Toward a first-year project.

[eirias]

Haven't updated this in ages; stopped doing much reading for a couple months and now that I've started again I really ought to try updating. It's a useful thing.

For now, though, I have a question. If you were going to invent a new system of music different from Western music, how would you do it? What kinds of regularities would you include?

Comments

[mokatz.livejournal.com]

There's always the Eastern musics, who, of course, DON'T base their music on any sort of Doric, mixolydian, or otherwise scales. Then there are even the quarter tones, where the octave is broken up into even MORE than 12 evenly spaced steps.

Something that might be interesting, but probably horrible sounding, would be to break up the octave into 16 step, thus being a nice power of 2, sort of mirroring the whole, half, quarter, eigth, etc. of meter. Each step would be (Frequency of previous note) * 2^(1/16) ~= F*1.04423, as opposed to F*(2^(1/12)), for the western scale.

Thusly for an A440, one would have frequencies of 440, 459.48, 479.82, 501.07, 523.25, 546.42, 570.61, 595.87, 622.25, 649.8, 678.57, 708.62, 739.99, 772.75, 806.96, 842.69, 880.

It might also be interesting making some type of frequency ratios relating to pi (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Pi.html), e (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/e.html) or the Golden Ratio (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoldenRatio.html) (this one ought to be interesting), or maybe even the Fine Structure Constant (http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/FineStructureConstant.html). Either as the basis of the "octave", or as the ratio between notes.