Ratios and music

I've been reading Harry Partch lately. Great stuff. It became much more enjoyable after I printed my GRE vocab list and kept it nearby. Here is my book report on Partch's Genesis of a Music: This guy is neurotic.

I respect the work that he put into this stuff and all, it's just that he is overly thorough. The sad part is that his invented instruments are now quite obsolete as a result of technology.

Anyway here is the start of what may become a series of posts based on intonation.

Ratios.
Music is most correctly described as ratios. All those lines and dots and squiggles that is all the rage in today's music conservatories are misleading, erroneous, artificial, cumbersome... oh, don't get me started on notation.

The first rule of ratio music is two's are perceived as the same note. Tell a choir to sing an "A," the altos with perfect pitch, that is, all of them, will sing A440, which is a tone that vibrates at 440 times a second. The tenors will sing A220, the basses will sing A110, and the divas among the sopranos, that is, the entire soprano section will sing A880. 110, 220, 440, and 880. Halved or doubled, they're all the same note, just different octaves.

Now through a convoluted and arbitrary historical process that will wait for another day for thorough explanation, an octave on the piano contains 12 chromatic keys. This equally tempered scale is a perversion of the ratios that occur naturally in sound. The mindset behind equal temperament is, "Well, since its too hard to get most of the notes in tune, we'll just make all of them out of tune and they'll be close enough."

As a result, none of the ratios that you hear on a "well" tuned piano occur naturally except for the octave, the 2 to 1 ratio. Some knot-head about 500 years ago said to himself, "Hey, let's just forget about these inconvenient ratios and divide the octave into 12 equal segments."

Then he said. "That makes cents."

Sound and performance

One characteristic of electronic music is the way the music is divorced from the performance gesture. That is, the sound does not necessarily relate to the performance of that sound. For instance, watch Bela Fleck and his Flecktones sometime. You'll hear percussion though there is no apparent drummer on stage. The percussionist is actually Future Man, playing his drum axe, or whatever he calls it, wait, let me check... "synth-axe drumitar." It's basically a guitar like thing with a whole lot of buttons all over it, triggering whatever drum samples he programs for each song. It makes sense to me, he has ten fingers to work with instead of just four limbs. Also the bassist, Victor Wooten, doesn't appear to play half the notes you hear, but that's not electronics, that's just crazy-mad skill.

Whereas in the past a violinist creates a beautiful tone by applying the precise amount of pressure at a carefully consistent speed, today I re-create the same beautiful tone quality by choosing an appropriate sample from my hard drive. However, the point of electronic music is not to duplicate traditional (obsolete) instrumentation, but to expand the sound palette to include entirely new sounds(John Cage, Silence, pg. 4). Who needs mallets and bows and air pressure when the crack of thunder or crashing ocean wave is at my command. Why limit myself to chord progressions to intensify drama when I can include the sound of a wailing child, or exploding rocket. I can be as subtle as the beating of a butterfly's wings or the crackle of smoldering charcoal (Iannis Xenakis, Concret PH, 1958) .

But, the question remains, is all this a good thing? Perhaps the thing that makes music the most valuable for most people is the human connection between audience and performer. People like to visualize (auralize) the rosin contacting the string, the desperate breath required for the trumpet entrance, the effort involved in maintaining pitch on the oboe, etc..

This is why I believe, as much I value electronic music, live performance on acoustic instruments will never completely go away.