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Re: [microsound] another article



> >http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3129145.stm

> This article skips over the very large practice of microtonal music 
> and the role of non-12-tone tunings worldwide.

"You have many musical cultures that don't have a 12-note
 scale, they may have five notes, a pentatonic scale, and yet
 we could not find any that had notes that were not in the
 chromatic scale or very close to it," 

I'd say that the incentive to create microtonal music or subscribe to a
tonal system other than the Western "standard" is finding the (or a) 12
note scale not "very close to it". 

> Though there is an 
> assertion that the 12-tone scale derives from speech patterns there 
> are no specific examples of this.

Would be interesting to refrence the Journal of Neuroscience text. 

But given the piece's  lack of refrence to conclusive historical
material - namely Pythagoras - documenting that the 12 notes derive from
the circle of fifths, one doesn't hold out much hope for the answer to a
non-existant "one of the oldest puzzles in psychology". 

> Considering that Harry Partch's 
> interest in microtonality came from his research in prosody and the 
> microtonal in speech it seems that Professor Schwartz and his 
> colleagues may have started with a premise of 12 tones being a 
> natural phenomenon and then fudged their data to support it.

Yes, Partch most certainly refrenced historical research and I
definitely agree that Professor Schwartz seems to have encountered
something he felt qualified as a phonomena and went about theorizing
about it.

There are simple harmonic relationships in musically pleasing sounds and
sound combinations and all scale systems attempt to encompass the best
ones (3:2, 4:3, 5:4, etc.) as intervals in the scale. 

All the scale systems (barring a composer's intentional experiments)
attempt to select, order, rationalize or fudge harmonic intervals that
occur throughout nature and speech into a musically acceptable model,
there's no dispute or new revalation that. 

nick

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