Composing using the Golden Ratio <3 ! !! !!

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Apologize if I offended, but you were being less than clear.

But its okay. I think I get it now.

you're using the normal musical tones, but you're giving each key on the piano (both White and black?) a serial number (one through 88). And you're using that serial number to pick notes for your composition via the golden ratio.

So if you start with the first key on the left as key number 'one' you would use the Fibronacci sequence to pick the other keys (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,58, and ..at 89 you fall off the edge of the piano). Maybe Im confused about the Fibronacci Sequence having to do with the Golden Ratio-but thats my understanding of it. Anyway I think I get it now.

Then if you started with the second key from the left you would just prorate it to the right so to speak ( add 1 to each number in the Fibronacci Series to pick notes for that composition).

Makes sense.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 11 Jan 2014, 12:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It supposed to read "one through 88".

Dont know why that emoticon got there.

But it does look kinda cute there.

Glad all's clear now! Im actually in the process of creating a scale using phi. The initial hurdle was the fct that between 8khz and 22000 there are only about 3-4 tones audible to the majority or which can be prodcued on mid level stereo equipment. Managed to overcome that however. I'll start producing 12 tone compositions using it I think. Perhaps creating fractal music.

Great fractal tip would be to build an ambient piece export the whole as mp3 and speed it up. Incorporate that into the piece. Continually do the same until you end up with a single tone! It is probably the closest example of fractsal music ive seen as the Lsystem examples werent "true" fractal compositions

No good on fractals. I doubt you have the computing power to handle that kind of sample rate! Musical fractals aren't perceivable the same way visual fractals are, and THAT is going to be your biggest hurdle.

You COULD create pseudo-fractals in which the source fractal is simply embedded in the background noise of a, for lack of better term, super-fractal, and is simply faded in rather slowed down. Visual fractals are simply magnified, after all, rather than distorted, and speeding up/slowing down a fractal is going to alter or distort one musical component or another. You end up fading a sound in and out while keeping pitch constant or keeping the amplitude while altering the pitch. Sooner or later you're going to have to deal with the ILLUSION of fractals rather than ACTUAL fractals.

It should be encouraging, however, that digital artists who create animated fractal art do pick and choose which part of the fractal they let the viewer see. Even if you can't produce TRUE musical fractals on the level you're suggesting, you CAN make the objective of composing to filter out precisely what you want the listener to hear…which pretty much sums up the whole of most musical composition, anyway.

This post strikes me as somewhat naive. Keyboard instruments can be tuned however anyone wants. "A Above Middle C" is not 440 cycles. A=440 is a modern-day accepted tuning standard with the goal of unifying the tuning of a variety of instruments in order to allow them to perform WESTERN music with predictable results. 440 Hz is a recent invention and still not even in consistent use EVERYWHERE. Even gamelans vary in tuning by region.

In-tune/out-of-tune are relative terms. Keyboard instruments patched to perform Near-Eastern and Arabic music are not tuned to western scales, and some notes would sound out-of-tune if played side-by-side with a western-tuned keyboard. Some types of synthesized sounds aren't even the most effective with conventional equal-temperament. An analog synth tom, for instance, sounds unnatural if it's 12 equal tones/octave chromatic. 1/4 tones or even 1/8 tones or anything in between work better. Works composed for prepared piano often distort or alter the pitch of the strings due to the effects of objects placed on the strings, so in a larger sense the "true" pitch of the strings don't even matter. Creating individual keyboard key tunings is especially easy on software-based synthesizers. It doesn't matter if it sounds "good" or "in-tune." It matters if the performance matches the composer's expectations, which is the only tuning that matters.

Now, sure, equal temperament on a piano gives the best contemporary performance of Mozart and Bach's work on a modern acoustic keyboard instrument. However, MOST wind and string players do not use equal temperament. What wind and string players do, at least the best ones, is listen to their own parts, figure out where in the harmonic structure they are, and adjust for intonation. They might also consider where they are in the harmonic series as well.

