Name: Standard-Tuning-2 by Kristal McKinstry
Duration: 15 min 1 s
Description: My second 20 minutes in standard tuning in 38 years.

Ichika Nito - I Finally Play In Standard Tuning

Clasp

First try of 2 pitchshifted-electroacoustic-violins combined with the Organic Keyboard Tablet Instrument(3 players... Alexandre on the tactile screen , and Roland and Ivo on 2 violins)

Oups i forgot to cut the sound... second half of the video is not the tactile instrument, but just part of this demo video of the pitchshifted-electroacoustic-violins : https://www.facebook.com/DynamicIntonation/posts/645200288892772

First try of 2 pitchshifted-electroacoustic-violins combined with the Tablet (3 players)

This song is very special, sampled from the Navajo song listed here.
Dookóóslííd · Louie Gonnie, Alex E. Smith, Cheevers Toppah and Nitanis "Kit" Largo
If you look up the original track and give it a listen, you can hear all the instruments and layers. Thank you to the Navajo Nation for such a beautiful song that inspired this beat. Special thank you to Myztic, the man who made all this great by mixing and mastering all the tracks I have released so far. He was a cowriter on this track. Big ups, my brotha

Navajo Mountain

Title:
Quantum Shells

Dates:
05-Oct-2024 (inception), 05-Oct-2024 (finalised), 08-Oct-2024 (released)

Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund

BandCamp Purchase:
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/quantum-shells

Description:
Music inspired by physics.

On the 4-Oct-2024, Kristal McKinstry (Ref. [1]) posted on the "Microtonal Music and Tuning Theory" FaceBook group a micro-tuning scale inspired by quote:
"Electrons have relative shell orbits based on power of quantum shell, i.e. 1 4 9 16 25 36 49"
(end quote)

Ref. [1] provided the frequency ratios as
quote:
50/49
9/8
32/25
64/49
49/36
25/18
36/25
72/49
49/32
25/16
16/9
49/25
(End Quote)

I took the first seven ratios of Ref. [1] assuming it started with a 1/1 ratio. Don't quite remember why I only took the first seven notes.

The portion I used from Ref. [1] were the following frequency Just Intonation (JI) ratios (octave reduction portion shown in []:
(1) / (1)
([2]*5^2) / (7^2)
(3^2) / ([2^3])
([2^5]) / (5^2)
([2^6]) / (7^2)
(7^2) / (3^2*[2^2])
(5^2) / (3^2*[2])

which in cents is (rounded):
0c
35c
204c
427c
462c
534c
569c

These were defined in a scala tuning file using the exact integer JI ratios, not as cents.

Perhaps I should have used all twelve plus the 1/1 and 2/1 ratios of Ref. [1], but I just went with my whim and only used the first seven notes, which gave a frame interval of 1.388 instead of the usual 2/1 ratio of an octave.

Discussing this tuning with the McKinstry post composition completion, revealed that the intension was that it was assumed that the tuning began with 1/1 and ended in 2/1 to complete the octave.

To put me in a certain frame of mind during this composition, I thought of vibrating electrons and as I scanned through the instrument list in Ableton Live, I came across the chime and bell and thought, perfect. Some more sound hunting landed me on electric strings for the chordal section, an impression of electrons humming. Mind you, this is all very fanciful, I suspect if any vibration of an electron could be captured it would not be within the limits of human hearing, so I actually do not know what the vibration of a real electron would sound like, but hey, "don't let the truth get in the road of a good story" :) . This then set the back drop to improvise freely using my voice through the Soma Pipe fed into the Soma Cosmos (hardware drifting memory station), then feed back into Ableton Live, where all the recording and arranging took place.

Thanks again to Kristal McKinstry for the inspiration your tuning gave for this composition.

References:
[1] Kristal McKinstry, 4 October 2024 10:52, posting on the FaceBook group "Microtonal Music and Tuning Theory".

Buy Quantum Shells

Quantum Shells

Title:
Glass and Pipe

Dates:
28-Sep-2024 (inception), 28-Sep-2024 (finalised), 12-Nov-2024 (released)

Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund

BandCamp Purchase:
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/glass-and-pipe

Description:
It all began with a post from Tim Kroker on the Soma Laboratory FaceBook page, triggering the Soma Pulsar 23 with a drum head without midi, and the dismantling of some of our old garden furniture destined for the garbage tip. A lucky coincidence in time.

Our garden furniture table had given up the ghost, which included a 40cm x 70cm glass plate top. My son said that glass plate would make a good glass plate mic, that got me thinking. The glass plate was still in good condition, hm, what would this sound like with a contact pickup attached, feed through the Soma Pipe and Soma Cosmos?

