Microtuning

2

Comments

  • edited November 2021

    OK, I've solved the Sunday riddle. I avoided feeding the N-to-1 switch with a monophonic signal (from the knobs) and replaced it with a switched polyphonic signal passed through 12 knobs.

    In the Micro.Tunes module, only turn the white knobs.


  • edited November 2021

    the interesting question comes, as mentioned earlier, now

    what sound to feed with the 12 pitch offsets?

    u won't hear the subtile beating differences between the notes on chords (that is what this is after?!?) if u don't use very pure (and boring ) waves

    I really struggle to find applications for this, if the sound already works with beating of frequencies against each other in some way, the effect gets totally lost. 🤷‍♂️

  • edited November 2021

    this only matters if you think hm, when I play A & C its out of tune because I can hear it wobbles ...

    but if you do that other intervals start to sound really odd ...

    the solution is equal temperament as best compromise over all ;)


    for some reason I cant watch that video, it says login to watch

    (my bet is Bach was looking for the square root of 12 (=3.46410161514) and could not find it as its heavy math ;) but that may be just my assumption. )


    (prelude in c major in 3 tunings, skip the blah, music at the end)

    hm, i dont really perceive the change in tuning as such sometimes, its more a change in timbre (brighter or duller) YMMV

    So what I am asking myself is why choose this when I have a million other options to mess with timbre on a synth? (the wobble to me is timbre and not pitch)



    there aren't many ppl interested in this, so lets discuss it here a little. :)

  • @lala your comments are honestly cracking me up.

    It would be like a pianist walking into a synth store and saying "I can't imagine why anyone would ever need a filter. There's no use case for this thing!!"

    If you don't get it, then please move along. Microtuning is not for you and you're too quick to show that you aren't really interested in learning to hear it. Your mind is already made up and that's fine.

    It's well established that Bach did not use Equal temperament. And not because it wasn't a known tuning, it lacks color. In unequal temperaments of the baroque era, each key has its own characteristic due to the divisions of the comma. This subtlety is lost in the greyness of 12TET.

    In fact equal temperament was not invented in the 20th century. it was certainly known of and even used in europe and even ancient China, but was rarely used because it is compromised and thought sound too muddy. The thirds, sixths and sevenths are glaringly out of tune. Only lutes were tuned to ET because they're a fretted instrument and making instruments with microtonal fretboards is extremely difficult.

    A harpsichord tuned to ET sounds horrible, which is why nobody tunes them this way.

    It's one of those things that sounds passable simply because you're used to it. But if you're used to another system, ET sounds incredibly out of tune, because only the octaves are actually purely tuned.

  • oh wow, just now seeing all these posts. Can't wait to try these out! thanks for sharing :-)

  • edited November 2021

    you dont get what I am on about, its human non linear perception ;)


    the point I am on about is :

    do you perceive "the wobble" as pitch difference or timbre?

    this is essential 😉

    i perceive it as timbre

    id like to have an straight answer, thx.


    per definition everything that isnt pitch is timbre but this doesnt match the human experience.

    so I have to ask how do you perceive it?

    this will vary from person to person ...


    im always interested in human perception, not so much in numbers ;)


    since u talk about "color" I assume you perceive it as timbre too. aha. that's very interesting. ;)

    so we are not talking about pitch at all we are talking about timbre. that's very interesting. ;)

    well mr. Bach didn't have a synth to spit out timbres at will so he had to get his "colors" somewhere else ;)

  • the way I see it, pitch is timbre and timbre is pitch. timbre is made of harmonics which can be observed as discrete pitches. Play around with an additive synth and you quickly begin to see this. Speed up a polyrhythm and you get a musical interval.

    pitch, timbre, rhythm, harmony.. all the same phenomenon seen from different perspectives.

  • @palms, @lala I think my perception of these micro adjustments is somewhat "mainstream": I can definitely hear the advantage of going the extra mile and I find it surprisingly obvious with isolated chords but it's not that I listen to music and say "uh-oh, that tuning needs to be fixed".

    What I do hear and can't stand at all is if an acoustic melodic instrument tuning is off more than maybe 15 cents.

    It may have to do a lot with what kind of music in a certain context we've listened to as young children in their first years. It's not only about perfect pitch but also about the precision I believe.

  • But even in additive synthesis the added harmonics are usually based on the root pitch/frequency no?

    At least this is the case with most additive synths I've come across so far?!

