How Many Notes Are There? The Theory of Quarter Tones
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ม.ค. 2017
- It's common knowledge among music students that there are 12 notes. But, well, that's kinda weird, right? I mean, what is a note besides a name for a frequency? And there's way more than 12 frequencies out there. We tend to stop counting at half steps but there's no real reason we can't keep going, and the most common way to do that is with quarter tones, the notes between the cracks in our standard system. Quarter tones sit halfway between the half steps, and while they may sound weird and out of tune on their own, if you use them right, they can do some pretty amazing things!
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In today's episode, 12 Tone tackles 24 tone.
th-cam.com/video/G2jUhnCU9iA/w-d-xo.html
Well played sir xD
12 Tone and his twin brother
th-cam.com/video/8iaqW3yCoVE/w-d-xo.html
@@12tone lol
I would appreciate it if you made a video on the maqams and Arabic musical tradition! Love the channel!
E7 to Dd... Mind Blown...
^_^
I'd never done it before working on this video, but I saw some other people talking about it so I tried it out!
Quartertones do not sound as weird if you listen to them commonly, they sounded out of tune when I first heard them, but no I am almost entirely used to them.
Does it work if you have perfect pitch?
Platinum XYZ you can make anything sound good
@@Platinum_XYZ It tends to throw people with perfect pitch off sometimes, because their foundational knowledge about music seems to fall apart, especially if they grew up with 12-TET. It also seems like they can get used to it if they are exposed to it enough. From what I remember, Jacob Collier has perfect pitch, and he uses microtones all the time.
Word! Arabic music uses quarter tones extensively. Peace.
@@Platinum_XYZ Rick Beato's pre-teen son, who has perfect pitch, did say he just perceives microtones as being in between the common tones. He can also hum a specified quartertone by imagining it as being positioned between its two nearest common tones.
You hear 1/4 tone and 3/4 "bends" sometimes in metal, even though a 1/2 tone bend is most common.
True! They also detune by a quarter-tone sometimes!
in the tail end of Enter Sandman's solo, the guitar is sharp by around 30 - 40 cents, which sounds really striking
Pantera "Walk" main riff uses a quarter tone bend, doesn't it?
Please. Blues and Rock did it first.
I love bending the minor third by a quartertone when playing bluesy stuff on my guitar.
I tried using a quarter note once as the entire pitch of a mashup (something exactly between D and D#). And it somehow worked. It gave a strong feeling of nostalgia and calmness to me and that ended up making the entire mashup I made a lot better because of it.
Thanks to that experiment and experience I plan on using quarter tones (or any microtone I feel like using) more than the normal tones in my mashups.
In the late 1980s, I discovered 88CET tuning, which, among other interesting qualities, also has a neutral third. I find them fascinating because of their ambiguity: you can play the same notes three times in a row, and the first time it might sound major, then minor the next, then back to major!
It’s worth pointing out that the quartertone approximations to 9:7 and 7:6 are rather far off. I find that they make more sense to our ears if they are closer to accurate. 88CET nails both much more closely - about 4 cents. It nails 7:4 almost exactly.
BTW, I have never heard it called “superminor,” but “subminor.”
Also some scales like Persian/Arabic differ in microtone depending on whether you are ascending or descending the scale! Which is neat and fun to learn and play
Oh that's super cool! I absolutely have to check that out
Hang in there! Notes, notenames, the names of notes are NOT names we give to specific _frequencies_, but rather to "families of frequencies" related in some way. In western tradition, to frequencies differing by (approximately) 1200 units in a logarithm-of-base-2 space. Because ultimately, in music, we hear intervals, not frequencies per se.
Very true! Within the context being discussed here, though, we're looking at notes within an octave, and only one frequency per octave has any given name. For large swaths of theory, octave is irrelevant, so it's often easier to think of pitches as a shorthand for pitch classes and not worry about the distinction.
I tend to preserve distinctions just for the sake of curious people whom might wanna search and will be getting clashing info
Fair enough! I tend to find that non-experts often have trouble identifying which information is important and thus get distracted by over-specificity, so I try to strip things down to just what's relevant for the specific points I'm making, but both approaches are valuable!
