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need help with microtone

From:Carsten Becker <post@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 8, 2003, 10:20
Hello folks!

This topic has actually nothing to do with conlanging, but with music theory
and conculturing. Because I'm playingthe the classical guitar for six years
now, I know rather much about music theory, but nothing about MICROTONE. I
thought of filling this gap in my knowledge by putting up a musical system
for the currently nameless conculture I want to work on* for my conlang
Daléian. As you could see in Janko's number request where I gave him my
numbers, my counting system is based on eights instead of tens liek ours (if
you didn't read it, point your browser at
www.beckerscarsten.de/specials/conlang/daleian/index.php?goto=numbers -
sorry for the long url...). Our musical system is baseed on twelves,
though - many natural things seem to be based on twelves btw. But in my
opinion, it would be very boring to copy our music theory stuff. I wouldn't
learn anything new that way. So I decided _their_ musical system to be based
on eights, too. As I said, I don't know anything about microtone, so when
you'd be so kind and explain me how it works, you'd have to begin at the
basic. I would be very thankful. I know mirotone means to divide an octave
into other pieces than twelve, e.g. in five or even >40 as in India (AFAIK).
The thing I'm worrying about most is howto find out the ration between the
sounds (cf. c:b = 15:8) and hwo to calculate the sound in Hertz**. As it
seems, exponential growth is important. If you don't know about how to
explain it yourself: Have you got any links to good explanations? Midi files
are useless at the moment because what I need as first is to know how it
works. I know that microtone is often atonal and can sound awful. I looked
for "microtone" in some lexica already, but either I found nothing or things
I already know - as mentioned above. Btw., what's the German term for
"microtone"? It's just because we haven't got any English encyclopedia at
home, except Encarta 96 and I looked at Wikipedia, too, but it was useless
what they wrote.

====================
* This will take much time. And I don't know enough about some important
things yet - one reason is because I'm still so young (17 y/o)

** Note I'm living in Europe, where the standard tunic is a'=440Hz, in
America it's 450Hz IIRC, and in France (at least this goes for classical
orchestras) it's 415Hz (AFAIK). here in Gemrany, we use 440Hz as well.

Replies

Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>