Birthday

Had a birthday dinner at my aunt's tonight with family. Got this tattered piece of sheet music from a friend of my aunt's who I don't even know that well (I guess she likes my piano playing).

The bottom corner says "Copyright MDCDIII" which is... 1903! The cover is really beautiful and antique-looking and will make a good decoration for my wall (it's fallen off anyway). As was popular back then, the music is supposed to represent events in a story. Inside the cover there's a wordy description of the events described by the music and instructions for how the different parts should be played, and in the music itself there's corresponding notes letting you know where you are in the story:

INTRO. Dash of the Charioteers for Position. Con Brilliant.
The Race.
Finish of the Race.
Parade of the Victors. Grandioso.
TRIO. Populace Dispersing.
Evening Song of the Christians, dolce
Alarm of Fire, fff
People in Consternation, furioso.
Second Alarm
People in Panic.
People rush wildly through the streets.
Fire fiercely Raging, fff
Crash of falling walls.

...and then it reprises the beginning, concluding with "a grand finale that is thoroughly in keeping with the spirit, life, and enthusiasm of the occasion that is being described" in the words of the description.

The piece itself sounds like the accompaniment you sometimes hear in old silent films; in fact another piece by this guy, "The Chariot Race", was used in the accompaniment to the silent version of Ben-Hur (though it was published before the film). You can hear the piece here (midi file... also the player added some ragtime embellishments towards the end... the composer wasn't that cool). I'm surprised how much I like it, it would actually be pretty fun to play.

Yesterday was my actual birthday. I spent pretty much the whole day installing programs for microtonal tunings and then playing with the results. My friend Damon has been bugging me to produce more microtonal music since I posted my first quarter-tone piece, and anyway I wanted to just screw around for awhile and further procrastinate CD recording. Once I got the programs running (Scala [www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/scala] and Scala 2 SynthEdit Microtuner [www.12equalboresme.com]) I had to sit down and work out what note frequencies I wanted to map to the keyboard keys. My first keyboard mapping scheme was kind of hard to play with and I ended up laying awake for much of the night thinking about the problem and rearranging the notes first thing in the morning. Here's what I came up with -- boldface represents black keys:

KEYBOARD LEFT HALF:
1 (base note, C)
16/15 of the base note's frequency
9/8
6/5
5/4
27/20
45/32
3/2
8/5
27/16
9/5
15/8
2

KEYBOARD RIGHT HALF:
1
25/24
10/9
7/6
32/27
4/3
25/18
40/27
Average of 14/9 and 25/16
5/3
7/4
16/9
2

(In the first version I found that 14/9 and 25/16 were practically indistinguishable, so I decided to combine them.) The notes come from a modified version of Partch's tonality diamond described in an earlier post, laid out to correspond with their closest approximations on a conventional keyboard. Many of the notes on the right half are 80/81 of the corresponding notes on the left half. 80/81 is a subtle but audible difference, about a fifth of the distance between adjacent notes on the conventional scale. The contrast sounds interesting. The way it comes about is, on the keyboard's left half, F, B-flat, and E-flat are tuned as a series of exact fourths (4/3 or 2/3) and A, D, and G, respectively, are tuned an exact third in relation to those (5/4 or 5/8); whereas on the right side the opposite occurs: G, D, and A are tuned as a series of exact fifths (3/2 or 3/4) and F, B-flat, and E-flat are tuned a minor sixth (4/5 or 8/5) in relation to those. So these sets of keys in the two keyboard halves are harmonious within themselves, except for the chords C-F on the left half and C-G on the right. My tuning also contains some multiples of 7, which aren't used in standard tuning and are considerably different (flatter) than the corresponding notes on the standard keyboard. For a long time I've been curious what 7/4 (and 11/8 and 13/8) sounds like so it was exciting to try it out... yesterday I probably spent an hour just listening to droning chords with unusual intervals, trying to get an intuition for them. This morning I made a good start on a piece using my new scheme.

This represents the difference between a major third tuned as the ratio 5/4, or tuned as four steps through the circle of fifths (81/64) -- the conventional scale compromises between those two tunings.

