[PenultimateManStanding]

I loved what Gillian Welsh did on the Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. I notice though, that mainstream country radio stations 20 - 30 years ago played that outlaw stuff and it was fun to listen to back then. There was a funny song mid 80's about a housewife who was disgusted that her husband wasted his paychecks at the bars after work so she came up with a plan. She's gonna rip out the carpet and put sawdust on the floor. She's gonna put on something sexy and put a big bar in the living room and sell beer. Then her husband and all his friends can come home to his house after work and she'll keep the money.

[Pops]

Murder On Music Row
(Larry Shell/Larry Cordle)

Nobody saw them running

From 16th Avenue

They never found the fingerprints

Or the weapon that was used

But someone killed country music

Cut out its heart and soul

They got away with murder

Down on music row

The almighty dollar

And the lust for worldwide fame

Slowly killed tradition

And for that, someone should hang ("Ahh, you tell 'em Alan")

They all say "Not Guilty!"

But the evidence will show

That murder was committed

Down on music row

For the steel guitars no longer cry

And the fiddles barely play

But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars

Are mixed up in your face

Ol' Hank wouldn't have a chance

On today's radio

Since they committed murder

Down on music row

They thought no one would miss it

Once it was dead and gone

They said no one would buy them ol'

Drinkin' and cheatin' songs ("Oh, but I still buy 'em")

Well there ain't no justice in it

And the hard facts are cold

Murder's been committed

Down on music row

For the steel guitars no longer cry

And you can't hear fiddles play

With drums and rock 'n' roll guitars

Mixed right up in your face

Why the Hag wouldn't have a chance

On today's radio

Since they committed murder

Down on music row

Why they even tell the Possum

To pack up and go back home

There's been an awful murder

Down on music row

[aldente]

The best source of online music that I have found so far is a station called "groove salad" to be found on shoutcast.com
Highly recommended!!

[PenultimateManStanding]

Diana Krall, Let's Face the Music And Dance

[dinopello]

At the moment, and has been for a while it's

'The Philadephia Experiment' - (Uri Caine, Ahmir Thomson and Christian McBride). The whole thing, but if I had to pick one song it would be 'Call for all Demons'

[dmtu]

Guns n Roses, Coma. Very complex instrumentaly and and you can feel the emotion from every note

[sklump]

Miss Right Now: Midimiliz, Nick Jacholson
Older stuff: Bob Marley, "Jammin'"
Classical: Bach, Rachmaninov, Scarlatti are good

Picking one favourite? That's like picking one favourite drink.

[Carlhole]

The musical scale was divided (in Western culture) into twelve notes - don't ask me when; I forget. But it was a long, long time ago in a kingdom far, far away. Other cultures have divided the musical scale into 5, such as the pentatonic Asian system, or twenty or more such as in India and the Near East. Twelve divisions seems like a very wise number to me because it is the smallest number with the most divisors. Twelve is a mathematically rich number and in music, this leads to many interesting harmonics. To a Westerner, the twleve-tone scale seems almost programmed by nature into the brain's neural circuitry. But this is not so.

I've always wondered why there IS something such as music at all. And why do people seem to respond in identical ways to it? Why do some people have perfect pitch? And are there people in other cultures that have perfect pitch for a musical scale with thirty notes? Are there musical intervals in a thirty-note scale that express melancholy, weirdness or a sense of incompleteness that everyone in that culture recognizes? Hmm.

Caveman Crooners May Have Aided Early Human Life

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('WSJ', 'M')ore evidence that the brain has dedicated, inborn musical circuits is that even babies have musical preferences, finds Sandra Trehub of the University of Toronto. They listen longer to perfect fifths and perfect fourths, and look pained by minor thirds.

If music is indeed an innate, stand-alone adaptation, then evolution could have nursed it along over the eons only if it helped early humans survive. It did so, Prof. Mithen suggests, because "if music is about anything, it is about expressing and inducing emotion."

Particular notes elicit the same emotions from most people, regardless of culture, studies suggest. A major third (prominent in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy") sounds happy; a minor third (as in the gloomy first movements of Mahler's Fifth) provokes feelings of sadness and even doom. A major seventh expresses aspiration. The absence of a third seems unresolved, loose, as if hanging, adds jazz guitarist Michael Rood, 17 years old.

[jimk]

Here is an experiment I put together using a scale with 53 notes per octave:

http://www.cnfractalmusic.com/warehouse ... 6_b6t9.mp3

(log 3)/(log 2) is what I call the fundamental ratio of music. This is an irrational number, but one can approximate it using rational numbers. 19/12 is a pretty good approximation - this is why a conventional scale has 12 notes. 84/53 is an even closer approximation, which is why I used 53 notes per octave in my experiment.

Somehow our ear tends to find harmonious frequency ratios like 3/2 and 5/4. It may be just because lots of objects in the world have overtone series with those sorts of intervals.

Fascinating stuff, for sure!

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jimk', '
')Somehow our ear tends to find harmonious frequency ratios like 3/2 and 5/4. It may be just because lots of objects in the world have overtone series with those sorts of intervals.

Fascinating stuff, for sure!

