"According to a survey in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we misunderstand the tone of emails 50% of the time--and for good reason: there is no face on the other end to stop us in midsentence, to indicate that what we are in the process of saying is rude, not comprehended, or cruel.... Psychologists call it disinhibition, and its pervasive effect--as can be witnessed every day in nasty comments appended to newspaper articles online, in the aggrieved tone and intent of some blog postings, in email inboxes scorched by flame wars--has turned many parts of the internet into a nasty place."

"According to Marco Iacoboni, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA, this has bolstered the notion that "our mental processes are shaped by our bodies and by the types of perceptual and motor experiences that are the product of our movement through and interaction with the surrounding world." Consider then, the ramifications of an era of communication in which we are disembodied as never before...."

"A 2006 Cisco research paper concluded that failing to respond to a (email) sender can lead to a swift breakdown in trust. Lose an email forever, and you are sitting on an unexploded land mine."

"Email is addictive, it has been shown, in the same way that slot machines are addictive. You press the send/receive button just as a gambler pulls down a slot machine lever, because you know that you will receive a reward some of the time."

"Thirty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle, the French philosopher Guy Debord predicted we would be spending more time apart. 'The reigning economic system is founded on isolation,' he wrote. 'At the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system, as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "lonely crowd.'" To this list of machines we can now also add the internet and email.

Ironically, tools meant to connect us are enabling us to spend even more time apart."

" By depriving ourselves of facial expressions and the tangible frisson of physical contact, we are facing a terrible loss of meaning in individual life. The difference between a smiley face and an actual smile is too large to calculate. Nothing-especially-'lol'-can quite convey the sound of a friend's laughter."

The Tyranny of Email-John Freeman

--



Better sounding 19tet than I did with my awful 'Homegrown Piano.' Maybe I'll have to purchase something from h pi. Not a lot else out there really...

Of tet versus just intonation, for 12 tone each key will have different sound in just intonation, not just if it's major or minor. Except for a few trifles each key is exactly the same in 12tet. That's a positive for 12JI.
Then there's this fellow:
http://music.case.edu/duffin/Norton/Letter.html
Unfortunately the damm song files aren't working. I guess I could figure it out on my own further...

But I must say for very large scales there is something nice about a relatively even step up. In Partch's pure tone 43 I don't like the jumps.

Another issue 43 notes means only two octaves for an 88 key keyboard. Needs to be a bit less. I think 31 will still be too much. May have to stay at 19. But will experiment further up into the 20's. Or should I be limited by the keyboard I happen to own anyway? I hate to be a dabbler (into too many things) but I see myself trying to build a microtonal instrument eventually.

But for now I want a conventional virtual orchestra, yet microtonal. Something that can just be played on a keyboard.

It sort of matters to put down this half thought out stuff. Otherwise I forget. I forget whole projects not to mention possible directions. Granted this is somewhat ignorant musing.

-

Read Perfume by Suskind. Good but will leave no trace at all on me.

The Handmaid's Tale by Atwood. Excellent. Like 1984 but darker. I guess a little too dark. 1984 has the hope of a love affair smacked in the middle. Handmaid just has a small one near the end. But it brings up the question again of how women are treated especially in the ME. Though many of the women claim they want to be treated that way and will scream religious intolerance if anyone says there's something wrong with the inequality there, still it ought to ultimately be handled like slavery was. It should not be tolerated. No matter the panglossianism.

Kushiel's Dart, the first 100 pages were pure fluff and I gave it up.

These three mentioned by Robin Hobb, possibly to just hopefully get me to go away for a while. In response to the concept of 'preachy' books. She ignored my mentioning 1984, CS Lewis and Ayn Rand and instead responded with these three. As books that bothered her. Awfully fluffy reply it was. But then it's an awful medium to interact by so who cares? How she can stand being so open and out there and yet exposed to endless anonymous hidden people is completely beyond me.

I recall Chomsky promptly used to answer emails. What did I feel when finding this out? Sad that he wasn't sufficiently famous. That his email address was right on the internet and he could so quickly respond to people. And then I felt him to be such an angel. The guy must get incredible hate mail. And yet there he sits dutifully opening up new anonymous email messages. What an incredible saint.

In other news Lamarckian evolution might be right after all.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1951968,00.html

Partch's 43

z3ta+

..it's actually 12 out of 43-tET (1/5-comma meantone). Whoopsie.
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/scalesdir.txt

While 3/2 is assoclated with power, 5/4 is more expressive of sentiment and emotion. To my ear, these qualities of the primes show up to some extent in combined intervals; for example, the included interval 5/3 (a "major sixth") seems to convey some "fiveness" and some "threeness." This would imply that the character of any just interval includes expression of the prime factors that make it up. Of course, all this is highly subjective.

In early times the interval 5/4 was considered discordant; its acceptance as consonant came centuries after 3/2 gained popularity. Then it became firmly established as an essential component of traditional triadic harmony.

http://www.redshift.com/~dcanright/harmser/

Power versus a more nuanced expression of differing feelings. Sort of like forcing people in line versus actually using reason and communicating their differences. Originally the 5/4 sounded discordant but as the ears spent time hearing it became 'musical'. With time a much larger and discordant scale could become acceptable. Would such routinely listened to by an entire society influence the actions in the same direction?

justonic and long explanation of just intonation

http://www.justonic.com/demos.html
Do I really care? Not sure.