I would disagree with strong arguments. But you're so lovely for replying twice in a single day I'm rather giving you a virtual hug. Cheers from Brasil for spreading the microtonal word! May the microgods bless thee!
John Smith Because there are a multiplicity of interesting effects which can be achieved through temperament which are intuitive but not absolutely just. For instance, a neutral triad with a harmonic seventh is kind of gibberish if you try to write it solely using pure frequency ratios, but the closeness of every interval within the chord to a relatively simple just ratio means that the chord *sounds* pure, particularly when ever so slightly tempered to, for instance, bisect the fifth and bring the distance between the third and seventh closer to 10/7.
One type of chord that quarter-tones does pretty well is an approximation of overtones 8, 11 and 14, so basically in Partch's notation 8:11:14. If we consider 'C' to be the root, the 1/1 (or 8/8). F-quarter sharp is pretty close to 11/8, and Bb is pretty close to 14/8 ( = 7/4 ). However, out of these, the approximation of 7/4 is not very good, and some other temperaments nail this much better. One can also 'flip' it like you'd flip a major chord into a minor, by replacing the F-quarter flat, to obtain 14/14, 14/11, 14/8.
My guitar isn’t horribly out of tune, I’m just using quarter tones
Great music theory joke
I love this video! Today my director mentioned her concert choir in college singing a piece that was in quarter tones, and I really wanted to learn more! This video is really informative!!
Nice, finally someone who knows that the world also exists outside europe, pretty rare with musical theorists!
Yeah, it's a hard thing to deal with 'cause my education focused so much on European theory that I don't really feel comfortable talking about other cultures as much, but I think it's really important to recognize that European music is considered the standard not because of any inherent quality but because of a long history of violent colonialism. Other cultures' music is just as rich, interesting, and important, it's just not what I'm an expert on.
I know I'm two months late but I really want to second this. I was able to take a class on music in the Middle East last year where we learned how the māqamāt (plural of maqām) works and it was extremely fascinating for me. I am currently studying oud as well; I think the best way to think of the māqamāt as replacing the Western idea of scales with an expanded system of modes (any maqām can be played starting on any note, and it's really just convention that dictates which note you typically start on).
B.J. Ryan Really?? That's amazing! I thought they were just different scales haha thanks for adding that!
I want to study middle eastern music(and more advanced music in general) so much!
Like america
Wow. So woke.
You should look up King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. They have an album called Flying Microtonal Banana.
I'll look them up, thanks!
You should because the album is also freakin awesome...
I love this band. Fishing for Fishies is the best
Totally wasn’t expecting them to be referenced on a video like this but I respect it!
I'm so used to our western scale frequencies, that even the slightly different tunings used before equal temperament (forget the name for it!) sound really off to my ear, despite the fact those tunings were chosen for those frequencies mathematically dividing into each other more pleasingly. I've messed around with some microtonal stuff before, especially with the third between Maj and min, but I never got far with it.
Yeah, when I was working on the video we did about tuning systems, I was amazed at how... bad the Pythagorean and Meantone triads sounded, when they were supposed to be much more mathematically ideal. But we're used to a pretty sharp major third, so hearing a "pure" one sounds really strange. That's one of the reasons I was so surprised that the Supermajor triad worked so well. I was expecting it to be awful too, but it wound up sounding a lot like an extra-unstable sus4 chord.
And I'm definitely looking forward to talking about 19TET and Bohlen-Pierce! It's one of the reasons I made this one: Quarter tones are a good intro to microtonal music, and there's just so many cool things you can do with microtones!
I am looking forward to it too.
Literal quarter tones are to some degree a logical historic dissection of 12tone equal but for the most part are dissonant compared to JI ratios and other tuning systems are arguably
ore interesting - keep up the good work. Edward Parmentier has a 17th century French harpsichord music CD in 1/3 comma meantone which extends out to 19TET just as 1/4 comma extends to 31TET
BlobVanDam Pythagorean Interval?
I can't believe you explained this much about microtonality in under 6 min. You should be a prof.
Thanks!
Wowza, that was a lot of information I had no idea existed. I learn something from every vid!
that was a great insight, thank you!
Some chords based on the 11th harmonic (11/8), mixed with a 2nd, 5th, or octave. Open voicing might be better. This is only starting with C.
