installation

ordered

This is a reharmonization of Happy Birthday, tuned to 22 equal divisions of the octave. It is loosely centered around what we call "porcupine temperament."


Happy Birthday

I recorded this a while ago, have no idea what it's from

Sunset

This is a comma pump in the unnamed 17496/16807 temperament, tuned to 34-equal. The basic root movement is by 7/6, and the chords are tuned to 7-limit subminor 7 chords, to make the voice leading smoother.

17496/16807 Comma Pump, Subminor Chords, 34-equal

In this set of listening examples, common practice works have been retuned to exotic tunings in which the relative structure of the diatonic scale is always preserved, so that it always takes the form of LLsLLLs (for "Large step" and "small step," respectively). The perfect fifth, which generates the scale, is allowed to vary from as flat as 7-EDO, where the diatonic scale is a perfectly evened-out "neutral" diatonic scale, to as sharp as 5-EDO, where the half step becomes so small that it vanishes, leaving a perfectly evened-out pentatonic scale.

The chosen spectrum of tunings is such that diatonic interval categories such as the "major third" may, at times, approximate different intervals from the harmonic series than they normally would in 12 equal temperament, just as long as the LLsLLLs scale pattern is consistently present in the tuning. These experiments aim to explore the properties of the "categorical perception" effect, and to see to what extent it exists and interrelates with the missing fundamental phenomenon and other psychoacoustic effects.

The "artwork" for this compilation describes the tunings used, and the properties of each one; click "Download Artwork" to view it.

In this particular set, the chosen composition is Bach's Fugue in C Major (BWV952).

Bach - Fugue in C Major (BWV952) - 31-EDO

Bach - Fugue in C Major (BWV952) - 19-EDO

Bach - Fugue in C Major (BWV952) - 40-EDO

Bach - Fugue in C Major (BWV952) - 75-EDO (Generator 43\75)

Bach - Fugue in C Major (BWV952) - 7-EDO

Bach - Fugue in C Major (BWV952) - 5-EDO

This is an early microtonal improvisation of mine, which I did before I knew anything about regular temperaments. 24-EDO is the tuning, and this composition can be loosely thought of as being structured around "semaphore" temperament within it, and perhaps "neutral" as well.

Oblique Motion

This is a comma pump in porcupine which goes up by three 6/5's and then down two 4/3's back to 1/1. I designed it as an example of something that I thought sounded perfectly "natural," but which doesn't work at all in 12-EDO. I'll use this in a piece somewhere down the road.

The tuning here is 23-EDO, which does a much poorer job in approximating the harmonic series when compared to the other tunings listed here, so the chords don't seem to blend as well. That notwithstanding, it still has a certain interesting color to it, which I somewhat enjoy.

A Porcupine Comma Pump - 23-EDO version

This is mostly goofy experimental music theory stuff to see how different microtonal scales sound - no real musical compositions here (yet)

Bach - Fugue in C Major (BWV952) - 5-EDO

Mike Battaglia