”Das wohltemperierte Klavier” each piece character depends on the tonality). Why we still use it? Practically as you said it is used only on piano/keyboard and percussion repertoires. Thank you for your great videos.
Because in Europe everyone was playing something different and everyone was annoyed by everyone elses tuning if Im not mistaken. JS Bach made Equal Temperament. Bach died around the time Mozart was born and Ludwig Van was born about 20 years later. th-cam.com/video/41g2fSYZ4Sc/w-d-xo.html
@@whatabouttheearth JS Bach did not made equal temperament (it was already known and it was a bad alternative of that time) and "well tempered" is not equal to "equal tempered" :)
The first five notes of the Bayati scale sound a lot like the song "Rattlesnake" by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, which would totally make sense as they based their tuning off of Arabic music. It's like a little musical Easter egg
Alexander Ellis's English translation of Helmhotlz's Sensations of Tone has some really interesting appendices about his researches into tuning and temperament. Even though the book is over a hundred years old, I keep finding inspiring leads to follow in it.
I'm surprised that indian classical music has not been mentioned in this video. In this musical tradition one mostly refrains from sounding several notes at once and thus does not worry about "harmony" but focuses on "melody". I've been lead to believe that indian classical music requires its practitioners to distinguish and learn pitches and scales with more precision and variation in terms of tuning than any other known musical tradition.
Using scordatura with 1/4 notes was a great way for me to explore the guitar in a fresh new way. I've become quite fascinated with arabic and other scale systems.
Hi David, I've been binge watching your channel since discovering it a couple of days ago. Wonderful stuff! I'd like to suggest a topic for you to tackle: synaesthesia and how it relates/affects a composer's work.
Byzantine music! it is modal and the way a scale is used is close to the one in Maqam. In addition to this what happens between the notes is as much important as the notes. Byzantine music is using divisions of the Pythagorean monochord in a lot of different ways, producing different modes with a different number of notes. Last but not least, most of the times the divisions of the "scale" are different when a melody goes up and down.
I think a side benefit of the western style of equal temperament is it's quite easy to manipulate the listener's emotions by stepping outside of that system, since the ears of the vast majority of listeners are very finely tuned to that system. I quite often will step outside this system in order to give the music an off kilter feel, or make something sound emotionally unstable, by pulling the note that resolves a melody slightly out of tune by say a quarter tone. The ear expects that resolution, and both gets it and doesn't get it leading to a very strange kind of musical cognitive dissonance. I agree that more explorations into alternative tunings are needed, but I also think we aren't necessarily beholden to those 12 notes even in traditionally western music. It just takes players who know how to pull things like that off and can internalise the intended effect this off tune playing can have.
Anyone who plays electric guitar is naturally hitting those "quarter tones" pretty much all the time because that thing just never stays in tune. Especially when you go further up the neck, but for some reason we tell ourselves that what we're hearing is "true temperament".
Different tunings are like unique accents. They’re all the same language, but they each have their own distinctive sound that makes them more or less familiar
Indian classical music uses 12 tones, but they are not equally spaced or in any predefined tuning. Indian classical music revolves around ragas. Each raga is a scale + some rules and limitations regarding their melodic treatment. Each scale includes 7, sometimes 5, notes out of the 12. Out of the 12, only the tonic and the fifth are fixed (with the fifth being at exact 3/2 to the tonic). The rest are defined by intervals (in mathematical sense), within which they must reside. I don't know much beyond that, but afaik the tuning isn't fixed for each raga, though musicians do obviously take into account which raga they are going to play when tuning their instruments. And of course it's far more complicated than I described here, because I'm far from an expert.
excelent video , thanks, i studied dictate melodic and harmonic on cd and piano , like classical school and it can help a lot, you need to following the degrees ....beguining,,,,,elementary, ,,,,etc 3 years you need of perception class,is great video class thanks
String players learn, essentially, several approaches to tuning: open strings tuned in pure fifths; some degree (subjective) of raised leading tones; pure overtone-based consonant double-stops; and an approximation of equal temperament when playing with keyboard. Somehow we make this work.
Fascinating video! Thank You! I'd love to see some mention of ragas and Indian Classical Music though. Ragas like Marwa, Bhairavi, Darbari Kannada, Bhairav have interesting accidental notes. Some say it's just intonation tuning but I don't think it's correct assumption. All that is not really researched well IMO.
The lick :22. Also, this was absolutely amazing man!
Haha this video is so good, and this comment makes it even better
lick purists who don't play music much (like me) thing that the 6th/7th notes being different is important maybe
@Adam Neely haha I love to imagine that Kayhan Kalhor is sneakily adding in The Lick to his music
Adam, it was your video I watched like two years ago that first showed me not-equal temperament tunings. I think it was, anyways.
...are there any options for guitars to try these without buying a new fretboard? Seems that guitar is very equal-temp designed.
Hater's will say it's autotune.
"12 different pitches, all of which he thinks of as some kind of E"
Sounds like me trying to sing.
Alex Ball
i can do that too, imagine me trying "one note Samba" without ever hitting the note on the sheet.
