See also Just Intonation.
Friday, July 26, 2019
Thursday, July 25, 2019
The Sharp: ♯ as 25/24
“For the Renaissance musician, a sharp multiplied a musical frequency
by the fraction 25/24 – and so does it in Ben’s music.”
— “Regarding Ben: A Keynote Address for the Microtonal Conference
[2010] at Wright State University,” by Kyle Gann
See too my own note from 2001: Harmony, Schoenberg, and The Last Samurai .
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Annals of Phenomenology
The Return of Purple Man
Or: This Just In
Detail from a post of yesterday morning taken from
the laptop of private investigator Jessica Jones —
The above image, together with yesterday's date, suggested, rather
fancifully, yesterday morning's later post on just intonation, "Seventh."
The nemesis of Jessica Jones, the Purple Man —
A New York Times piece today* is related to both just intonation and
the color purple —
* Published at 1:50 PM ET —
itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-08-08T17:50:30.000Z"
Friday, September 26, 2014
Style
“You can play things stylishly on the wrong instruments
or unstylishly on the right instruments;
I hope we’ll get it stylish on the right instruments.”
— The late Christopher Hogwood, founder of the
Academy of Ancient Music
Hogwood reportedly died at his home in Cambridge, England,
on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2014.
In memoriam—
This journal on Wednesday—
The notes of the just intonation major scale:
See also Hogwood on Mozart.
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Variation on a Simple Tune
The previous post discussed a tune ending in the following
sequence of notes (symbols as in a Wikipedia article):
C#4 B4 A4 E4 G4 .
(This sequence was approximated in that post by integers
representing the relative frequencies of the notes: 5 9 8 6 7 .)
Yesterday’s simple tune may suggest to some a similar refrain:
D4 E4 C4 C3 G3 .
This is, as a helpful page at Ars Nova Software explains,
the theme from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
The notes of the just intonation major scale:
The corresponding ratios from Close Encounters are…
9/8 5/4 1/1 1/2 3/4 , or, in whole numbers, 9 10 8 4 6.
These numbers also correspond, as in yesterday’s post, to the notes
B4 C#5 A4 A3 E4 .
Click the image below to try this on an online keyboard, playing keys
9 10 8 4 6 for Close Encounters.
“And you can tell everybody this is your song…”