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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

>gigantic innovators of music in 20th century

I still hold out hope that someday Harry Partch will get the recognition he deserves. If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes? It makes more sense to me than trying to wring out the last few drops of novelty using Schoenberg's ideas. Partch demonstrated that microtonal works can sound both pleasant and novel, but musicians are strangely resistant to the idea.

One exception is Sevish, who produces some of the most interesting electronic dance and ambient music I've heard. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-JZhCWsk3M

I wish more musicians would compose stuff like this.

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One can also explore inharmonic timbres - the kinds of timbres that are naturally produced by cymbals, gongs, bells, drumheads etc. William Sethares has convincingly shown that one can compute inharmonic timbres that will make "weird" tunings/scales that are not based on the harmonic series sound "in tune", and usable as music. (This has to be done by minimizing a prediction of psychoacoustic "roughness" for the given tuning/scale; to some extent, it's a trial and error process.)

Oooh! Interesting. Do you know of a good resource for learning about Sethares' method?

He has a book about it - Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. Unfortunately, I don't know of anyone who has tried to reproduce his results and make them more easily approachable for broader use, at least not thus far.

His website is a good place to start:

https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html

> If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes?

If traditional Western literature is played out, surely the obvious solution is to add more letters to the alphabet?

Music theory has the concept of "octave equivalence", where changing the pitch of a note up or down by an octave does not change its function. This means it's possible to enumerate all the functionally distinct harmonies available in standard Western tuning. There are 12 distinct pitch classes. One of these must be the lowest note in the harmony, so there are 11 remaining pitch classes that could optionally be included or omitted. If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies.

Most of them are of little musical utility, but you could conceivably use and have opinions about them all. This is not possible with literature. There are far more than 2047 functionally distinct sentences, so there is no need to add more letters to the alphabet.

> If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies. Most of them are of little musical utility, but you could conceivably use and have opinions about them all.

Unrelated but it reminded me of this [0] article discussed on HN a few times.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...

> If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies.

You're omitting time. Harmonic perception is highly contextual. The way a chord sounds will depend heavily on the chords that precede it, so it's not just a question of enumerating the chords. You have to enumerate the chord progressions, and their rhythms. That's a much larger number.

I somewhat disagree with your assessment. I don't think the next phase after traditional Western harmony is a wider adoption of microtonal music.

What we see more and more of is an increased reliance on aspects that were previously less explored in the traditional (orchestral) Western music, such as texture and rhythm. Even in academic music, but mostly in cross-genre acoustic/electronic production.

Ableton Live is about to release a new update with a comprehensive, well-integrated means of working in non-standard scales and custom micro-tuning. Hopefully this will lower the technical barrier to entry among contemporary musicians enough to broaden it's usage.

Ableton Live already has Microtuner (https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/microtuner/), I haven't heard it being used much though. Also, Bitwig released the Micro-Pitch device years ago.

I am curious whether a better Live integration is going to lead to more usage.

I find microtonality gimmicky

Me too. It's not a convincing direction for art music imho. This is my biggest criticism of Ligeti. I don't think he needed that detuned flute in his Violin Concerto. Otherwise love his music to my bones.

It's true that a lot of microtonal music is gimmicky, but I think that's the fault of the composers, not the tuning systems. Do you find barbershop music gimmicky? The defining feature of the genre (harmonic seventh chords) is microtonal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord

I'd not consider just intonation to be microtonality.

I guess it technically is? But to me it conveys something different.

For example, there's period performances of Bach pieces played in harpsichords tuned in just intonation. I'd not say that's microtonality.

Just intonation is an unusual choice for Bach's works. I'm not aware of any evidence that he used it, and he certainly thought about tuning. His "Well Tempered Clavier" was meant as a demonstration of some unknown tuning system that was more flexible than the various meantone temperaments that were common in his time. But there are approximations of meantone using just intervals, so it's certainly possible that people have performed it that way.

But this sort of just intonation is not like barbershop, because all the intervals can be tolerably approximated with 12-equal temperament. The mood of the piece will change somewhat as some become more and some become less consonant, but it will remain essentially the same work. The barbershop seventh chord cannot be so approximated. The "ringing" sound of the seventh chord that defines the genre doesn't occur unless the seventh is tuned very noticeably flat from the closest 12-equal temperament equivalent. If you arpeggiate a barbershop seventh chord it sounds obviously microtonal.

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