Post: #1

No expert here, im fascinated by harmony, some songs really influence my state/mood

Basically a C Major (C-E-G)makes you feel happy




C Minor(C-Eb-G) makes you feel sad





E: 320 Hz
Eb : 307 Hz


13 Hz translated in music is the difference between expressing happy and sad states

theres also more clearly defined intervals like the Diminished fifth that has a more evil/spooky connotation




The minor and major 7th, its what make a chord sound "jazzy" and its so subtle that i cant really translate it into an emotion

the perfect fifth is reactive, because of its dominant/resolution relationship with the root (fifth is alpha as fuck)



just imagine it without the two last notes.

The 6th's,9th's are sweet, fourth's rule,minor sixth sucks, its so abstract,that's how i can express these intervals


A semi tone is 1/2 of a full tone, so Eb= E -1/2 of a note
a microtone is a further division of the note by 4-8-16-32 etc

So if you bend the minor third 1/2 of a note (in C Minor : Eb) it becomes a Happy Chord (C Major)

But what if you bend the minor third just 1/16 of a note, where does that chord fall in the emotional spectrum?

And what if you bend the root note ( C ) downwards 1/8 , the Third minor (Eb) up 1/156 and the Fifth (G) Downwards 1/32 of a note?

This is what microtonal guitars look like




Theres an instrument called Tonal Plexus which has 15 variations of the same note



I randomly found this Plexus Piece years ago on youtube , every time i hear im still fascinated and confused, i feel having my emotions being throwed around ( what a thing to say loudly)





how do you guys feel with microtonal music
to other musicians, how do you translate the other intervals like 4th,6th,Minor second etc...

Post: #2

When I was younger I was fascinated with alternate time signatures, unusual scales, microtonal music. Nowadays, meh.
I don't think making music using an offbeat technique just for the hell of it, as some sort of token adventure in breaking the rules or "thinking outside the box" has much merit; while the job of art at times is to push the boundaries, some things have become conventions for great reason.

Listen to a prog metal or contemporary classical song in some zany time signature and scale, and it usually just sounds like confusing noise, like someone was trying too hard to concoct something off the wall. Great art should come together naturally... Truly great songs composed in alternate time signatures are hard to even notice as not being in 4/4 time. Two examples of that off the top of my head being Take Five by Dave Brubeck (5/4 time) and Walk by Pantera (12/8 time).

Same deal with microtonal music, 99% of it sounds like complete unlistenable shit. That piece you posted -I've actually heard it before- is so subtle in it's use of microtones that it basically sounds like standard equal temperament with a chorus effect thrown on top of it. If microtonal music has to disguise itself as tonal music to sound listenable, then I am not impressed, and am in no hurry to add extra frets to my instruments.

As to intervals and what feelings they express, I think it's too dependent on context to clearly define. In context the minor scale and minor chords/intervals can sound happy, the major scale and major chords/intervals can sound sad, and prettymuch every blues song ever written uses the tritone (diminished fifth/augmented fourth) without sounding evil or spooky.

Post: #3

(09-18-2014 02:42 AM)Ziltoid Wrote:  When I was younger I was fascinated with alternate time signatures, unusual scales, microtonal music. Nowadays, meh.
I don't think making music using an offbeat technique just for the hell of it, as some sort of token adventure in breaking the rules or "thinking outside the box" has much merit; while the job of art at times is to push the boundaries, some things have become conventions for great reason.

I see your point, i agree that trying to be groundbreaking or over complicating the process usually falls flat in the same category of trying to hard. The same hole that habits most avant garde bullshit like yoko ono and feminist perfomance art. But even with how music can be diverse, at its most basic level the only thing that really matters is if it sounds good.

I particularly am not interested in what was the artists intention or if it is enjoyable, it is worth my time and appreciation

But i Disagree on the Merit part, there are whole other cultures which do not follow these conventions

The Arab scale and music system was created based on a microtonal system

African tribal music is complex sounds made of layers of instruments playing different time signatures

As the European movement progressed studying melody and harmony, African music explored the boundaries of rhythm, they profoundly assimilated it into they're own lives, Some African dialects are almost spoken like a beat box, so most of their music and culture appropriate just not odd time signatures, but crossed layers of poly-rhythm

And scales are unusual only because we didn't grow up hearing them since they belonged to other cultures, whats dissonant/consonant changes with time .
Most classical composers would shriek hearing chords with a major 7th or 9th, that change happened quite recently (2-3 centuries)

If Impressionism can be called a classical movement it did change the conventions with new melodic possibilities, that would reflect centuries later with Tom Jobim defining the bossa Nova in Brazil, he changed a lot of things to do this, especially with samba which was all about maintaining its tradition and style

this was samba before bossa nova

this was Jobim's samba


He was a student of Hans Joachim Koellreutter, a huge composer that came to Brazil running from the nazis, Jobim had his roots on classical music, without that background Bossa Nova could not be shapen into the giant cultural and musical movement that it is since the 50's

that something a teacher of mine always said (poorly translated from portuguese)

- nothing is originally created anymore, most musical possibilities have already been explored, and if you wanna do something "new" you gotta study the people who came before you.

like that quote from Isaac Newton

Quote:If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

So i agree with you on the importance of musical tradition, since we cannot do anything without it, and so much has been done on music that almost everything is a cliche but i sincerely hope to never stop being fascinated with anything musical as i grow older

Quote:Listen to a prog metal or contemporary classical song in some zany time signature and scale, and it usually just sounds like confusing noise, like someone was trying too hard to concoct something off the wall. Great art should come together naturally... Truly great songs composed in alternate time signatures are hard to even notice as not being in 4/4 time. Two examples of that off the top of my head being Take Five by Dave Brubeck (5/4 time) and Walk by Pantera (12/8 time).

