microtonal SNES music made for the wonderful Micro Tones Server Secret Santa event, with a prompt by @damifortune to make microtonal snes music (hardware-rendered by dami as well)!
 
Also a tribute to the wonderful Easley Blackwood and his "Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media", the main inspiration for this piece.

Check out the full album here, with some of the most delightful, enlightening, and quirked up xen micro tone tunes in recent memory which everyone should listen... 😊 https://microtonesserver.bandcamp.com/album/micro-tones-server-secret-santa

easley blackwood goes on a spelunk with 16-bit friends (.smc, 17edo)

Trajectory

Contemplation

Wonder

Trash

VNESHNIY MIR [17-EDO]

there’s supposed to be a note at the beginning but that got cut off


 what the hell is up with my vst

idk what to name this song [17-EDO]

In both movements of this quartet, each instrument gets assigned a repeating rhythmic pattern—sequences of notes and rests of equal length (say, all eighth notes). 

The first violin plays a pattern of 11 beats (6 notes, 5 rests), the second violin a 7-beat pattern (4 notes, 3 rests), the viola 6 (3+3), and the cello 5 (3+2). These patterns cycle independently.

One full cycle  takes 2310 beats—the least common multiple of 11, 7, 6, and 5.

But—crucially—beat durations vary.

Indeed, the duration of a beat depends on its density—meaning how many instruments are sounding at that moment (0 through 4). Each density appears a fixed number of times within the full cycle, independent of pattern contents assuming the constraints above. 

The twist: beat durations get adjusted so that each density—whether a silence, solo, duo, trio, or a full quartet—occupies exactly one-fifth of the total time of the movement. Rare textures are stretched, common ones compressed.

Thus the interaction of the parts effects an emergent large-scale rhythm.

Out of millions of possible combinations of patterns, one movement employs the set that yields the most unpredictable overall rhythm (in a precisely defined mathematical sense). The other, the most predictable.

As for pitch: each instrument traces a fragment of the cycle of fifths—in near standard tuning. The quartet plays 17TET, so with the octave divided into 17 equal steps, which makes a "perfect" fifth span 10 steps. Each instrument repeatedly travels through this cycle fragment, alternating between octaves. Individually, the lines sound diatonic; together, they form unfamiliar and highly dissonant verticalities—often stranger than even the most dissonant music in 12-tone systems.

Despite this microtonality, no specialized technique is required. If each player tunes their instrument to a slightly different “A,” then standard fingerings suffice—as long as they resist the instinct to tune to one another.

Waves, Winds, Mind - Mvt. II

Waves, Winds, Mind - Mvt. I

Composer, mathematician, visual artist. 
Seeks collaboration with performers and choreographers.

Please don't spam this account!

msuic throey

🐸 https://soundcloud.com/sexytoadsandfrogsfriendcircle

New tracks tagged #17tet