8:9:11 C D F‡
8:11:12 C F‡ G
8:11:16 C F‡ C
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard attempted something like 24 TET on the “Flying Microtonal Banana” record. A good entry point for quartertones in a western context.
Heh, I think it's really interesting that many of the use cases you site are to use quarter tones to resolve the "problems" that equal temperament has created in terms of cheating the natural harmonic series. Never really thought about it that way, but makes sense. I would love to see you do a video (if you haven't already) on your thoughts about just intonation versus equal temperament and what the various drawbacks and positives are of each!
"True" meantone tuning, which cheats 3s just so that 81s and 80s are exactly equal, becomes essentially indistinct from equal temperament upon extension of the generator chain beyond the 31st step since moving by 31 fifths so tempered will only cause a ~6.069 cent pitch drift, which is much more difficult for the human ear to notice than 81:80 though technically still noticeable. A bit hilariously, this pitch drift generates a quadruple diminished seventh of ~702.646 cents, which is essentially Pythagorean.
Great video! I would have loved a mention to the barbershop seventh, which if properly tuned is closer to a half sharp minor seventh iirc. So in a way, you find quarter tones even in a really western popular music tradition!
Here we talkin 24TET and I'm like let's do 53EDO if we gonna have 3 octaves/keyboard
Would you consider to make a video about the fugue?
Matznosyn That would nice in a presentable format
Not to detract from the conversation about giving credit to the musical accomplishments of non-western cultures which is an important conversation of course but microtones are not new in western music either. Guillaume Costeley was experimenting with music that split the octave into 19 notes in like the 14th? century I think albeit its use was mainly to sound more diatonic but still
Interesting, I hadn't heard of him! I'll have to do some more research on his stuff. Thanks for sharing!
I think he meant cultural use and importance given to microtonal music. Because a piano is a reference in western music, pitch correctness are immediately divided into the 88 notes. which is also why perfect pitch if a cool gift to have within western music, but arabic/indian music has no use for perfect pitch since there is no middle c.
EDO19 and EDO53 do a better approximation of the harmonic series than 12TET. Try it out in Serum or Omnisphere sometime.
Guillaume in the 14th centry...Nicola Vicentino in the 16th century with a 31-tone system...Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Harry Partch, Julian Carillo, Charles Ives, Ben Johnston, Alois Haba, Easley Blackwood, and many other "Western" composers in the 20th century.
I'm surprised there wasn't a little more about bent notes, even though I know they're not really a central topic here.
That's a good point! I was thinking more about the structural uses of quarter-tones, but of course they have expressive uses as well. Maybe we'll do a follow-up!
I love using them to give songs new feel.
Just increase or decrease pitch of any track by 50 cents.
Suprisingly enough, i found that some songs pitched up that way tend to feel more natural for me to sing.
Your videos are golden man
Thanks!
THANK YOU For acknowledging other musical traditions. I tried finding ANYTHING on them when I went to school for composition. I gave up when it was all through the perspective of European music theory
Whole Note = 100 (Common)
Half Note = 50 (Common)
Quarter Tone = 25 (Rare)
Dozen Tone = 12.5 (Super Rare) and the cycle of unknown sounds keep going on
Hex’s Tone = 6 (Super Rare)
Tri Tone = 3 (Super Rare)
What’s next ?
Reese Thomas _tritone_
but by then its like not possible to resolve with reasonable accuracy anymore
You come from dividing the whole tone to counting how many cents
Septatone = 1/7 (Ultra rare)
you are just dividing by 2's why not 3 or 5 or 7 or 11
What's next is going completely outside the 12-tone (2nd tone compton) system like 17-tone (3rd tone superpyth), 19-tone (3rd tone meantone), 22-tone (4th tone superpyth), 31-tone (5th tone meantone), 34-tone (6th tone diaschismic) 41-tone (7th tone magic), 46-tone (8th tone diaschismic), 53-tone (9th tone schismatic/almost pythagorean) etc. Many more useful systems are available. Well staying confined to 12-tone as a basis, we have the fantastic 72-tone system (12th tone compton/miracle) as well, this is a common tuning for fixed instruments in modern maqam as far as i understand, having very good (approximations of) harmonics up to at least the 17th, were we normally use the 2nd (octave), 3rd (fifth+octave), 5th (major third+2octaves), 7th (minor septima+2octs), 11th (half-sharp fourth+3octs) and 13th (neutral sixth+3octs) harmonics, and any combinations thereof for pretty consonant music, Western or Eastern.