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jimk', 'H')ere is an experiment I put together using a scale with 53 notes per octave:

http://www.cnfractalmusic.com/warehouse ... 6_b6t9.mp3

(log 3)/(log 2) is what I call the fundamental ratio of music. This is an irrational number, but one can approximate it using rational numbers. 19/12 is a pretty good approximation - this is why a conventional scale has 12 notes. 84/53 is an even closer approximation, which is why I used 53 notes per octave in my experiment.

Somehow our ear tends to find harmonious frequency ratios like 3/2 and 5/4. It may be just because lots of objects in the world have overtone series with those sorts of intervals.

Fascinating stuff, for sure!

[Carlhole]

Nevermind. I follow...

That IS fascinating.

I suppose in that far away kingdom, they just discovered by trial and error that twelve tones worked better than other divisions. Then, I have to wonder why those other cultures came up with a different number of notes?

[jimk]

Here was my amazing experience with this. I used my trusty HP pocket calculator to figure out the rational numbers close to (log 3) / (log 2). I used "continued fractions", so you can google that if you want to learn some math. It is quite simple to figure out that 84/53 works well.

By the way, if you ever need a good rational approximation for pi, try 355/113.

Anyway, I started poking around on the web to see if other folks had experimented in similar ways. Turns out, already in 40 B.C., in China, folks had figured out the 53 note scale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/53_tone_equal_temperament

How they did that without pocket calculators... it boggles my mind!

[Carlhole]

Gosh, that is really interesting! Thanks for pointing that out, Jimk.

This is a folk tune written in 53-et:
http://66.98.148.43/~xenharmo/mp3/shaahin/shur.mp3

It almost sounds like it could have been written in a regular twelve note scale also, if just a little Indian. And the other examples on this page like Pachelbel's Canon, also written in 53-et, sound no different.

In the case, of a familiar tune like Pachelbel's Canon, the only difference would be the degree of mathematical exactness of interval - and I can't see how the brain could possibly distinguish such small differences. After all, the article said:

"The cent is a logarithmic unit of measure used for musical intervals. Typically cents are used to measure extremely small intervals, or to compare the sizes of comparable intervals in different tuning systems, and in fact the interval of one cent is much too small to be heard between successive notes."

But one would think that a scale of 53 notes would have all sorts of intervals, chords and phrases that would sound utterly and fantastically different than a piece of music written using a mere 12 tones. I wonder why they didn't include an example of a piece like that?

[jimk]

It's funny, I got into the whole peak oil thing in 1976, and that's right about the time I got into researching scales and tuning. Been thinking about both for a while now!

The whole tuning thing is incredibly deep. Here is another experience that blew my mind. I don't know about Pachelbel - he was probably earlier than Bach. I was trying to transcribe Bach into a more precise tuning system. This was around 1979, before I discovered the 53 note system. I was working with a couple of Bach's Harmonized Chorales, which are very short. What I discovered was that this music cannot be made more precise!

The interval from C to D in the conventional tuning, that interval might be approximating the ratio 8:9, but it is also used to represent 9:10. The difference between these is 80:81. This "comma" is the fundamental fudge factor of any 12 note system. What I discovered about Bach is that his music is basically making puns, it's playing with ambiguity. It's taking advantage of the "enharmonic equivalence", the fact that the same note stands for multiple harmonic relationships. So one cannot faithfully transcribe his music to a more precise system, because then the ambiguities would have to be resolved - and there is no consistent way to resolve them!

That was fun enough. Then in 1991 I had access to a good library, and discovered The Structure of Recognizable Diatonic Tunings by Easley Blackwood. He goes through several centuries of western music and shows how that whole tradition is basic on puns and ambiguity, where this 80:81 comma is getting played with like a pea under a set of walnut shells. It's a really great book if you want to understand the relationship between music and tuning systems. These things aren't independent!

Then just in maybe 2002 I found an Easley Blackwood section in a CD store. He's composed music in some wierd tunings, but most of his music is in conventional tunings. His understanding of how music and tuning work with each other has let him compose some really great music.

So the point of my little musical experment was to try to discover what kind of music might work naturally with the 53 note system. It's algorithmically constructed, using lots of random numbers. The computer program I wrote, that generates the music, tries to keep almost all the notes in nice harmonic relationships, while still putting in enough spice to keep it interesting. Since the 53 note system permits natural intervales to be represented very precisely, the music should actually sound more harmonic than the conventional 12 note system!

BTW, 1 cent is a tiny difference in pitches! 80:81 is more like 21 cents. It's quite audible. If you ever try to tune a guitar using harmonics - it can't be done precisely, there is just this 80:81 interval that one gets stuck hiding somewhere.

To bring this back around to peak oil... the amazing thing about music and mathematics is that these kinds of disciplines allow unbounded exploration and progress and actually fun, all without requiring any kind of unsustainable consumption of resources!

[Chuckmak]

I LOVE THIS POST!!!!!!!!!!

[Chuckmak]

double post lol

[Chuckmak]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jimk', '
')By the way, if you ever need a good rational approximation for pi, try 355/113.

[jimk]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Chuckmak', 'i')'ve always used 22/7

[JimColyer]

Amazing how many songs can be written with only 12 notes.