Alex you are a God, how can you insult God
There is a lot of inaccurate information in this video, David. Almost all Middle Eastern modes are cousins of the Medieval/Liturgical modes. I have 2 videos on the topic. Look up Persian and Greek modes. Bayati is just Phrygian with a raised 2nd degree, Bayati in E : E F+ G A B (B-) C D E. In fact your image at 7:28" shows that Sikah, Bayati and Rast are all modes of the same scale, Your 3 lines are the shifted versions of each other. And These were just a few of the issues. There are no 12 versions of Ek, as the interval between C and Ek should have been measured and not just the pitch of the Ek. There are a lot of different C-D intervals in the history of Western music as well. There is more variability in the C to D interval than C to Ek. The interval between D to F+ is 340 cents in Persian music plus minus 4 or 5 cents! and closer to 150 cents in Arabic and Turkish music as they intentionally tried to temper the scales for modulation after a conference in Cairo 90 yrs ago or so.
😂
@@goodcyrus To be honest, Western musicians don't really understand modes anyways... It all ends up being just major or minor with extra sharps or flats (especially once you lay down the harmony). In particular, the Sikah/Huzam kind of mode makes no sense whatsoever from a Western music kind of perspective.
This video is so good I've watched it several times by now and I have no intent of stopping.
I've also sent it straight to all my Iranian friends (I'm not Iranian at all, and frankly I couldn't relate less, but that's the whole point, innit). So far they've all been commenting back how exceptionally well-put-together it is. No surprises there.
Thank you, Bruce. (Edit: sorry, David, of course. You can tell just how agitated I am. It's just that privately I always call you "that Bruce composer guy" all the time. Sorry again.)
I mean. Bruce sounds more badass. There's Bruce Wayne and Bruce Lee. Bruce is a badass name. King David vs Goliath is good too. But I still prefer Bruce. Because the Bruce's of the world kick ass.
That last point about multiple instruments is key. The amount of opportunities for polyphony available in Turkish or Arabic music is limited. It is harder to have multiple instruments play different things, let alone an entire orchestra if you are playing music based on maqam. This can probably be overcome with some ingeniuity, but it is really not in the tradition.
When I listened to Ben Johnston's string quartets, I realized that it is possible to somehow use microtonal tunings with multiple instruments. It does require some nontrivial musical genius (like Johnston) to do it, though.
I wish that Chebotarian's book on Aram Khachaturian's counterpoint were translated. There are many ways to introduce counterpoint to Eastern music.
I would say the typical one is to start a countermelody on the ripercussa of the scale, that is in a distictively different division of the measure.
There is one big difficulty that arises with counterpoint in Middle Eastern music. It is meter. It is very difficult to compose a counterpoint to a melody not knowing when it is going to end beforehand.
It's not quite as cool as using "real" instruments, but technology makes it very possible to play microtonal music along with other people! Just a few weeks ago I told my bandmate "ok, I'm gonna break your brain for a minute", tuned both our MIDI keyboards to 17edo, and told him to sit down and just experiment. I played chords and followed along with whatever he was doing. This was his first ever experience with microtonal music, and he had a blast-- and played some stuff that sounded pretty awesome, as well!
Awesome video. Loved it. People need to talk about this stuff more. The influence on the industrial revolution on and mass production really "fiinished off" a lot of regional tuning systems. You hear a lot about the 440 vs 432 hertz "conspiracy" but rarely about the more obvious 12 tet "conspiracy whose hegemony has made most of the world use a single truning system.
Throughout my life, I was only ever exposed to 12-TET. I was never even told that other tunings existed, so I never thought of notes as anything other than fixed frequencies of 440 Hz times 2 raised to the power of some whole number multiple of 12. Or 24. I had developed "perfect pitch" and deluded myself into thinking that it was some kind of superpower.
Come late 2022, and I finally got back into classical music on my own, during which I learned about the history of tuning in Western music. It was here that I discovered tunings such as 19-TET and 31-TET which are the modern equivalents of historical 1/3-comma and 1/4-comma meantone, and since then, microtonality and xenharmony have become my main interests within music as a whole. Since then, I've fundamentally changed the way I think about music.
I've also become increasingly disdainful towards how the terminology and concepts that most people are taught are specific to 12-TET, especially how there's no mention whatsoever that they're specific to 12-TET. People are being "locked in" to one tuning and they don't even get to know about alternatives.
I've had a similar experience, but on a much smaller scale (pun not intended), to your Iranian friend. I keep my harpsichord tuned to Young's temperament. A few years ago I took part (as a flautist) in a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto no. 3. The piano was in equal temperament, of course, and I found it excruciating at first to hear all those wide thirds. I tried to bribe the tuner (who also tunes my piano to Young's temperament) £50 to secretly put the concert hall's Bösendorfer into Young's. Unfortunately he refused.
Yeah, Valotti is my favourite.
😀😀😀 bribing a tuner
Bit difficult to find an unequal compromise temperament in which both c minor and E major sound good.
I have the opposite experience: my brain is so used to hearing equal-tempered thirds that the narrower justly tuned thirds sound "out of tune" to me.
This is the best video on music I have seen on TH-cam! I hope that the music world opens up more to different microtonal tunings.