I feel a bit like I'm getting sucked into this obsessive subculture of tuning geeks. You can really spend a lot of time doing all this math to calculate frequencies that are only a teeny-tiny distance away from the conventional notes (but make absolutely perfect ratios, without the compromises in the standard 12-equal-divisions tuning... some people really get off on that). I'm still trying to figure out what difference the alternate tunings really make and how to use that difference musically. To get a sense of how deep tuning geekdom can go, just browse this catalog of the 3700+ alternate tunings that come with the Scala software. (Example: the "detempered convex closure of 11-limit diamond in {243/242, 441/440} temperament plane," with 39 tones per octave. Or more simply, there's the "Yugoslavian bagpipe" tuning... for all you Yugoslavs reading this...)

In other random news, I've heard back from two of the venues I contacted regarding future shows. I'm looking at a Halloween party show at The Factory with Carjack! and a show in November at the TrumbullPlex with Emily Bate, though both are tentative now. I'm excited.

Carjack! and more works-in-progress

Yesterday I finally finished a presentable version of The Cheese... I'm sure I'll want to tweak it further, but the main thing is, it was good enough to post on my myspage. I've been holding off for awhile on contacting venues to try to get gigs, until I had more presentable stuff on MySpace. I really wanted to have even more of my songs on there, but lately I've been feeling restless, working in my apartment, feeling like I ought to be getting out and doing stuff... and I went to see this dude in concert Friday, called Carjack!, and it made me even more restless.

Carjack! put on a very good show, lots of energy and weirdness; I recommend seeing him if you get the chance. It was at this little loft space in Rochester called The Factory. The crowd seemed to be young hip-looking college kids and high-schoolers and maybe a few middle-schoolers. I was the oldest person there I think except for Carjack! himself (who's 35... this may partly explain why I relate to his music), Carjack!'s sidekick, and some people who looked like parents of people in the other bands that were playing. I danced some at the show but mostly the scene felt a little too uptight for me to get too loose... other people were mostly standing still, crowded back against the walls of the small space while Carjack! cavorted about in the center. I had the impression that Carjack! was trying very hard to get people into it, and failing, and trying harder and still failing, and that he must be a very sad Carjack!. After the show I bought a homemade CD from him and talked to him and he talked a lot about what an awesome show he had put on, how he must have totally freaked those kids out and they didn't know what had hit them. While he was talking he was standing very close to me in the cramped space, looking down at me (I hadn't realized how much taller than me he was) and talking very quickly, loudly, and animatedly. I nodded and smiled a lot.

I tried promoting myself there a little bit... I got the contact info for the person who books shows at the Factory, and I told Carjack! about my thing and said we should play together. I am still a bit uncomfortable doing the self-promotion thing.

Carjack! was followed by Aleph-1. For the uninitiated, Aleph-1 is the mathematical term for the first infinity larger than the infinity which is the size of the integers (which is Aleph-0). I felt special that I understood their name, but unfortunately they were too prog-y for my taste; I thought the music was a bit self-indulgent and lacking in substance. I fantasized about heckling them with mathematical jargon: "You call yourselves uncountable? You're in one-to-one correspondence with every bad prog band from the '70s! Take it to the power-set, guys, take it to the power-set!" But I'm not that big of a jerk, so I just left early.

So I went home and checked out Carjack!'s MySpace and all his side projects, and was reminded, again, that you really don't have to have your stuff be too polished to get venues to give you gigs. So the next day I did one final round of tweaking on The Cheese and said to hell with it... posted it, and then emailed six places (the Factory, the Luna Cafe [St. Clair Shores], the Blind Pig [Ann Arbor], the Neutral Zone [teen hangout in Ann Arbor], TrumbullPlex [anarchist co-op in Detroit], the Asterisk [place in Brooklyn where Carjack! is playing next week]), sending them my MySpace link. I'll email more soon... maybe wait till I get feedback on this round? I'm procrastinating a little; this whole thing is a tad scary.

Here's The Cheese.