I wonder if instrument characteristics influenced the development of these scales. I have a baglama saz which is super resonant, which I presume means that these higher harmonics are much more audible than on a guitar or violin. I have never heard a rabap or sarod or cumbus saz in person but they appear to also be very resonant instruments ( and I'm enamored of vids of them!). Anyhow, I thoroughly enjoyed this!
this reminded me of that Tolgahan Çoğulu's (yes i googled it) weird looking acoustic guitar. which sounds amazing btw
I need Quarter Tones in my life.
th-cam.com/video/BSMPVj6xOo4/w-d-xo.html
Welcome to the world of Ivan Wyschnegradsky.
damn I want more info on practical applications of quarter tones. I just got a fretless guitar and it's fun to test different quartertone melodies/harmonies. you can also use a finger slide but it's trickier
One thing that I forgot to mention is there are intervals known as cents-which are 100 of them per note. And in this case, you can tell that there are 1200 cents in a full octave. Quarter tones are at least 50 cents apart from each other.
Very true!
I'm just getting started on getting to know the different quarter tones in the scale. But what I want to know is, what are the names of the slightly sharper an flatter notes of the keys of A,B,C,D,E,F, and G that are concerning these quarter tones and micro tones as well?
Ooops! I forgot the sharps and flats of those notes in quarter tone and micro tone steps,too.
You actually drew a penguin diagram in the end. Being both a particle physicist and an opera singer, I just kneel down before you for that. Thanks, made my day! :)
This throws of my perfect pitch so much, you have no idea.
I had been waiting for this episode (or something similar) for a long time. And now my obligatory 31 tone plug about how you can get an even better 5th and 7th harmonics with 31 notes per octave (though with worse 3rd and 11th harmonics). And how can we be sure that in many of the non-western musical styles that the smallest units were actually 1/24th of an octave and not something like 1/31st of an octave? Are there any musical traditions that use a chromatic scale with more than 12 notes?
I was hoping you'd plug that! I'm hoping to talk about alternate TET systems soon, although as always I may get distracted by new, shiny things so who knows when "soon" really is... Anyway, to answer your question, it's tricky 'cause most traditional systems don't use tempered tuning at all. Maqamat, for instance, use all sorts of microtonal pitches, but the intervals are largely minor, neutral, and major seconds, so we can approximate them to tempered quarter tones pretty effectively. They still include microtonal inflections, which we kind of glossed over here, but official Arabic notation utilizes quarter tones for simplicity, since it's impractical to notate each individually intoned frequency, so it seems reasonable to say that, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, they use 24 notes per octave. Other cultures it can be more or less clear what people consider a note and what they consider an inflection, though, and I'm not an ethnomusicologist so I can't state with any sort of confidence that no musical culture has built around something like the 31-TET system, I just don't have that sort of background.
Another vote for 31TET here! I love the sound of 1/4 comma meantone. The pure major 3rds sound so sweet! 31TET closely approximates 1/4 comma meantone while giving a lot more tonal possibilities. There the whole step is divided in 5 small intervals, and there are two different size semitones, diatonic and chromatic. In 16th-17th century some European composers and instrument makers experimented with extended meantone with more than 12 notes. Here's an interesting video about one of these 17th century microtonal experiments: th-cam.com/video/-tyIvhv1hc0/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for these videos! Ivan Wyschnegradsky had a proposed scale of 30+ notes! That and Leonid Sabaneyev (scriabin friend and confidant) had an even larger scale proposed.
Thanks! Yeah, one of the reasons we really wanted to make this particular video was to set up discussions of more advanced microtonal stuff. I'll definitely check those two out, thanks for the recommendations!
His list of compositions are online. He wrote numerous pieces but sadly did not share the success of Scriabin or Rachmaninoff.
Very interesting!
Yes, you can play quarter tones on a guitar.