These commas exist only outside the confines of the twelve notes tones of equal temperament. In fact, tempered tunings were developed over the past four hundred years precisely to avoid the commas that are heard whenever music with moderately complex harmonies is played in just intonation. I have discovered that incorporating the commas into the harmonic fabric of my music frees it from the need for tempered tunings and opens up a new approach to tonality.-Michael Harrison (as opposed to justonic)

Throughout the history of Western classical music there has been a gradual evolution from the use of relatively wide and consonant intervals to increasingly narrow and more dissonant sounding intervals. For example, organum, early two-part music that developed from the 9th to 12th centuries, used the consonant open sounding intervals of perfect fourths, fifths and octaves. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the relatively dissonant intervals of seconds, thirds, and sevenths were interwoven into the polyphonic fabric of the music, which was still organized contrapuntally as opposed to tonally. At the beginning of the 18th century, music began to be formally organized around tonal centers. As major, minor, and other key relationships developed, it became essential to create a tuning system that permitted moving easily between different key centers. In the 19th century, the evolution of even more complex chromaticism resulted in stretching tonal harmony to its limits. In the 20th century, Schoenberg’s concept of “emancipation of dissonance” led to the free use of any interval combination in equal temperament. I propose that this evolution is still in progress, and that its next stage is the “emancipation of the comma.”

etc...

The barriers on microtonal music are...

The sound of homegrown piano with scala files isn't any good. But I suppose it's no worse really than a harpischord.

I'm unfamilar of course with any new scale and standard keyboards don't correspond. I guess I need to stick pieces of tape on the keyboard in the place at least of one octave up, a fifth, the seventh, etc. With what little playing around I've done so far it seems I lose the ability even to tell what is an octave up! As the strange pitches ...discombobulate me or something.

What alternate scale should I even use? Maybe, probably, no amount of trying to study music theory and the mathematics behind it is going to answer that question on it's own. I simply need to mess around with such alternate scales, actually hear them, see how they sound...

Despite the bad sound of homegrown piano I should use it and it's scala files pitchshifted from a single note. 19 equal temperament-put bits of tape on the keyboard.

...

lambdoma
The problem with that is there's 21 notes in the first octave, ten in the second and then only 3, 2, and 1, 1, 1 in the following. But that first bit looks like a nice alternate scale to me.
1/8, 1/7, 1/6, 1/5, 1/4, 2/7, 1/3, 2/5, 3/7, 1/2, 4/7, 3/5, 5/8, 2/3, 5/7, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 6/7, 7/8, 1

Not much agreement out there though. 19 equal temperament and 31 equal temperament are high regarded. I should experiment with just intonation, the left half of the lambdoma as above, and continue experimenting with 19 equal temperament.

What's so special about using limits by the way? http://totallyratted.com/theory/0008_harmonicseries.pdf
Pythagoras using the three limit. Partch using the 11 limit, etc. Many questions I've no one to ask.

Just versus equal tempered scale
Just intonation
I think the just scale would be better for me. I don't really need to change keys much. (And I think I maybe won't bother to write a song in every key...) Maybe a bit of enharmonic modulation, which I think I've done here and there in the past... But such isn't an essential component of my music. And anyway, I at least would like to play with the just scale a bit.

Physics of Music
This site is interesting. May make some wind chimes later. Was thinking of micro (vibrational frequencies) and macro time (the beats)....

I don't need to change keys so much really. Basically there's the minor key and the major key and then other scales. The pentatonic scale, six note, Partch's 43 tone scale, etc.
Microtonality

...with the 12 tone scale there is the major key which is:
2,2,1,2,2,2,1 or
1,9/8,5/4,4/3,3/2,5/3,15/8,2
and the minor which is:
2,1,2,2,1,2,2 or
1,9/8,6/5,4/3,3/2,8/5,9/5,2

The difference between the two is basically:
Major: 5/4, 5/3, 15/8
Minor: 6/5, 8/5, 9/5

The major (just) scale has ratios of relatively smaller whole prime numbers. It is interesting to me to try to translate this over to the general dark and brooding feel of music in minor keys versus the relatively happy sound of major keys. The ratios of relatively larger whole prime numbers can be thought of as dissonant, but also as simply more complex, more difficult to understand. And I wonder if are minds translate that which is simple and straightforward into 'happy' and that which is not so easy to understand as sad or dark and brooding. To me the minor scale just sounds more interesting also. To go to something like Partch's 43 tone scale then I would think would be going (potentially) much further in this direction.

I do wonder at what point the brain sees a ratio of larger whole numbers as close enough to some much smaller ratio. Like 199/100 being very close to 2/1. Or 15/8 even being close to 2/1... At what point does that become something that is translated as happy instead of sad/dark and brooding...?

Anyway, microtonal VSTs... Found this so far:
http://12equalboresme.com/Synths/Synths.html
Haven't tried it yet. Listened to a couple of samples. It all sounds vaguely chinese though like all such and such (unfamilar foreign group of) people look the same.
Actually downloading that one looks like too big a pain in the ass. Maybe this:
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ or something....

..finally the 31 tone scale:
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/beerart.html
Mentions the harmonic seventh (7/4)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh
which I mentioned earlier wondering how such doesn't exist in the 12 tone scale...

...then also the 43 tone scale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch%27s_43-tone_scale
etc.

..I guess an obvious reason for only 12 notes could be that we've only ten fingers and two hands... Practically speaking, actually playing a real instrument with a 31, etc tone scale would have been very difficult before electronics..