These are some assorted random experiments that aim to poke at different facets of our music cognition to see how they unwind.

Music Cognition Odds and Ends

installation

old likes

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

flat major scale

Tracklist + Interview: http://nesthq.com/interview-minimix-masayoshi

@Masayoshi-Iimori is a Saitama, Japan based producer who is making music that sounds like nothing else. Or rather, it sounds like everything at once. He takes the structure of EDM trap, lights it on fire and throws on a rollercoaster of other styles. His @NestHQ premierd “NRG” remix, one of the best tracks of the year so far, is like the IMAX action movie of trap anthems. His flip of Mr. Oizo’s “Positif” refits Ed Banger disco with mainstage-sized adrenaline. Everything he does pushes the boundaries of what’s expected from a banger.

I reached out to Masayoshi for a Nest mix hoping he would come back with 30 minutes of the most insane turn up out there, and he didn’t disappoint. This is punk music.

Backflip out of your comfort zone and dig into Masayoshi's new Nest HQ mix. 

Follow Masayoshi: 
@Masayoshi-Iimori

Follow Nest HQ: 
@nesthq

Tracklist 

Nest HQ MiniMix: Masayoshi Iimori

Not Flat Major Scale

Workwrokworkworkwork

Busted Full

Rinse FM Podcast

Rinse FM Podcast - JCush - 28th November 2016

Phases of this example -
1) starts off in orgone[11], LLsLsLs mode, moves around by half step within that mode
2) abandons the MOS in order to obtain more consonant harmony, shifts the base chord from 7:9:11 to 4:7:9:11
3) once you have some basic "resolution," whatever it is, just go crazy and use it everywhere, setting the tonality up in a bunch of disparate keys, a la Bach. Of course, since we hate 12, we won't do it by rotating around the meantone circle of fifths - in this case we'll do a 5625/5488 comma pump instead

Tonality, Patterns in 11-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)

Tonality, Patterns in 11-EDO

Mike Battaglia