Re:[Shaku] microtonal fluctuations in the noosphere

From: Karl Young (kyoung@itsa.ucsf.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 19 2005 - 10:57:06 PDT


thanks for the interesting post, Joel

> Justin, in the US and Europe the avante-garde microtonally saturated "free music" ...
> I use laptop that listens to whatever comes into it's microphone port (my shakuhachi, but also just whatever is in the air) via a pitch and envelope detector that uses a moveable Do version of Partch's 43-tone per octave tuning system. Many electronic musicians use complex tuning systems that are not 12-TET.

As a Parch fan (though not one that claims to have the ability to pick out pitches at will from the 43 tone scale) I'd love to hear that

> The studies that have been done of classical musicians in various traditions (european, and carnatic classic musicians) that show a low-frequency (1 over F) based randomness to the microtonal fluctuations in tuning that professional players make during performance

Interesting; I hadn't heard about those studies (wonder if it's somehow related to the result that analysis of the works of accomplished composers apparently yields a 1/f spectrum re. pitch distribution) and it sounds sort of counterintuitive unless I'm misunderstanding something (usually the case !). Is that study really saying that pitch fluctuations for professional players increase with decreasing frequency (as a power law even) !? Somehow it would seem that fluctuations at lower frequency would be more audible and hence players would struggle more to "correct" them but maybe that's wrong. Perhaps there's some funny uncertainty principle going on saying that the product of frequency fluctuation bandwidth and duration are bounded below and given that it's harder to pin down low frequencies with shorter playing duration...

Karl Young
University of California, SF Phone: (415) 221-4810 x3114 lab
VA Medical Center, MRS Unit (114M) (415) 750-9463 home
4150 Clement Street FAX: (415) 668-2864
San Francisco, CA 94121 Email: kyoung@itsa.ucsf.edu
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