Being an active member of the early music community I am glad the topic of tuning is being brought up in this fantastic channel!. The input from other cultures is a welcome and illuminating one but, as you briefly mention at the end, only looking at our western musical tradition we already see the issue. As a harpsichord player, I can say that one of the most appealing acoustic features of the instrument over modern keyboards (with equal temperament) is the common practice to use baroque temperaments on them, which tend to have much more accurate thirds and sixths in central keys. These intervals are the "souls" of triad chords and their inversions; one easily sees that they have served as the foundation of the emotional language of western tonal music for the most of modern history. Until I learnt about temperaments (when I had to tune my own harpsichord) I couldn't really tell why some pieces sounded so much richer and exciting on the harpsichord versus on the piano. As much as I love the piano, my favourite instrument of the western classical tradition by far, I think that it is a little tragedy that they are commonly tuned to equal temperament. I highly recommend the book "How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony: And Why You Should Care" by Ross Duffin on this topic, it reads lightly and it gives a very good overview of the history of western temperaments. I feel this reference adds nicely to the points being raised in your video, David. Thanks for the amazing job on your channel!
As a fanatic for Renaissance & baroque music, I really appreciate what you wrote. It would take years of listening to quality HIP before my brain began to understand why my ears were drawn to certain recordings much more than others. A lot of this, turns out, would have to do with specialized tunings specific to composition & instrument. "Why do I LOVE that sound so much ___? What IS that going on there?" I'm still on the very front end of figuring this all out, but what a fun journey of discovery.
On that note, I'll be picking up the book you brought up. This isn't the first time someone has recommended it, so I think it's time I finally read it.
Have you heard of the YT channel, "Early Music Sources"? Wonderfully researched & nicely-produced content. They have a vid series on historical tunings / temperaments which I think you'd very much enjoy.
Be blessed
There's a small tradition in the U.S. coming from Harry Partch and, competely separately, the early microtonalists including Terry Riley and La Monte Young, of tuning to pure intervals but incorporating much higher harmonics into the harmonic language than people typically see. Riley's "The Harp Of New Albion" is a great example of re-tuning a piano and taking advantage of the resulting unequal relationship between keys. Also, when the strings in a piano harp are tuned to resonate more strongly with each other, the sound just becomes ridiculously rich. I'm also a big fan of the string quartets of Ben Johnston, who is a student of Partch's.
This kind of music is not just limited to the U.S, it is an increasingly 'common' part of European music too.
Ben Johnston has a "Suite for Microtonal Piano" as well.
Didn't know he was a student of Partch!
th-cam.com/video/vwQxCi6pSEk/w-d-xo.html
Yup! Other massive works for piano specifically with this idea in mind that I know of are La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano, Michael Harrison's Revelation, and Kyle Gann's Hyperchromatica. Although, that last one is not for traditional piano, but is for 3 Disklaviers.
Another Ben Johnston fan checking in here! I wonder if the new Dorico update is flexible enough to render demos of some of his scores...
@@furmanarrangements I use Dorico. Yes it is. I think that some people are a bit skeptical of it's limitations compared to Johnston notation, but IMHO the limitations aren't a big deal. A fairly common approach is to set the custom tonality to 1200EDO and just set pitches according to cent deviations, and to add accidentals as you need them. Dorico only recognizes one accidental per note, so (for example) if you want both a -A and a --A, you will need to create one accidental for '-' and another for '--'. I don't think that's really much of a hassle, because once you create a 'compound' accidental, it's there and you don't have to recreate it. And there won't really be *that* many unless you're doing some really funky modulations like in Johnston's String Quartet No. 7.
Am I the only one finding the hardino tuning more beautiful than regular tuning?
I think it sounds so good because it's different, refreshing to hear but still close enough to our scales that we're not lost
No
Yes!! Truly it sounds so perfect right away! There's no turning back, now equal temperament will sound off forever haha
Yes it does sounds beautiful in its context. But so those the one with the higher 2nd. I will not have my guitar re-fretted to it any day soonXD
good luck making music out of it
I was a part of my University's gamelan Ensemble, and it was actually very important that the tunings between instruments were offset enough to allow a shimmering texture.
Even common practice period (western) music was tuned to 5-limit temperaments, sometimes with more than 12 pitch classes, sometimes with only 12. Hearing a meantone harpsichord is much different to a 12-edo one.
When I was at Michigan State University in the late 70's, the music school's resident piano tuner (Owen Jorgensen) put on a tour-de-force concert one night, with at least 7 (perhaps 9?) pianos on the stage, all tuned differently. A short piece was played on each to illustrate something of its temperament. This was at the very beginning of the period instrument bandwagon, with its historically-correct tunings.
The highlight of the evening was the premiere of a piece written for him by the head of the composition department (James Niblock, if I recall). Jorgensen called it "seven and five" tuning. The seven white notes of the piano were tuned in an equidistant fashion (from each other), and the five black keys similarly equidistant from each other. But the tunings of the white and black notes didn't have anything to do with the other color, except to follow one rule: as one went up a "chromatic" scale on the keyboard, going from a white to black note (or vice-versa) the up/down "direction" was never violated -- that is, going from say, F to F# could not go DOWN in pitch. Some of the adjacent-note intervals were vanishingly small, only a handful of cents.