I was rehearsing students once after the usual warmup and tune-up when they played a chord with the worst intonation I'd ever heard. At first I thought my alto saxes were playing a joke on me. I stopped, re-tuned, tried again. It was horrible. Every section was in tune with themselves. Every note was dead on with the strobe tuner. It didn't make sense. I looked in the score to see what the tuba player was playing. And then it occurred to me--have the tuba player use an alternate fingering (it was concert F, btw, which can be played open or with valves 1 and 3). My tuba player was confused. Basically the way it worked was open F belongs to the Bb harmonic series, whereas 1-and-3 F belongs to the F harmonic series. As long as he was playing open F, the rest of the harmonics further up in the series were creating beat frequencies with the rest of the ensemble who were playing chord tones that were more closely related to the F harmonic series. The difference was bad enough it was like one of them was playing a completely wrong note, not merely an out of tune note. By changing the fundamental in the bass voice, the intonation sounded PERFECT.

Piano tuning doesn't even follow equal temperament anyway, despite any claims to that effect. You rarely, if ever, hear an acoustic piano at true equal temperament. For one, true equal temperament is a compromise that makes the piano a versatile instrument playable in most situations with combinations of instruments. It will never have PERFECT intonation, but it gets closer than any alternative while retaining the ability to play in a variety of tonalities. Second, true equal temperament sounds HORRIBLE as the out-of-tune effects become more pronounced in registral extremes. High notes sound flat, while low notes sound sharp. Doesn't matter if they are perfectly in tune according to equal temperament. They still sound wrong. Good piano tuners will stretch octave, pushing the upper registers sharp and the lower registers flat in order to expand the octave and achieve a psychoacoustically superior sound.

Finally, it is technologically possible to design digital instruments, both hardware and software, that automatically detect the harmonic content being performed and adjust intonation for each individual chord--just as live orchestral players do. This renders any argument regarding old-fashioned tuning systems pretty much obsolete. The only point to even resorting to conventional tuning systems anymore (beyond piano and other acoustic keyboard tunings) is really more for the sake of some weird period-accurate fetish or for some other aesthetic preference of a composer or performer.

All that aside, perfect pitch/perfect tuning is not really something to get all that excited about. Something many synthesists tend to wax sentimental about is the formerly annoying tendency for analog equipment to drift in tuning as the oscillators heated up. Analog oscillators driven by digital clocks became mass marketed to budget-conscious musicians because of how inexpensive (comparatively) they were to the best analog systems, but getting the kinks worked out with pitch-stable oscillators meant cheap synths lost much of the character of the pricier analog modulars. Various solutions have been proposed to retain that "fat" analog "warmth" you'd get from oscillator drift, but electronic musicians still gripe about how nothing sounds like a Moog. Those out-of-tune oscillators gave those synths such a HUGE sound that no current synth on the market lacks some kind of chorus effect or, at the least, dual oscillators that a programmer can detune to get the same or similar effect. Heck, even the Synclavier can be set to slightly randomize notes within a specified range, which accomplishes two important things musically: 1) It imitates drifting oscillators for that old-school, massive analog sound, and 2) it helps prevent harmonically related or repeated sustaining or decaying notes from phase-canceling, something digital synths are especially notorious for.

Finally, absolute perfection in tuning and intonation is BORING. One of my pet peeves as a clarinetist is how often I was taught, and many clarinetists are typically taught, never to use vibrato. Compare with violinists. A straight, pure tone from a violin is about as unnatural as you can get. It's unsettling, whether it's a beginner still learning to just get the bow right or a seasoned veteran playing white tones as indicated in the part specifically to musically evoke that kind of mood. Pitches that don't move or breath musically tend to affect audiences in a negative way. Perfect, constant pitch-stability is going to give the listener a bad case of ear-fatique.

I'm composing something more akin to "spectral" music at the moment, which for me means a LOT of sustained tones. Since I'm working in the electronic idiom and don't wish to spend an excessive amount of time on that kind of work, one thing I attempt to do is automate as many musical components as I can, including variations in pitch and loudness over time. I'm guilty of letting most notes just kind of hang there with little change over time. I know it has to be bad if it's giving me, the composer, a headache. Dynamics don't have to be overly dramatic to be effective, nor am I writing music that is intended to be intense or exciting. If I expect anyone to listen more than a couple of minutes, especially to a long-form piece, there have to be peaks and valleys (in dynamic terms) if the musical line is to hold any kind of interest at all. Perfect pitch, standard tuning, and consonant harmonies are the least of my worries. I happen to use standard 12-tone equal temperament, but nothing is stopping me from using the same compositional techniques to a 13-tone octave or even a 7-tone octave. Note pitches for me only provide the raw material. There are musical components that, to me, are a lot more important than pitch.