Dear Steven,
Well, I can say that my piano has drifted off of Western equal
temperament, so compositions for it that I wrote using Western
tonality have jumped the track into the world of microtonality. I do
plan, however, to remedy this with a nice tuning. The biggest barrier
to moving toward, say, the 17-degree scale is I'm not sufficiently
motivated to learn Sanskrit.
However (in the interest of full disclosure), my Opus 16 (which was,
in fact, performed publicly) did include a brief section that would
have made Penderecki proud. I was aware of his works, particularly
Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and so in my composition the
string orchestra indulges in such non-Western dissonance for nearly a
full minute (this occurring in a piece that lasts about 38 minutes in
concert performance). And that's about it, folks.
I could have sworn that I had mentioned to you the research conducted
by Ernest Ansermet about the geometry of the cochlear spiral in the
inner ear -- that its curvature is based on the log of 12.
Ansermet's conclusion was that the human ear naturally divides an
octave into twelve parts. Since the cochlear spirals of other
mammals are curved differently, such creatures may discern such music
as alien gibberish. If one were to truly test animals for musical
aptitude, the scale should be subdivided based on a specific animal's
cochlear spiral geometry and music then created within that
customized tonal architecture. If the animal responds to that, and
not to music based on other scale divisions, we'd have some empirical
support for Ansermet's theory that would be nearly unassailable.
Martin
On Sep 19, 2007, at 3:08 PM, Steven Jones wrote:
Dear Martin,
just wondering if you're interested in other tonalities besides
western and whether you've ever explored any of them in your own
compositions?
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Martin G. Selbrede
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Uni-Pixel Displays, Inc.
8708 Technology Forest Place, Suite 100
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