Re: CHAT: conlang and alternate tuning WAS: from the ashes...

From: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>

> En réponse à Danny Wier <dawier@...>:
>
> [snip] Wow! That's impressive! Is there a logic in the succession of
fractions?
> Must there be one (except the concept of Just Intonation)? If there is, it
must
> a monstruous work to create a new music scale!!!
It's based on one long chain of fifths (3/2 intervals), or 31 notes on the
53-tone scale. But the 17th note, the diminished fourth, I found could be
just as easily expressed as 5/4 (the "natural third") rather than 8192/6561.
This scale came about from what is called a "5-limit lattice". That's a
two-dimensional array of intervals where the center note (1/1) has fifths
(3/2) extending to the right, fourths (4/3) to the left, neutral thirds
(5/4) upward, and neutral sixths (8/5) downward. For each note on the
53-tone gamut, there are several possible notes, all determined by a power
of five in one of the factors. The interval with the smallest numerator and
denominator (with one exception) is the note included in the scale.

It's hard to explain in words; I'd have to make a .gif and put it on my
website or something. Or just go to one of the sites on microtonal music and
look up "lattice", "5-limit", "just intonation" etc.

> > The first and last notes of the scale are the equivalent of Western
> > sol/G =
> > 98/196/392 Hz (since the Arabic scale starts at that note).
>
> Does it start exactly at the same note as Western G? Or is it just the
nearest
> equivalent? I'm still wondering whether the values of the Western octave
are
> there by chance or if there's a reason behind the value 440Hz for the
basic A...

I'm not exactly sure, but I know that the lowest string of the oud (the
fretless lute found in Arab and many other musical cultures) is usually
tuned to a G (in Western terms 98 Hz), and I was going by a website that
listed the Arabic note names for two octaves from low G to high G, so I'm
assuming G.

But A=440 or G=98 is just a standard for a major part of the world, but not
all of the world, and a single oud player playing with a drummer can tune
any way he wants. And I've played with a few rock bands that tuned to "flat
tuning" -- meaning the E's on the guitar were actually tuned to E-flat.
That's not far from the Baroque A=415 tuning.

And that's a whole other subject and I'm not too expert on the history of
tuning standards.

~DaW~


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