Friday, March 6, 2015

Music Theory for Conworlders: What's Better than One Overtone Series?!?

Western - as well as eastern - musical scales have developed along a somewhat different path than I'm now going for, but let's try a small experiment. We take a slightly restricted overtone series, 8:9:10:12. We notice that 8:12 was a nice interval - C to G, essentially - and maybe G would be a nice place to restart the entire thing? We'd get
8/8     9/8     10/8   11/8  12/8    
12/8*8/8      12/8*9/8      12/8*10/8      
(...9/4) 3/2 27/16 15/8
The previous composition I've used - slightly adjusted to fit the currently slightly smaller scale (7 notes instead of 8) - I've decided to maintain movement rather than keeping the notes close to where they originally were - that is, if the original composition makes a move of four notes in a space where this scale only has three, I did some workaround so instead of going g ab a b c you get g a g b c or somesuch.
We could pick some other place to add the other scale - we could start from a tone for which C is an overtone instead. What C is to G, F is to C, and we can construct the scale that way as well, now getting:



8/8    9/8    10/8    12/8    
4/34/3*9/8     4/3*10/8     4/3*11/8      


3/25/311/6
For future purposes, we may now notice that 9/8 and 10/9 - the distance from 9/8 to 10/8, that is - are fairly similarly sized; we also can tell that there's one place in the scale where there are spaces that are quite a bit tighter - 15/8 to 2 as well as 5/4 to 4/3 leave a space of 16/15. From 5/4 to 3/2 we have a slightly larger gap - 6/5. In cents, these would be ~204, ~182, ~114 and ~316. There are two intermediate sizes here as well, that divide the 6/5 gap in two bits. It also happens to be that 204+114 get pretty close to dividing the 6/5 gap in two, which are observations that might come in handy at some point? The similarity between 204 and 180 permits us to use G-based melodies even though we're tuning from C and F. We could maybe even permit going about it the other way and use overtones from G, but pretend we're using overtones from G, giving us the final scale I'll list here below:

We get scales like these:
First, overtones 8-12, where 8=C, overtones 8-10 from C's 12th overtone:
C: 0 cents, 1/1
D: 204 cents, 9/8
E: 386 cents, 5/4
F: 551 cents, 11/8
G: 702 cents, 3/2
A: 906 cents, 27/16
B: 1088 cents, 15/8
Second, overtones 8-12, where 12=C, overtones 8-10 from C.
C: 0
D: 204
E: 386
F: 498, 4/3
G: 702
A: 884, 5/3
B: 1051, 11/6
Third, a 'compromise' between these would be:
C: 0
D: 204, 9/8
E: 386, 5/4
F: 498, 4/3
G: 702, 3/2
A: 906, 27/16
B: 1088, 15/8
Compare to the usual, modern western major scale:
C 0
D 200
E 400
F 500
G 700
A 900
B 1100
We now have unequal-sized steps, dispersed in slightly quirky patterns - but for a couple of tones we hit very close to overtones for several steps - the second and third scales, especially, make C, F and G all reasonably stable as some kind of tonal centres of the scales. Here are a few chord progressions comparing and contrasting the four scales:

An important point: the modern scale gives good approximations of the lower overtones. They also approximate them well in a pretty 'linear' way, i.e. whichever starting point within the scale you pick, it approximates the overtones equally well.
 This does not hold true for the scales I presented previously - try and see how well the pitch set matches overtones for E, for instance - you're quite far off, with the exception of E-B.

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