While I'm at it... here's another work-in-progress that I've been adding to over the past couple weeks:
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Free-Association Song
"I never have enough lyrics to go with my music, so for this song I'll just read from the dictionary and free-associate and that'll be another one down."

Last week I spent several hours trying, and failing, to get Partch's tonality diamond (see my earlier post) to play with my music software. I got sick of wrestling with my computer and just wanted to play something, so finally I just programmed it so the keyboard was split in half with the upper half a quarter-tone lower than the lower half, and I started playing... that was a thrill. Just savor those quarter-tones.

Here's my little preliminary stab at microtonal music: Ha What Did I Say

I'm pretty proud of it actually... though I don't think it approaches the awesomeness of the piece by Charles Ives that inspired it: Quarter-Tone Piece #3: Chorale

aha

I spent a few hours today at my cousins' house practicing my trio and trying to convince my cousin Laila that (1) 0.999... equals 1, and (2) math can be cool. I convinced her on (1) and made a little headway on (2). To try to convince her further on (2), I thought of this funny math problem I came across once upon a time. I think it's cool enough to be worth posting here.

Dr. Pugh and Dr. Steel are colleagues in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley. One day they are at a math department party and their student, Mason, says, "I have an amusing little problem for you. I'm thinking of two whole numbers between 1 and 9, inclusive. Their product is [he whispers something in Pugh's ear] and their sum is [he whispers something in Steel's ear]. Can you figure out what the numbers are?"
They both take out pencil and paper and do some calculations.
Then Pugh says, "Hmm... no, I don't know."
Then Steel does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I don't know."
Then Pugh does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Steel does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Pugh does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Steel does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Pugh does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Steel does some more calculations and says, "Hmm... no, I still don't know."
Then Pugh does some more calculations and says, "AHA!"
What are the two numbers?

If you know, don't give it away in the comments. If you're stuck and need a hint, email me (clobberfoe of geemale).

The Dequindre Cut pathway

Today I tried biking on the new Dequindre Cut bike path, from Eastern Market to Chene Park. It used to be an abandoned railway line, with bridges at every street that were completely covered with elaborate graffiti. Now they put this nice, streetlamp-lined, tastefully landscaped path through it so you can stroll past the graffiti as if in the Detroit Institute of Arts. It felt pretty incongruous and disorienting to see this illicit artform, painted on these old decaying structures, featured as the centerpiece of this pretty, bourgeois sort of parkway. I thought it was a great idea though, very cool.


The image above is from this DetroitYes gallery (from before the bourgification). More photos here.

The diamond marimba

So I got very excited by this yesterday... Apparently there's an instrument called a diamond marimba whose notes are laid out in two dimensions.

This actually seems to be much more logical and interesting than a one-dimensional layout. The marimba plays microtonal music, i.e. notes that don't exist on a normal keyboard (the microtonal notes are in between the normal keyboard notes). Each southwest-northeast row contains a scale in a different key. Each scale contains notes whose frequencies are exact multiples of that scale's base key (give or take some octaves) -- e.g. if the base note is C then the scale contains C, G, E, D, plus other non-standard notes. The rows in the perpendicular, northwest-southeast direction also contain scales. These scales contain all the notes that the base note's frequency is a multiple of -- the inverse relationships of the relationships in the southwest-northeast rows -- e.g. for a base note of C, the scale contains C, F, A-flat, B-flat, plus other non-standard notes -- more like a minor scale. The southwest-northeast rows are called otonalities and the northeast-southwest rows are called utonalities... I love good jargon.

The coolest thing, however, is that you can actually play the diamond marimba, virtually, at this site. (Note: I think the labels on the lower half are off by an octave or two [i.e. a factor of 2 or 4]).

This guy's site also has links to the software he uses to compose microtonal music. I definitely want to try it.

The diamond marimba was invented by Harry Partch, a 20th century American composer whose music I've been a fan of for a year now, without knowing much about the instruments on which it was played. Here's some of his music featuring (I think) the diamond marimba.

Arrest, Trial and Judgement (single song from the opera Delusion of the Fury)

Delusion of the Fury in its entirety