Various sound ideas were recorded on a custom digital eight track recorder, where I could mess with the audio slices and playback rates, layer it all together. The glass plate was hit with a rubber eraser, and crudely held in place by resting one corner on the carpet in my home studio and the opposite corner held with my hand. The contact mic was fed through a pre-amp, then off to the Soma Pipe, either capturing the true acoustics of the vibrating glass plate or triggering one of the drum effects in the Pipe. Then to mess with the audio textures some more and create that bubbling sound, fed the audio to the Soma Cosmos.

Pressed record on the eight track and began a live improvisation.

The bell sound from the glass plate was played back at just intonation frequency ratios of 3/2, 1/1, 5/4 and 3/1, providing a nice harmony and an interesting polyrhythm.


Glass and Pipe

A mixture between the ancient Armenian Duduk , Oriental Oud & the modern electric music 
#Duduk #Oud # Oriental #soul #House #lounge #deephouse #chillout

Mare Caspium.mp3

My second 20 minutes in standard tuning in 38 years.

Standard-Tuning-2

Das sieht jeder Esel

SIMPLIFIED VERSION -- SEE my BANDCAMP for FULL DETAILS

Title:
Water

Dates:
07-Nov-2025 (inception), 07-Nov-2025 (finalised), 08-Nov-205 (released)

Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund

BandCamp Purchase:
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/water

Description:
(SIMPLIFIED account, see my BandCamp or FaceBook page for full details)
The emphasis for this piece was to just use the Soma Lyra 8, show casing it's capability and for me to discover what one can do with just it. The Soma COSMOS was purely used as a reverb unit. All tracks were recorded via my software based six track recorder, FindTheBeat. All six tracks were used for this composition, five tracks played simultaneously with the sixth used as the master recorder.

Track 5 is perhaps the exception since it was a portion of track 4 Lyra 8 recording by creatively adjusting the play back-speed thereby changing the pitch and simultaneously adjusting volume to have it come in and out. I could stop the play-back by setting the speed to zero. I used it here to create sweeping pitching changes, mimicking the Doppler Effect of an object flying past the listener with a ramp up and down of volume.

Tuning of the Lyra was done prior to recording.

Once the bones for the composition were laid down in the first track, I then layer additional tracks on top of this, where the tuning would be progressively altered, improvised tuning.

The Soma Lyra 8 has what it calls a Hyper LFO (low frequency oscillator) section of two oscillators, who's signals can be OR'ed or AND'ed together to produce the final pulse that is then sent off to the tuning section of the eight melodic oscillators. The amplitude of oscillation is controllable in pairs of four, and in the organic style of many of the Soma Laboratory instruments, it is not linear, which provides for some interesting surprises. So the user has the option of adjusting the frequency of the two LFOs, OR or AND operations and the amount of frequency (pitch) oscillation to bring about a lyrical sequence of notes.

Track 1 tuning is shown below in Table 1.

Table 1: Track 1 tuning
ID, frequency [Hz], octave + cents, frequency ratio
1, 101.457, 0 oct + 0 c, 1/1
2, 125.920, 0 oct + 374c, 1.24/1
3, 153.513, 0 oct + 717c, 1.513/1
4, 309.046, 1 oct + 728c, 3.046/1
5, 357.018, 1 oct + 978c, 3.519/1
6, 394.275, 1 oct + 1150c, 3.886/1
7, 455.200, 2 oct + 199c, 4.487/1
8, 563.895, 2 oct + 569c, 5.558/1

Table 1 tuning is intended only as a guide, the performer will need to fine tune to create the desired mood.

I was curious what this tuning would sound and look like if simplified. Purely looking at the data, I could see hints of a Just Intonation (JI) quality, so the simplification process I took was to select the nearest JI frequency ratios (ratios of integers) with low numbers plus some human preferences and biases. This is shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Simplified tuning of Table 1 as JI.
ID, frequency [Hz], JI frequency ratio with respect to root note
1, 100, 1/1
2, 125, 5/4
3, 150, 3/2
4, 300, 2*3/2=3/1
5, 350, 7/2
6, 393.75, 63/16
7, 450, 9/2
8, 566.67, 17/3

Table 2 was not used in Water but rather experimented with post Water production, showing a close resemblance of Table 1 intent and a useful scale harmonically and melodically. Something for a future composition.

I live near wet lands that are frequented by water fowl, including Canadian Geese, who's call is very distinct and impressionable. So can you hear the Canadian Geese influence in Water? 

Water

A guitar-like piece from long ago in 25-note equal temperament

MusicWorks 61

A Study in Fives

Microtonal spectralist fugue one-mermaid-band on slide-guyageum-guitar and shamanic opera vocals.

Experimental bluegrass sitar surf jazz.

Standard-Tuning-2

Kristal McKinstry

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