Get a 24Fret Harmonic Guitar from FreeNote and it has quarter tone frets as well as septimal frets, and they are all Intervals from the Harmonic Series!
love it!!
I am glad the grandfather of western harmonics was a mathematician. Using twelve tones in an octave grants us so much flexibility in making exotic scales
What do you mean when you say exotic?
@@sofnaji In Western music theory there is a list of 7 different scales, which include both major and minor. Other musical cultures however use different notes to build up their scales. Think of Indian music, Arabic music or Indonesian music. All have separate and distinct scales, all different still to the scales found in western music.
@@jelleverest so exotic for you but not exotic for me :)
This was an amazing video! Interestingly, Turkish and classical music from India and Pakistan are also very heavily rooted in microtones. And as someone learning maqams, I'd love to know where I can find more information on them with regards to Western music theory. For example is there any resource which lists maqams' notes such as you did with Saba?
I know this is an old comment and maybe this isn't an issue anymore, but I'd like to share online learning resources anyway. A site I like and use as reference is www.maqamworld.com it's in english and maqams are written down on musical staffs the same way you'd write a normal scale, with explaining the different parts that make up a maqam.
I play oud and am still learning this stuff, so I like looking for things that help online.
The musical theme for THE TWILIGHT ZONE uses a quarter tone to spooky effect.
Hi, i'm a persian classical musician which means both western and iranian music sound perfectly fine to me! anyways, there are many scales in persian music that use quarter notes(Shur, Segaah, etc. Check this link if you're interested en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dastgāh-e_Šur). We have symbols for them as well, Sori highers the pitch by a quarter tone and Koron lowers it. Both of these were made by an Iranian music master.
By the way, thanks for making this video, it's rare to see non-western music discussed a little!
Hey!
Great video.
Is there any book you'd recommend on microtones ?
Thank you !
Hmm... Not off the top of my head, unfortunately. This mostly came from conversations with other musicians as well as my own experimentations. I don't really tend to use many theory books these days, I find they tend to overly complicate things and make everything harder than it needs to be. Sorry I couldn't be more help!
My braaaaain... you talk so fast it’s fantastic. Impossible to get bored, But I had to pause halfway through to process :D
please : may I ask You which pc music program software would be chosen by You , in order to play these musical notes microtonally ? Hoping to receive Your kind answer , I salute You with Best Regards
Yo... when you resolved that tritone out to a perfect fifth??
::MIND BLOWN::
I wish there were more videos exploring 24TET like this
3:34 I think u r talking about Octive there? I think harmonic is more than just Octives. the note G is harmonic to E .but is G a multiple of E. sure by a fraction but not a whole number. right? also D# and F# and so on perhaps/
I think it's interesting how 24tet can approximate the 11th harmonic almost perfectly. I always just wrote off 24tet as being 12tet with just extra dissonance added on top so this is cool to see.
-and then there's several different reference tunings. Because of different frequency changes being necessary for a given perceived pitch change, reference tunings both below and above 440Hz are needed. Then, there's the matter of the voice and "omni-interval" instruments.
You might want to check out Disc Makers article about microtones.
Microtonal music fascinates me to no end. One particular tuning I've grown very fond of is 313TET with a subset of 9 notes distanced 53-12-53-12-53-12-53-12-53.
Honestly, infinite possibilities. One thing that I've always fantasized about is tuning modulation, but at first approach it sounds like a huge can of worms we might not want to open. Nonetheless alluring!
Tuning modulation sounds really interesting and, with digital instruments, not that hard to do. Maybe you could write a piece that fluctuates between modern compositional techniques and more classical devices, and accentuate that with changes between tempered and mean-tone tuning... Would be neat to see what happens!
That sounds good! Might be a fun one to pull on my teachers haha
I'd hear musicians say how the perfect 5th is a really great interval and incredibly stable then I'd hear/play it and be like "uhhhh, no"
Is this unusual?
Is there a name for the note in between for example d and d sharp? D half sharp?
Imagine learning riffs of quarter tones and singing them only for everyone to think you're singing out of tune when you're doing it deliberately
I would consider the neutral triad to be fairly similar to a chord of a root, the tritone, and the octave, but smaller and more consonant.