I don't recall Jorgensen mentioning anything about those equidistant tunings in your video; my recollection is that he came up with this tuning merely as an intellectual exercise. I also don't recall getting anything from the evening other than a bit of a chin-scratch, and something to talk to the other theory nerds about.
Great video on an often overlooked subject!
A similar analysis in terms of frequency ratios would be even more interesting as consonance between notes is based on the resonance of their audible overtones.
Millions of thanks for this, really appreciate your work, saludos desde barcelona
Regarding the xylophone tunings of central Africa and Java, what are the overtone series from the traditional instruments? Western music cares about dividing the octave in large part because our traditional instruments (strings, woodwinds) have fairly clean overtone series.
But the instrument shown at 10:40 has fairly thick-looking bars, and the sound decays quickly after the instrument is struck. In that case, the natural harmony for the first overtone might not be the octave. If my uninformed supposition is correct, it could go a way towards explaining why the traditional tuning schemes place less emphasis on the octave as a fundamental unit of pitch division.
Overtone series are pretty much the same for every instrument within the given laws of physics and atmosphere of the planet we happen to inhabit. "Western music cares about dividing the octave" not because of the instruments, but because it was difficult to play in ensembles while different instruments were tuned justly to different fundamentals thus creating dissonance while playing the same note.
> Overtone series are pretty much the same for every instrument within the given laws of physics and atmosphere of the planet we happen to inhabit.
Yes, but I'm wondering about non-idealities. Pianos are tuned with a Railsback curve because of inharmonicity due to string thickness/stiffness, and as a result the octave on a piano is ever so slightly sharp.
The instruments depicted here seem to be non-ideal, hence my speculation. It may be that one of our classic tunings (say a Pythagorean tuning) would result in noticeable dissonance with these instruments, even when playing with itself rather than as part of an ensemble.
@@chethelesser The overtone series for a note on a given instrument isn't the same thing as the harmonic series for a given pitch. Strings (and presumably, thick xylophone bars) have inharmonicity as Majromax said, tuning Caribbean steel drums involves tuning the overtones as well, and ordinary metal bells have inharmonic overtones.
Or take this video as an example: th-cam.com/video/v4ELxKKT5Rw/w-d-xo.html The overtones on this rubber "drumskin" is 1, 1.92, 2.64 and 2.76 times the base frequency.
@@Majromax Have you heard of "Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale" by William Sethares? It's a book about how the timbre of an instrument relates to what intervals played on it sound consonant or dissonant. I haven't read it yet, but from what I know about it, it seems sort of like you're talking about the same kind of thing. If anything, take a listen to the sound samples on the web page, they're really interesting. sethares.engr.wisc.edu/ttss.html
@@chethelesser The harmonic series only applies to things which are very long in one dimension and very narrow in the other two, like strings or air pipes. Resonators of a different shape will have a different series of overtones. For example, the overtones of a drum are far from the harmonic series because the resonator is a flat sheet of material. The overtones of a xylophone will also be different again, because the resonator is a thick bar of material.
This video deserves some kind of award.
Very interesting: I was not aware that Central Africa has tunings much like Indonesian-Gamelans’ “Slendro” (approximately 5TET) and “Pelog” (approximately 7TET)! Thanks, Bruce.
Isn't Pelog approximately 9-TET?
@@electric7487, I don’t claim to be a super-expert on gamelan music, but I’m pretty sure it’s 7.
@@mr88cet Most sources I've read online say that Pelog can be approximated by a 7-note subset of 9TET instead of 7TET. And in both Slendro and Pelog, octaves are often stretched.
@@electric7487, probably worthwhile looking it up in the Xenharmonic Wiki (TH-cam probably won’t let me post the URL).
In iranian traditional Music they use something almost similar to modes called "Dastgah" "دستگاه". In which they tune some degrees almost a forth step lower which is called "koron" "کرن" and some degrees almost a forth higher which is called "sori" سری"
This way the song feeling depends a lot on the Dastgah we choose to play in ( way more than classical music). And there books that explain which Dastgah gives which feeling.
In the Byzantine Chant tradition we have both systems coexisting next to each other.
We use our modern day descendants of what are the ancient Greek modes.
Doric - for example - is still rendered and sung in its "soft diatonic" way
(and not hard, which corresponds to ET).
definition: a ET full tone interval (ex. from C to D on the piano) would be cutup in 12 microtones
the soft-diatonic Doric mode starting from D would be rendered like this:
D to E would be 10 microtones, so it sounds a little bit darker. (the ET would have 12)
E to F is 8 microtones, rendering F in its familiar ET place.
F to G is 12 - standard ET
G to A is also 12 - standard ET
but A to B is again 10 microtones, mimicking in what is called "tetrachord relationship" the distance of D to E in a 10 microtones interval; this B would sound a bit darker/bluesier if you will
B to C is 8 microtones, placing C in it's familiar ET place,
and C to D is again 12 microtones, rendering the higher D in it's perfect octave as we know it
Amazing!! The Central African xylophone part was the most interesting thing I've heard in a long time. As more time passes, I become more and more convinced ethnomusicology is the most interesting part of the study of music :D
Awesome video as usual!
