It's Happening Again: Generative 23 (14edo)
Channel: duckapus
Date: 02/02/2023

Something a little different perhaps, a little more lively. Used the "edge of chaos" maxmsp note-making thingie, but this time with more "hocketting", where voices are leaping around such that "melodies" sometimes emerge spread out over multiple voices. Also, it is in 14edo, a tuning which "on paper" looked to me like it would probably sound bad, or at least "out of tune". I mean, the 5th is flat, there are three kinds of 3rds and 6ths and none of them are quite like the "normal" 12edo 3rds/6ths. I'm surprised and a little confused as to why it sounds almost normal here. A little strident or dramatic, and somehow restless. Sometimes it almost seems "normal" but somehow "not normal" at the same time.

I think maybe the oddness of the tuning is a bit obscured by the way the music leaps around in counterpoint a lot. Like, I wonder if non-standard intervals are more obvious when heard in harmony than when heard melodically in a counterpoint-like way.

I used several different scales (or modes thereof, who knows), which act like chord changes, sorta maybe. The scales are, counting steps, 313313 and its mode 133133, used in the first part; 313133, used in one of the "interludes" and part of the "outro"; 33233, used in the middle "high energy" part; 322223, used in part of the "outro"; 2313311, used in the first "interlude"; and 22122212, used in the last "interlude". Part of the strange feel of 14edo might have to do with step sizes. Compared to "normal" 12edo, in 14edo the "half-step" (m2) and "whole step" (M2) are quite a bit smaller. Then there's the third step, which at 257¢ is right in the weird space in between a major 2nd and a minor 3rd, making an overly large whole step, "sorta a step but kinda not". Called a "subminor" below, it is also what Margo Schulter calls the "interseptimal Maj2-min3" space. A couple other intervals, the 171¢ large neutral 2rd and the 1029¢ small neutral 7th, fall into what she calls the "equable heptatonic" or "heartland" range, a "unique region of pitch". What all this means in this piece, I don't know. How would I know?

Here's some info on how the steps of 14edo work out, in terms of step, pitch in cents, name(s), and JI intervals approximated:

0    0¢       unison                        1/1
1    86¢     narrow minor 2nd     21/20
2    171¢   large neutral 2nd      11/10, 10/9
3    257¢   subminor 3rd             7/6
4    343¢   neutral 3rd                 11/9
5    429¢   supermajor 3rd          9/7
6    514¢   wide perfect 4th         4/3 (+16¢)
7    600¢    middle tritone           45/32, 64/45
8    686¢    narrow perfect 5th    3/2 (-16¢)
9    771¢    subminor 6th             14/9
10  857¢    neutral 6th                 18/11
11  943¢    supermajor 6th         12/7
12  1029¢  small neutral 7th       9/5, 20/11
13  1114¢  wide major 7th          40/21
14  1200¢   octave                        2/1