How did you sequence the quarter tone samples for this video? I'd love to explore microtonality more, but I don't really have an easy way of experimenting with it
I used Reason 8 with a rack extension called Microtune. (shop.propellerheads.se/product/microtune/ ) It's pretty cheap (Reason 8 Essentials was $50 or so when I bought it, Microtune is $9) and it's not that hard to use once you get used to it, although it can be tricky to figure out the set-up the first time. I think the creator of the extension made a tutorial, though.
Thank you so much! This video was a real moment of clarity for me: I never really "got" microtonality, but when you resolved that E7 to a D half-flat chord something clicked in my brain and I realized that there are real functional possibilities for these kinds of tonal systems.
Not that there's anything wrong with non-functional microtonal harmony, but it can be very intimidating to start if there aren't any rules to guide your exploration.
You could also check out Native Instrument's Kontakt, which is the flagship sampler of the industry. There are even versions of it - 'Kontakt Players' - which are free. It comes with many scripts, several of which are dedicated to tuning (and yup, there's one just for 1/4 tones).
Man, great explanation! And painiting are, by the way, very funny too! For me, quarter of the tone sounds awesome, beautiful to add in some places. Third of a tone sounds not good for my ear. In any way, very interesting theme!
I have studied eastern music, specifically persian music. Quarter tones are used just as much as semitones. In fact, if you hear them in songs you might not even notice them! Theese notes are called sori (aka soli) and koron, with koron making quarter a tone lower and sori making it quarter a tone higher. There are 7 dastgahs that could be compaired to scaled maybe? I don't really know, but they are cery complicated and wouldn't really fit in one comment. If you are interested, there are books tht explain the seven dastgahs and their subsets known as avaz/mayeh and hundreds of corners (gooshe) that you need to study all adding up to what we know as "radif". These notes are impossible to play with some i struments unless you change the tube, which limits the pieces that you can play (such as in piano), while in others such as violon (which is my main instrument) it's easy to hit. While they are possible to hit on instruments such as guitar, it just doesn't sound right... If you're interested in listening to these sounds try searching for "tasnif) or "avaz" which are the two main genres of traditional persian music. In every dastgah you can find some quarter tones. Anyways hope you learned something new reading this. Have a great day
please make a video on eastern music and scales and their use of microtones if you can :)
I've been meaning to for a while, but I'm always a little hesitant to talk about other musical cultures because I'm not an ethnomusicologist and I want to make sure I'm getting things right and being respectful of their traditions. It's definitely on my list, but if I'm gonna do it I have to do it right, and I'm not quite sure if I'm there yet, ya know?
12tone yeah, i know. it'll probably take time, but if you get it right it'll be awesome
Hum, are you using tempered scale quarter tones, how does that work? I thought temeperament was an occidental idea? Great vids btw!
Have you done a video on the pentatonic scale?
We talked about it a long time ago (th-cam.com/video/QFdVRj3AbuA/w-d-xo.html ) but, coincidentally, it's actually one of the primary topics of this week's video, so we'll have more on it soon!
Would be worth a video to explore the music of Ivan Wyschnegradsky. He built quarter tone scales of heptachords using as a generator the major 4th of 11/8 to replace the perfect 4th of 4/3 and the minor 5th of 16/11 to replace the perfect 5th of 3/2.
Crazy presentation.
love the tesseract
Video: this is about quarter tones in music
Thumbnail:
*tesseract*
Absolutely great video. On the point of liking or not liking intervals based on whether we are used to them I don't agree.
Although you can develop a taste to a certain degree by in large when it comes to music intervals what we consider beautiful is fixed by the harmonics, which is why when someone hears barbershop music they will usually love the harmonies (even if not the style of the music) even though they may have never heard a seventh harmonic sound.
The reason is because harmonics create resonance and resonance to most people is beautiful no matter where you come from.
I think it's more to do with what's acceptable then what we consider to be beautiful. So whiskey is acceptable because we are used to it. Our music is acceptable because we are used to it.
It might be if we lived in a culture where all music was in just intonation that our music in equal temperament would be unacceptable. Because we would be used to a higher standard of being in tune.
I think the reason why Indian music sounds off is because we are not used to hearing those out of tune notes. Not because there is no objective better or worse tunning.