I'm not quite sure but there's a theory about "quarter tones" in arabic music saying that the closer the country is to the equator, the lover the quarter tone interval (used by the majority of the locals) tends to be. a good comparison can be done on the difference between Turkish quarter tones and Egyptian.
Probably a bit late to the comments but Sethares's work on relating harmony to timbre it is rly fascinating and a nice culture-independent approach to analyzing harmony and tuning. Would love to see a video about it at some point.
THIS is the video I've been looking for, for YEARS. Great intro to understanding different tunings with examples. Now I can properly show friends and family why the music I often listen to sounds "off".
This is fascinating. However, using cents to describe the tunings is less that illuminating. I would like to know more about how these systems are tuned by ear and the relationships to the overtone series.
The 185 cent second step of hardino tuning is nearly a 10/9.
google "ratio to cents". I've made lots of spreadsheets, and learned how to do things like that myself systematically. I would encourage anyone to do the same. Then you won't depend on anyone else telling you the maths. Once you have accurate measurements of discreet pitches (cents) you can do loads of fun stuff with the numbers.
The cent is just a unit of measurement, that's all.
@@rosiefay7283 True, but it's an odd unit method of describing ratios. And where else do we divide a base unit by 1200?
@@stephenspackman5573 The Imperial and US Customary systems: Write that down! Write that down!
A fantabulous video. You are now in my reference database, congratulations.
Brilliant.The way you use sheet music in your videos is so good.Thank you.
Love the mention of Balinese gamelan! You should definitely have mention the pengumbang/pengisep paired tuning system, it's very fascinating. Also Selonding and Gong Luang tunings are out of this world - they preserve a much older tuning style that was borrowed from Java in the 14th century, but is now not often heard in Java. Also, the most common kind of tuning in Bali (Pelog Selisir) has the same concept of narrow, medium, and wide intervals but includes ~100c intervals, semitones; so you get hemi-tonic pentatonic scales!
Thank you very much David Bruce. This is one of your best videos so far. Congratulations! great video.
I looove Ballaké Sissoko's music, glad you mentioned it. Great job and thank you for helping us expand our perception of sound and music 🙏🏽
Man David, that was the most insightful, respectful and tempered (no pun) take on various tunings that I have heard. The emphasis on other tunings not being "imprecise" or "inferior" is so important - without losing track and calling all tunings interchangeable - equal temperament is not the standard by accident (unlike, say, English as the standard international language). One would wish for a balance where this standardization wouldn't necessarily force other tunings into obscurity. But I guess that is the downside to globalization.
Great video! I was amazed by the intervallic richness of differently tuned Central African instruments.
Tuning is why I was so enamoured by Spectralism when I first found out about it. Thanks for doing this video!
Fantastic openings....tqvm
2:44 reminds me of how when I started to play a second instrument it used to take me a minute to switch between them (alto sax and bass clarinet, witch are very similar, but are both transposition instruments) because I had to remember that in the lowest octave they play different, but now I hardly have to think when I switch, other than scales sometimes.
I adore this, thank you so much! Sharing now. I'm a big fan of classical Indian music but I don't know much about the tuning systems. Maybe look into that?
Gold. Your humor notwithstanding. The section on central African xylophones (synchronistically at 10 mins?) reminds me of the roots of rock-n-roll itself. Aside from our Peter Gabriels and Paul Simons helping bridge the sophistication of a land of 200+ gods for the drum alone (see Harry Belafonte video on rhythm).... I personally would die to put out the best ever *reggae* music from a white boy in a new genre similar to what the Police attempted to do after being introduced to the African tradition. Sorry to delve into rhythm but you covered harmony and melody so well. ;)
I am a microtonalist. I love 19, 31, and 53 divisions of the octave.
Fantastic and brilliant! Giving specifics to concepts only aware of in a most general sense!
I love the challenge you pose to my ear! I use GarageBand app and my favourite scales are the Klezmer and “Japanese” scales. But, you’ve opened me up to so many new scales. Thank you for waking me up!
Great to see Toumani Diabate here! I discovered him many years ago and was amazed and delighted by his first album.
In recent months I encountered a "musician" who insisted that there were only 12 notes,
no matter what kind of music they were used for.
I knew better and tried to explain to him that different scales exist, but he didn't get the idea.
A video illustrating someone the examples mentioned in the comment section would be rich. David, I think you opened a long conversation.
nice vid. Curious that harmonics, unequal temperaments, and Just Intonation were not mentioned.. Also, people often assume that 'western music' has long used the equal tempered scale, when in reality, it only came to standard use in the Romantic Era.
Bach didn't write in equal temperament contrary to popular belief.
th-cam.com/video/OuYqMUfYA50/w-d-xo.html
Beautiful musical example choices. A clear and intricate explanation. Thank you.
you should check out transcriptions of traditional persian music. they divide the octave into 24 quater tones. they include quater sharps/flats in the key signature.
Really great content! Thank you so much!
I do see a Dugga drum in one of the shelves behind you. How come you’ve not included the microtonal musical practice in Indian music?
A point I was longing for was - ‘sustain’ of notes becomes deciding factor when we are judging the consonance between them.