    Another way is naturally to build an additive synth manually by stacking sine-waves at what ever frequencies and amplitudes one desires and scale each oscillators frequency input and output individually 😎

  • edited November 2021

    @rs2000

    yeah below 15 cents or so it just changes the color

    like any 2 synth oscillators ...

    much fuzz about an old hat with fancy words 😈



    I mean there is amazing microtonal music that makes my jaw drop,

    but I am not Wendy Carlos and able to do that. so I am not very skilled I guess. ^^

    beauty in the beast sounds like smoking opium ^^

    (its a potpourri of world music and her own findings)

    I like it very much; but I can torture all my friends with it. ^^

    if u can get a copy of it

    I got it from oink

    it hasn't be rereleased since forever

    no one ever sailed away with the pitch like that before

    I guess she is the only person in the world that can say I used scales no-one ever used before.


    what's interesting is she later returned to the usual again

    Im not sure what that means

    I guess to many notes in an octave to choose from are to many options to get things done???

  • edited November 2021

    to me it seems like the small detunings are just a way to get "more color" out of an acoustic instrument when there isnt much you can manipulate. maybe you get a resonance at certain frequencies you like or u dont like ...


    some opera houses have a pitch of the house thats not a=440hz to avoid certain frequencies in the room ...

  • edited November 2021

    hm i guess

    western harmonics are easy to decipher - is this happy, is this sad, angry ? - no matter where you come from

    with some of the worlds scales I have no clue what emotion its supposed to transport because all the diminished notes sound sad to my ears ...

    If I listen to Chinese opera I have no clue what is going on, is this drama, are they angry, is this meant to dance to, are they happy?

    I have no idea. ^^


    so in the end I stopped looking into world music because I dont know how to express me in this "cultural language " that I dont understand - I cant say what I want to say - if that makes sense.

  • Yeah that makes zero sense to my brain.

    you do realize that the emotions you relate to western harmony is completely subjective.. right? There is nothing inherently happy about major or sad about minor. These are learned cues.

    your presumption that somejow western harmony is universally understood and “world” scales (god this term is so weird and racist) are incomprehensible to anyone but the culture from which they spring is very suspicious to me. Smacks of a weird supremacy that I don’t like. scales are arbitrary. 12 notes could be 14 or 22 or 164 notes per octave.

    If you don’t feel emotion when listening to other cultural musics, that’s very interesting and nearly the opposite of my own experience. I’ve been brought to tears by music in languages and tuning systems that I don’t “understand”, played on instruments I’ve never heard of. Somehow I can find deep emotional connections to music that isn’t from my country of origin. Even music written hundreds of years ago!

  • edited November 2021

    its very simple

    western harmony sells well around the globe, so I assume people get the message independent from their backgrounds ;)

    thats why we call music a universal language

    your turn 🙄take a chill pill 😐️

  • Lol it’s not universal. I’m chillin’ though. Gonna agree to disagree

    i love microtonal and non microtonal music. It’s all good. Over and out.

  • as far as I understand, you can resynthesize most audio with sine waves. If you have a Mac, I highly recommend playing around with this free software:

    drop a track in and it will resynthesize it. you can drag sections around, smear things out, etc.

    Also check out videos of the Panharmonium eurorack module. Can resynthesize incoming audio (with a bit of latency) but it tracks pitch and assigns bands to one of its 33 oscillators. Really lovely stuff!

    check out minute 3 for example of resynthesis.

  • edited November 2021

    Wow @palms, outstanding box! Thanks for posting this!

    This kind of realtime DSP controlled by knobs is lots of fun, and it works in realtime! 😍

    I wonder what could be done to make the resynthesis sound less mechanic. Not necessarily more true to the original source but a more "pleasing", "organic" result.

  • edited November 2021

    if you want to talk about your grandmas knitting class open a thread that says so.

    back to topic gentleman, or I will close this down.

  • I'm not sure what you mean. The posts I made were of microtonal synths.

    No idea why you're talking about knitting here.

  • @palms I've updated the video thanks to your help 👍🏼

    https://vimeo.com/648423718

  • edited November 2021

    I'm afraid you can't close this or any other thread.

  • aha! I'm truly impressed you were able to make a polyphonic microtuner out of modules. Absolutely awesome. Thanks so much for sharing your skills with novices like me :-)

  • I see we need MIDI2CV to work with scl and tun files sooner than later

  • edited November 2021

    i have 2 sinewaves and I can tune them, by that logic it must be microtonal. yes, well 😴

  • edited November 2021

    the charme of additive / resynthesis is that what works in theory (rebuild any sound with sinewaves)

    does not work inpratice.

    If it would work it would sound exactly the same.

    it doesnt yet. ;)


    I wonder if machine learning and the new chips would help here.

    thats basically what it does?

    compare this with that?

    @giku

    this stuff is freaky, my iPad now tells me when the dogs did bark. 😎

  • still dont think this kind of chaotic conversation makes much sense to random readers. ^^

  • edited November 2021

    i have miRack and havent encountered any issues thus far.

  • Hi @godrejparkretreat . Not sure about the relevance of your post. Is it maybe in the wrong thread? Or are you just making a point about an aimless discussion?

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