Fair point! Given the diversity of musical traditions out there, though, with all sorts of different kinds of tuning, I find it hard to believe that the one the Europeans settled on is, in any objective way, the best.
The example I like to use is the Major 3rd. To my ear, the modern 400-cent major 3rd sounds beautiful, whereas the justly-tuned 5/4 ratio major third sounds gross and out of tune. Of course, the 5/4 major third is more mathematically correct, but because I've spent my whole life surround by equal tempered music, I'm just more used to the out-of-tune one. It not only sounds good to me, it sounds _better_ than the correct one, which implies to me that there's more going on than tolerance for detuning. With cultural influence, you develop an actual _preference_ for detuning, which, to me at least, implies that there's a lot more going on than just pure harmonics.
Please tell me where could I listen quarter tone music
"Hey! Welcome to 24-tone!"
24-tone (sorry for recommending this too much)
th-cam.com/video/BSMPVj6xOo4/w-d-xo.html
well I want to know how did they come up this is A 440 and then this sound here is the next note or a whole step. instead of just ok 440 is A 441 B or something? is it that the next note or a whole step is something minimum that a normal human ear can distinguish between two sounds? did that become a different note? I want to know that.
4:35 yep...definitely a nail.
What program do you use to get the quartertones?
I use Reason 8 with a rack extension called Microtune.
Hey there, this is some good food for thought!
A couple light criticisms:
If I were the animator, perhaps I would have changed papers more often to keep things bigger and simpler (the paper tends to get a little cramped).
Also, I might object to 250 and 450 cents being used to approximate 7/6 (267) and 9/7 (435). I think that's ambiguous territory for my ear training, personally.
I hope this gets lots of people exploring microtonality!
Fair point! It's certainly not perfect, but as the closest available approximations within a quarter-tone system I thought it was a reasonable comparison, like how we tend to call both 400 cents and the ratio 5/4 "major 3rds" even though they're about 14 cents apart.
Sure! Depends on who you talk to, for that one. (24-EDO is not consistent in the 7-limit)
Test your quarter-tone hearing here : www.chord-book.com/ear_training/main.html
Cool, thanks!
Imp thnx
I’m a Turkish music musician, and many of our scales use quarter tones, especially in Ottoman classical music.
Matt Rogers Yes I play the bağlama as well, it has frets for quarter tones. I love playing türkü music on it.
I could see the super major and minor chords, what are they?
Quarter tones are also found in Swedish traditional music! It's...surprising and weird.
This video has blown my mind....
Check out Julian Carrillo who did amazing compositions with quartes and octave notes.
Why do you put a Feynman Diagram? Are you a Physicist? :)
Great Video Btw!! I just Bumped into your channel and i am amazed, thanks a lot!
Thanks! My brother's a physicist, I'm just an enthusiastic amateur!
You forgot to mention one of the most common uses of the quarter tone in western music! In blues it is very common to bend a minor 3rd up a quarter tone.
Good catch, I totally missed that one! Thanks for pointing it out!
Can you tell me some scales with 24TET?
Saba, Jiharkah, Bayati, Ussak, and more. There are more 24TET scales, especially in Arabic and Iranian maqams (scales). Turkish maqams use 53TET.
It's interesting because I'm Arab originally and heard a lot of these types of melodies growing up, so the quarter note and the three-quarters sound very natural. It's everywhere around us, like even the call to prayer which is sounded 5 times a day is usually in a Maqam with a quarter note in it.
There are some European traditions that use quarter notes as well, for example in traditional Swedish and Norwegian (dance/fiddle) music. Although the topic if those notes should be called quartertones is a bit controversial and people who play this type of music can have really heated debates about that (some people see it more as a personal "intonation style" compared to using extra notes, especially since they are most often only used for ornamentation and not as a fixed part of a scale). But still, from a modern theory standpoint, they are using quarter tones.
Interesting! I didn't know that, thanks for sharing! When I was talking about Europeans at the end, I was more referring to the Classical Canon set, like France, Italy, Germany, and Britain, but of course they're not the only European countries, and the traditions of places like Eastern Europe or Scandinavia can get swept under the rug just as easily. Sorry about that!
Damn, now I want to listen to/compose songs using quarter tones
Do it! They're tricky to use right, but if you can make them work they do a lot of really cool things!