I think that is the reason majority of Indian drum instruments also need quite precise tuning to the tonic.
woah, i had no idea dorico had that functionality! in addition to free meter, it's amazing they managed to cram such incredibly progressive and unorthodox/non-western concepts into an app that is effectively created for the purpose of allowing western musicians to write music in a western/orthodox format
I recently became aware of music in other tunings than the usual 12 EDO we hear in almost all western music, and it opened up an entirely new world of music to me. There are so many harmonics and chords that cannot be expressed in 12 EDO.
Most of all I like 22 EDO. This is also an equal temperament tuning, but the octave is divided into 22 tunes, instead of the 12 tunes we are used to. I'm still struggling to fully understand 22 EDO, but I like the challenge, and like the new harmonics possible. For example I hear two different kinds of minor chords in 22 EDO, where I only know of one in 12 EDO.
I've been playing music since I was 4, and I picked things up fairly quickly. I also gained what most people call "perfect pitch" from a young age. But my "ability" to identify notes without a reference combined with me having only ever been exposed to 12-TET for most of my life resulted in me thinking of notes as absolute frequencies and intervals as fixed mathematical constants, which I was able to get away with for most of my life.
While I am classically trained, in mid-to-late 2021 I started getting into singing, and my gateway into singing was actually contemporary worship. The very simple, strictly diatonic nature of most CWM was a big culture shock to me, but I was still thinking in terms of 12 firmly placed pitches in each octave.
However, late last year, I got back into classical music and discovered historical tunings (in particular, meantone tunings flatter than 12-TET and unequal well temperaments) and their modern equivalents, during which I realised that approaching music from a purely absolute perspective was completely wrong. After listening to much music in 31-TET, 19-TET, and a piece played in 43-TET, I personally think that CWM's simplicity and strictly diatonic nature lends itself perfectly to flatter-than-12 meantone tunings, and I can already see many non-classical songs (in particular, pop and CWM) sounding much better in 31-TET instead of 12-TET.
I have some songs in 19-TET and 31-TET in my music collection, and I've showed them to a lot of my friends. I also love to blow their minds when I tell them how B and C♭, F♯ and G♭, or C♯ and D♭ can be different pitches, and how this distinction can actually be very useful in many cases. Want a darker sound? Use D♯ minor. Want a brighter sound? Use E♭ minor.
This is interesting. Equal tempered tuning is wonderful and amazing. But I've been telling people for years that it's a "cancer". People look at me strange when I say that, but I explain that when other cultures find it, they seem to adopt it and lose their own music in it.
I've been getting into Flamenco lately, and I've noticed that the vocals sound "unusual" as if they're influenced by the middle east. I'm wondering if there is a micro-tuning going on there as well. I would think the focus on the guitar would tend to force equal tempered tuning. And I know the guitar is typically playing phrygian dominant. But it sounds to me like the vocals are stepping outside of even the middle eastern sound of phrygian dominant.
Why? Is 12tet just better?
@@Anonymous-df8it The big advantage of equal temperaments, whether they use 12, 19 or 53 tones is that they enable interval-preserving modulation. You can play any tune in any of the possible keys without it changing. Those three numbers also happen to produce some of the purest intervals.
@@molybdaenmornell123hopp5 Couldn't you get arbitrarily pure intervals by subdividing the octave arbitrarily finely?
12:00 love it it really sounds much better that way. there is a Sikah-Hijaz maqam that's an in-between version of a
Double Harmonic scale 1 3 1 2 1 3 1 and a
Sikah (tetrachord) type 1,5 2 1,5 2 1,5 2 1,5.
So there is also 3 types of intervals, four smaller then a semi-and-a-quarter tone, two bigger then a whole tone and one aprox. a whole tone.
By the way there is also the concept of all the pitches not being fixed and moving (most of the time) inflections, within Carnatic and North Indian music. Thanks very much for sharing the name of the composing software will have to check it out since my focus is very much on non standard tuning latetly.
The thing is that equal temperament tunings are able to switch keys and retain the same intervals, while they change if its not equal temperament. My favorite tuning system is 19 equal temperament, because it has better tuned 3rds and 5ths that are closer to the simple ratios they are based on, it has major and minor but also supermajor and subminor, and it just adds more flavour. 12 tone equal temperament music can also be translated well to 19 tone by using subset of 19 tone.
what are supermajor and subminor?
My problem with 19 equal temperament is that the major 2nd is very out of tune so any melody is either also out of tune or needs large jumps.
@@keegimujaltold1454
A subminor third, for example, is between a major second and a minor third.
A neutral third is halfway between a minor and major third.
A supermajor third is between a major third and a perfect fourth.
A whole colorful world of intonation! 🙇♂️
DBC This is a really good effort. Please, continue. One issue I would like you to pursue is how the tuning is done. My sense is that most music is tuned with the overtones of a string. Yet, gamelan (and related music) has different tuning with an ear to the overtones of metal, the gong. I would not be surprised if the tuning in Central Africa relates to the overtones of a drum.
Shoutout to the vulfpack
Fascinating video. Not a musician or player but find all of these videos very interesting, even as a non-specialist listener.
That's a great video and it should be watched by all musicians for widening their perception of music. Thank you 😊.
