Problems with ancient musical scales | Hacker News Reader

Problems with ancient musical scales

borisreitman.medium.com

22 pointsboris111 comments

So people with perfect pitch often complain about headaches when, say, a choir starts to lose pitch. This is because they can hear how the pitches sung by the choir have drifted away from the pitches notated on in the part they are reading from. That knowledge can apparently be quite distracting.

However, I have never heard a student with perfect pitch complain or even inquire about internal inconsistencies in tuning that would lead to comma drift. E.g., "Hey, I was practicing singing C-G-D-A-E-C and I ended up slightly off from the C I started with. What gives?" I've never heard of a student stumbling upon anything like this independent of reading a text about the problems of tuning systems.

People without perfect pitch (even non-musicians) can often hear that an equal-temperament major triad is a little bit more dissonant than a just-temperament major triad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcCkn0p7HDE.

I don't have perfect pitch, but as a guitarist I often tune my 3rd string to be a little bit flat (relative to equal temperament), because many chords I play have their major 3rd on that string and it sounds better to have it closer to just temperament.

Regarding singing, one of the reasons that Barbershop music has such a beautiful/smooth sound is because the vocalists sing the intervals of chords in just temperament, despite the fact that the bass note moves around in equal temperament. This is covered well by the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbershop_music.

It's odd - I've messed around with this kind of thing too, and while I can recognize the perfect intervals sound cleaner, I generally prefer some dissonance and waiver in the chords. Depending on the style of music, it just sounds more interesting to me.

The Barbershop example is orthogonal to what I'm describing. There, the singers are (apparently) choosing to sweeten particular chords to get certain relationships in the partials. That's something you can listen for and hear without having perfect pitch.

What I'm saying is that there seems to be a disconnect between the various theories of tuning systems and the way humans perceive melodic interval distances. It seems like people who have perfect pitch do a good, consistent job of organizing their memory of sounds into frequency bins. It also seems like what they are not doing is memorizing an idealized set of integer ratios-- or even any interval relationships in particular-- and then singing those intervals back in melodies.

If they could do the latter then you'd expect them to sing those intervals in melodic patterns that end up on a frequency measurably different from where they started. People with perfect pitch obviously have the ability to know when that happens, but I don't hear them describe that conundrum. It makes me speculate that what they are doing is leaping around "frequency lily pads" from memory rather than iterating over a list of well-defined intervals.

These are NOT problems - they are simply differences. They happen to not be as "convenient" as the 100% artificial system INVENTED several centuries ago which is not necessarily better than more ancient systems. Equal tempered IS MISTUNED because it's a "forced, contrived system".

In many ways you get more sophisticated expression from older systems because they are more tuned to both empirical physics and biology, rather than abstracted CONSTRUCTED for convenience.

It's now possible to view all 2048 scales (but hear only one), here. (This topic reminds me of that of prime numbers in many ways.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzee0jwMqpw

(Bonus mind-melter: Double Harmonic Major. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-HZXm61Cv4 )

Very interestingly this is the first scale for anyone learning Carnatic Music (classical Indian music predominantly popular and taught in South India).

As someone who grew up with a detuned piano I was kinda shocked how boring a tuned one sounded like. No/minimal beating phantom tones between similar notes. No detuned chorus between the different strings of one tone etc.

Our modern tonal systems make sense, but to me microtonal ones have more spice to them. Even stuff like Aphex Twin constantly uses "incorrect" tunings (analog gear is like that) and this makes up a signifikant part of the sound.

Or listen to stuff by Wendy Carlos. Just otherworldly

Especially Carlos’s Beauty in the Beast, one of my fav albums. It seems to have a strong Indonesian influence in places, and I’ve since found similar exotic tunings in music from there.

That was the one I was thinking about : )

The article mentions AutoTune, which is a technically interesting innovation.

Yet the humanity is found in all of the tiny imperfections of the art, not the mathematical symmetries on offer.

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