The only "western" application of quarter tones is in RnB hip hop vibe song things
If Do re Mi Fah So Lah Ti Doh is How we "Syllabalise" the Major Scale I am very Intrigued as to we Would Sing the Quarter tone Version for it.
1:12 doing that is kind of like saying "Gases resulting from combustion have been located upon the surface of dihydrogen monoxide." Or those increasingly verbose memes that were popular some time ago
Thank you for acknowledging that musical taste is a matter of conditioning.
Fan of Brazil here.
4:16 I really like that.
I looked into the Wikipedia page, and counted the pitch intervals, and I found out that there are approximately 312-317 in a whole, fluid octave. But then again, I would have to add extra notes like the silver ratio, perfect twelfth, fifteenth, and the decade to get a full list of pitch intervals. Currently, I am experimenting on microtonal synthesizers and keyboards online while I'm doing on and off research on this kind of project.
Really cool! Even with all those, though, that's still only how many named ones there are in an octave: There's plenty of potential intervals that exist but that no one's used yet!
That's right. And there's also harmonics and subharmoics in various numbers, plus there's things like Zalzal's wosta, jubilissma, and there even fraction types like 23 steps in 24 , or even 47 steps in 48, and so on and so forth. Check out Wikipedia and search "List of pitch intervals, and you'll see for yourself that there's more types of pitches than meets the naked human eye. And with all of this being said, me studying pitch intervals kind of remind me of using my Virtual DJ turntables when I used to have my laptop, because my favorite part of the turntable has always been the pitch slider.
Hi! Does Indian Classical music also has quarter tones or is it completely different?
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that while you can roughly approximate a lot of it in quarter tones, the actual tuning is more complex than that. Quarter tones are basically an add-on for 12-tone equal temperament, so they're not directly applicable to cultures that aren't based on that system in the first place.
@@12tone I'm not an expert either, but rather an enthusiast, which helped discover some research done on the tuning used for Indian Classical music. Please refer to the following: 22shruti.com/research_topics_list.asp, th-cam.com/video/ipYLnhC5YDo/w-d-xo.html
Know any example of countries that don't use the 12 semitone system and default to a microtonal system instead?
Thanks for this great video. I've been making music with quarter tones that have quarter step chord progression that I call "microchordal". I hope you can check some of my works on my youtube channel. Thanks!
So what does Arabic keyboard look like with all these in between tones on it. I know that they exist because some accordions are made with these on them. How do they look?
Well, Arabs don't usually use keyboards, instead they use fretless string instruments, such as Violin and Oud.. which make make its easier to access any tone you want.. however some Keyboards Have the option to modify one or more keys to be dropped a quarter tone so they can play Arabic Maqams (scales)
mina samir I’m actually trying to purchase something like the keyboard that you mentioned with the options to drop down a quarter of a tone but searches for this item on the Internet only. strange confabulations from the west and not the Middle Eastern equivalence of a keyboard. Look I just want to play middle eastern music without having to learn a new instrument like that oud. I think I would be lost with that thing without learning the Maqams. I was just in a Middle Eastern shop where I saw a video playing a band playing in microtones so I know that this exist but goodness I can’t seem to find it or learn anything about it. Yes I know about the fret less Oud and I even considered taking up a fretless instrument like a violin to learn to do this. Actually I’m very lost. But I do so much enjoy my Arabic music. I can’t seem to place any of it on any of my instruments except for my voice which is fretless of course. Can you help me anymore find a keyboard that would reach quarter tones by giving it a label or a name to search for? Thanks
Mary Seacross look up: yamaha a3000 (oriental), korg pa4x oriental they come with scale function, you can turn it of and on. It also comes with built in music styles(beats) and voices (sounds).
OK, so there are whole steps, half steps, and quarter tones, but what about third tones?
We're planning to get into other types of microtonal stuff soon, but yeah you can totally do those too! Honestly, though, once you're there it's probably worth slotting in an extra tone to get 19-tone even tempered, which does a better job approximating harmonics than 18-tone (What you'd get from splitting whole steps in thirds) does. plus it makes notation easier, 'cause you can just add an extra pitch in between each pair of natural notes.