Something ive started to notice is that guitar intonation and tuning is very unique to the individual. It's sort of like they all have their own version of what in tune is for them but because guitars are always a trade off it gives each player their own "thing". All guitarists do this to some degree but for me personally, i constantly adjust the intonation of the notes with my fretting hand in conjunction with picking velocity to get the result im looking for and I always tune by ear based on what i need to do. When Im playing im not thinking about "changing the pitch" as much as "this note will need to be 'brighter'" or this chord will need to "blend in" (tends to be closer to "just intonation").
I suppose my idea of "in tune" is "as close as i can get the note to the frequency it needs to be for what im trying to express"; which is sometimes "out of tune" (flatter thirds in rock music, slightly brighter #9s in blues, flatter b9s for darker sounds). For one friend of mine its "everything is green when i hit the open string" and im a bit envious of that because they get this huge, rich and 'consistent' sound. But its a little different for everyone.
thank you ever so much for this video
I love your videos. They really are outstanding.
Such a fascinating video - thank you! I'd love to know more about whether modulation or changing key has an equivalent in other tuning systems or if it is really only a device used with western/equal temperament music.
is it strange that while I don't really listen to a whole lot of world music (although I went through a Vas and Niyaz phase many years ago), but none of the examples in this video sound particularly 'off' to me, in fact, most of it, especially the Iranian examples are very pleasant.
I guess my pitch isn't the greatest and maybe the closer you are to having perfect pitch, the more jarring and "out of tune" tunings that you are not accustomed to sound?
It was the same for me, I also barely noticed a difference in the Intervals of the african Xylophone
It is sounds pleasant, just the "out of tune" notes sounds quite weird and new, at least to me. (forgive my english)
Likewise, all examples in this video sounded beautiful and not "out of tune" to me.
But then again, I like Autechre.
@alejandrothefader same here, I also have perfect pitch but because the majority of notes are either very close to 12tet or the relationship between them is so similar to what I'm used to it sounds very pleasant.
I don't think so... I don't have perfect pitch but it's not shabby either as I'm cery good at singing in tune and harmonising with others. And nothing except Arabic sounded off to me but that might be my unfamiliarity since the other examples I somewhat dipped my toes in. Gamelan is a curious case, to me the more I listen to it, the more of the "spooky" quality it has disappears and gets replaced with a peaceful trance like feeling. I think it's that you can have good "western" pitch but also understand other pitches well if you have a flexible mind and get used to em.
Really a superbe video. With some beautifully sounding music.
Great that you bring up the subject! Tuning diversity is indeed a worringly endangered aspect of music.
But then I find it strange that you yourself use “equal-tempered tuning” as a synonym for 12-edo! There are lots of equal-tempered tunings that are completely different. Perhaps most relevantly, the 13-edt Bohlen-Pierce tuning divides the just-intonation 12th, i.e. the interval that triples the frequency (aka tritave) into thirteen steps, and can thus approximate the 3:5:7 chord much the same way 12-edo can approximate the 4:5:6 major chord.
I personally think 31-edo would be an excellent standardised “default tuning”, since it can represent most Western music just as well as 12-edo (much of it arguably better, because closer to just intonation), plus 7-limit intervals (Barbershop harmonic seventh), in-between steps that might also be usable for Arabic and Persian melody, and even odd 11-limits intervals that would extend Bohlen-Pierce. Yet it would give the benefit of 12-edo that everybody can immediately play together without needing to first fine-tune a bunch of individual scale degrees.
31EDO seems to be essentially a drop-in replacement for quarter-comma meantone, and would work well for Renaissance or Baroque music.
I find the theory behind ancient Byzantine chant really enriching, especially in understanding the ways it ties intricately to its church's theology.
Great video!
Excellent video! Made me think of my first encounter with microtones through King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s album, Flying Microtonal Banana.
This is a gem, I love you.
Really interesting video - thank you for all the effort you put in.
Great video! Only tuning contribution I can think of is the Sikuri tradition near Lake Titicaca. It's a style that uses siku (panflutes) and drums. There's a lot of interesting features to it, but relevantly the sikus are not precisely in tune with each other. They are all slightly out of tune with one another, and this has the effect of thickening the sound. Similar to how in a strong ensemble the tiny intonation differences actual culminate in a thick texture.
Great Video!
A video on Japanese, Chinese and Korean traditional music tuning systems would be nice.
Amazing video, I love what you put out here! Also, Dorico
very nice episode
brilliant! thanks for putting this together!
To be honest I definitely hear the "acceptable" equipentatonic scale you demonstrated as more pleasant than the first one, and the example of two instruments being turned differently just works. I won't pretend like I understand how it works or that I could replicate it, but I totally does imo.
Thank you!
I heared it was the spread of the piano accordion that killed of many exotic tuning systems
Hi, one or comments, firstly many thanks for the video. I have taken slide guitar lessons with Michael Messer and it is common to have the slide play away from the fret position - this creates interest in the piece. Also the bending of strings to find notes inbeween the norm is common place. On a different point I have just acquired a double tracking effects pedal that enables two notes at different tunings to be added to the basic note. This creates a full and varying texture - the pedal is no constant in its double tracking, it varies during a single note! Finally, and on a different point the latest strobe guitar tuner I have bought has a sweetening facility which changes the open string tuning to try and bring the guitar more into tune up the neck. This is done as a normal guitar does not hold tuning up the neck by design. David
12 tone equal temperament is an oversimplified system that western composers used approximately for the last 100 years (I still don’t know why).