Yeah 4/4 is king, but to me its a lot easier to write digital scores in other tempos like samba in 2/4 , at least for me i use these signatures when composing for delimiting just one bar per phrasing, which is something very important when writing scores on the computer,like this example below



You can change it all to 4/4, but you use just 2 bars for 3 separate phrasings and the first note on the third bar(7/8) changes from an Eighth note to a Sixteenth(on 4/4), now the second bar starts messed up, not optimally organized and for the rest of the song you gotta compensate the using tuplets,dotted notes and other abnormal divisions .reducing and completing each bar. Its much easier to write (on the computer) this way

Quote:Same deal with microtonal music, 99% of it sounds like complete unlistenable shit. That piece you posted -I've actually heard it before- is so subtle in it's use of microtones that it basically sounds like standard equal temperament with a chorus effect thrown on top of it. If microtonal music has to disguise itself as tonal music to sound listenable, then I am not impressed, and am in no hurry to add extra frets to my instruments.

That's what i initially thought, it sounds like a normal chord progression with some nice sounding off keys, i don't know much about micro tonal music but i like those subtle shifts Indian singers do, isn't the sitar micro tonal? that's also another cool instrument and most arab music is microtonal so that can't be 99% shit

Quote:As to intervals and what feelings they express, I think it's too dependent on context to clearly define. In context the minor scale and minor chords/intervals can sound happy, the major scale and major chords/intervals can sound sad, and prettymuch every blues song ever written uses the tritone (diminished fifth/augmented fourth) without sounding evil or spooky.

Thats the magic of music, more than that, every major chord has its relative minor contained in itself , so its just a question of the chord root note, but in a solo you can throw the root away, so what scale are you playing C major or A minor? i know that depends of progression and harmony function of the key signature,but in that moment it can all sound the same.

But nonetheless changing any happy song chords and scale from major to minor will always turn into a sad song and vice versa, it can have some funny results, like Let it Be in Minor




Or losing my religion in Major



So i meant it without context, just the pure chord sound, no progression or scale, that may sound too much abstract but that's the point, its a curiosity i have since i studied functional harmony

Its not exactly about feelings, semiotics/simbology would be more like it, a single chord can communicate a lot of things, hell even a single note has a lot of information hidden in its harmonic series.

If music theory has gone far enough to give a chord the emotional connotation of happy,sad or spooky feelings why stop there?

Post: #4

Signatures like 2/2, 3/4, 6/8 7/4 16/8 etc are all completely standard and not at all strange in traditional tonal nice sounding Western music. Tons of old classical music and even older pop music would use different time signatures artfully in ways that didnt sound strange or "out there". Money by Pink Flyd is in 7/4 and is super melodic and grooving.

I think its shame modern popular music has lost most of its experimentation with different signatures, 6/8 in my opinion is a great bouncy signature for fun energetic rock.

Within my experience most microtones are used as passing tones towards standard western tones. A bend a quarter tone up serves just to make a gritty sound which resolves to a tone you would expect.

I

Post: #5

It's too easy to nerd out on all of this stuff. Once you start down this road you miss the point of music. It's an experience that's meant to be enjoyed. It takes you on a mental and emotional journey.

Post: #6

I highly disagree Parlay. If ALL you're doing is "nerding out" then yes, I think you miss the deeply emotional connection to the music. But if you can connect to the music AND you have an understanding of the composition then it makes the piece that much more rewarding.

I can't tell you how many hours I've spent figuring out Tool songs, and once you do it's revelatory. The structure of this song is brilliant. It's been out for 13 years and I'm still blown away by how they wrote it:





And The Patient, set to 5/4. I've played along to this and for someone that's been stuck in conventional time signatures his whole live, it's an absolute joy to play.





Microtones and compound rhythms have been around for a long time. Look at flamenco:

Post: #7

Is this microtonal? And would you bang if she was making these noises?

Post: #8

(10-09-2014 10:43 AM)kbell Wrote:  



Is this microtonal? And would you bang if she was making these noises?

Weird chick. But WB

Post: #9

Quote:But nonetheless changing any happy song chords and scale from major to minor will always turn into a sad song and vice versa, it can have some funny results, like Let it Be in Minor

This strikes me a huge emotional reduction, as there's a whole spectrum of feelings between 'happy' and 'sad', and neither of those is absolute anyway. You could be sad with nostalgia, depression, anger or defeat.

This song is in a major key, 4 major chords (G C D what sounds like D/F#), 1 minor chord (Am). Does it sound happy?





This song is also in a major key - verses sound like G C with an out of key F major before it pivots into the chorus on the Dsus2.

The minor chord is introduced in the chorus - the awesome Cm.

Is it a happy song?





I don't see the need for microtonalities. The Western Harmonic Scale has a huge range of emotional possibilities as it is.

Post: #10

Very cool discussion. I'm a guitar player who is self trained in blues and rock music. From this perspective, I feel like if you really want to investigate the possibilities of micro-tonality you might want to look at slide guitar players. Particularly relevant on this point, is the slide guitar virtuoso Derek Trucks. See: http://youtu.be/cvPdnZ80Eaw. In this video Derek is jamming with John Frusciante, of RHCP fame, and John Mayer, both regarded as masters of the guitar by the guitar playing community. 3/4 of the way through John M. describes the infinite possibilities Derek has because of his use of the slide. Just after that description both John's watch Derek do what Derek does best, in awe. See this clip for a closer look at what Derek can do using micro-tonality with his band: http://youtu.be/UyxL_0ZmzYs