I like the baroque’s well temperament idea that every scale has a different color for example g minor versus f# minor. Just one semitone away. Why we imprisoned ourselves to this @#$!! unmusical system is something I can not explain. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven didn’t use it (they preferred the well temperaments over the equal, that’s why in ”Das wohltemperierte Klavier” each piece character depends on the tonality). Why we still use it? Practically as you said it is used only on piano/keyboard and percussion repertoires.
Thank you for your great videos.
Because in Europe everyone was playing something different and everyone was annoyed by everyone elses tuning if Im not mistaken. JS Bach made Equal Temperament. Bach died around the time Mozart was born and Ludwig Van was born about 20 years later.
th-cam.com/video/41g2fSYZ4Sc/w-d-xo.html
@@whatabouttheearth JS Bach did not made equal temperament (it was already known and it was a bad alternative of that time) and "well tempered" is not equal to "equal tempered" :)
The first five notes of the Bayati scale sound a lot like the song "Rattlesnake" by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, which would totally make sense as they based their tuning off of Arabic music. It's like a little musical Easter egg
Alexander Ellis's English translation of Helmhotlz's Sensations of Tone has some really interesting appendices about his researches into tuning and temperament. Even though the book is over a hundred years old, I keep finding inspiring leads to follow in it.
Amazing!
I'm surprised that indian classical music has not been mentioned in this video. In this musical tradition one mostly refrains from sounding several notes at once and thus does not worry about "harmony" but focuses on "melody". I've been lead to believe that indian classical music requires its practitioners to distinguish and learn pitches and scales with more precision and variation in terms of tuning than any other known musical tradition.
I am from Iran also. I am playing Santur
Isn't it great that the slightly-out-of-tune Bob Dylan and Hedrix guitar actually add to the charm and memorability of the music
Using scordatura with 1/4 notes was a great way for me to explore the guitar in a fresh new way. I've become quite fascinated with arabic and other scale systems.
Hi David,
I've been binge watching your channel since discovering it a couple of days ago. Wonderful stuff! I'd like to suggest a topic for you to tackle: synaesthesia and how it relates/affects a composer's work.
Byzantine music! it is modal and the way a scale is used is close to the one in Maqam. In addition to this what happens between the notes is as much important as the notes. Byzantine music is using divisions of the Pythagorean monochord in a lot of different ways, producing different modes with a different number of notes. Last but not least, most of the times the divisions of the "scale" are different when a melody goes up and down.
I think a side benefit of the western style of equal temperament is it's quite easy to manipulate the listener's emotions by stepping outside of that system, since the ears of the vast majority of listeners are very finely tuned to that system. I quite often will step outside this system in order to give the music an off kilter feel, or make something sound emotionally unstable, by pulling the note that resolves a melody slightly out of tune by say a quarter tone. The ear expects that resolution, and both gets it and doesn't get it leading to a very strange kind of musical cognitive dissonance. I agree that more explorations into alternative tunings are needed, but I also think we aren't necessarily beholden to those 12 notes even in traditionally western music. It just takes players who know how to pull things like that off and can internalise the intended effect this off tune playing can have.
Anyone who plays electric guitar is naturally hitting those "quarter tones" pretty much all the time because that thing just never stays in tune. Especially when you go further up the neck, but for some reason we tell ourselves that what we're hearing is "true temperament".
Brillant!
I expected to hate music that doesn't follow the system my ears are used to. But most of these feel just fine.
Amazing video. Thank you.
Different tunings are like unique accents. They’re all the same language, but they each have their own distinctive sound that makes them more or less familiar
Indian classical music uses 12 tones, but they are not equally spaced or in any predefined tuning. Indian classical music revolves around ragas. Each raga is a scale + some rules and limitations regarding their melodic treatment. Each scale includes 7, sometimes 5, notes out of the 12. Out of the 12, only the tonic and the fifth are fixed (with the fifth being at exact 3/2 to the tonic). The rest are defined by intervals (in mathematical sense), within which they must reside. I don't know much beyond that, but afaik the tuning isn't fixed for each raga, though musicians do obviously take into account which raga they are going to play when tuning their instruments. And of course it's far more complicated than I described here, because I'm far from an expert.
excelent video , thanks, i studied dictate melodic and harmonic on cd and piano , like classical school and it can help a lot, you need to following the degrees ....beguining,,,,,elementary, ,,,,etc 3 years you need of perception class,is great video class thanks
Conceptual colonization & conversion. Interesting.
Where is the maqam sikah clip from? would love to hear the full clip. Thank you for your work!
String players learn, essentially, several approaches to tuning: open strings tuned in pure fifths; some degree (subjective) of raised leading tones; pure overtone-based consonant double-stops; and an approximation of equal temperament when playing with keyboard. Somehow we make this work.
Fascinating video! Thank You! I'd love to see some mention of ragas and Indian Classical Music though. Ragas like Marwa, Bhairavi, Darbari Kannada, Bhairav have interesting accidental notes. Some say it's just intonation tuning but I don't think it's correct assumption. All that is not really researched well IMO.