Bohlen-Pierce Temperament Tutorial (Microtonal Theory)

[@nickcarter4006]

Feel like this what Star Wars cantina music would ACTUALLY sound like

[@teddydunn3513]

I hadn't really heard thought much of the Bohlen Pierce scale before but I've recently started taking interest, especially when I found out they make clarinets tuned to it

[@JLMoriart]

Yeah the BP clarinets are so cool! Are you aware that conical wind instruments that are only open at one end (without a bell) have only odd harmonics? That's why the clarinet is (arguably) perfect for bohlen pierce: the intervals BP aims to approximate are the ones that line up with the clarinet's overtones, and the intervals in BP that are kind of close to our familiar octaves and fifths don't clash like they do for instruments that include even harmonics. It's pretty cool stuff! =)

[@teddydunn3513]

@@JLMoriart I know this is a late reply, but yes, I play the clarinet. The clarinet works perfectly for BP tuning for so many reasons, but one that I've considered recently is how its timbre works perfectly for a 1/7 : 1/5 : 1/3 utonal triad.

[@exyl_sounds]

as an egyptian, those intervals at 3:52 really reminds me of a specific maqam in our traditional music using a half flat minor 2nd lol

[@exyl_sounds]

In egypt and the middle east in general we use 24 edo so some of these microtonal theories actually dont sound all that bad to me

[@stephenweigel]

Bohlen-Pierce is an amazing world P.S. I'm suprised by how convincing your blues examples were

[@JLMoriart]

Cool dude, yeah moving roots of chords around by generators just seems to work, regardless of the tuning or temperament, and the relative importance of the seventh harmonic in BP may have helped the "blues-y-ness" of these examples. There are three MOS scales with their own respective blues progressions that I didn't cover in this video. I'll have to give a shot in the near future and see how well they "work" =)

[@StewartEngart]

@@JLMoriart Clarence Barlow did this in OTOdeBLU (17 edo) through AUTOBUSK in 1990

[@ryanschneider3700]

this hurts my brain, but in a good way.

[@rutgermuller]

Thank you. Beautiful vibe.

[@smarthalayla6397]

2:57 - "The Dead Cat Blues"

[@JLMoriart]

lmao this is canon

[@gud2228]

We only can hear 6 tritaves by our ears.

[@therealhelmholtz]

Yes

[@henrikljungstrand2036]

Also, just like the 2:3:4 is the absolutely fundamental Power chord in Pythagorean-Meantone, so 3:5:7:9 should be the absolutely fundamental Power chord in Bohlen-Pierce. While e.g. 4:5:6 and 6:7:8 should correspond with 9:11:13:15, 15:17:19:21 and 21:23:25:27 or something. I suppose 15:17:21:25 is somewhat similar to 6:7:9. This is about Major-ish, Minor-ish and Neutral-ish chords.

[@beinabill]

To my ear, the 12 bar blues examples don't highlight any potential advantages of BP temperament. They just sound out of tune and make me want to hear the same thing in 12TET. My guess is, rather than taking something that sounds good to western ears in 12TET and trying to convert it to the BP scale notes that most closely approximates its 12TET counterpart, maybe find or compose something in BP that makes use of the unique sensibilities of the BP temperament that you can't get in 12TET. I hope that makes sense and doesn't come across like I'm trying to troll or undermine the educational intent of this video, I'm actually trying to support it and expand my own musical vocabulary.

[@JLMoriart]

I appreciate your willingness to give feedback and share your thoughts! My first question would be, if you were to somehow make the "same thing" in standard tuning, how would you translate between the two? Nearest pitches won't line up with the same near-just harmonies, and doing something less concrete (like making all the major BP chords, aka 3:5:7s major chords in western tuning, aka 4:5:6s, would still require taking the melody that was written in an BP MOS scale and arbitrarily remapping it to another scale.) When saying that they don't highlight the advantages of BP, do you think it's safe to say that, at least to you, they just... sound bad? xD If so, I can think of two factors playing into that: 1. You haven't internalized Bohlen Pierce's melodic or harmonic structures, and they'd sound better to you after prolonged exposure to BP. 2. I'm not good at writing music in BP and the music is (semi-objectively) bad, because I haven't done much of it and because there is almost no other BP music to learn from. That said, I would argue these pieces actually do very much so make use of the unique sensibilities of BP. They use scale structures that don't exist in standard tuning, and those scale structures inspired the melodies I came up with. They also use harmonies and chord progressions that don't exist in standard tuning, and those harmonies also inspired the melodies I came up with. But I don't claim that they'll sound good to everyone. Sometimes I listen to these and think "dang, I really grokked BP for a minute there", and other times I'm like "hmmmm... was it just an illusion?" =P And it'd very reasonable to point out that taking a 12-bar-blues approach may have limited my stylistic choices to a subset available in BP that are not optimal (in one way or another) for making music that sounds good using BP. But without an existing body of work, all I can say is that I gave this a shot, at least *kind of* liked the result, and learned a lot about what is possible in BP. Maybe doing that enough will eventually lead me to developing a very BP oriented compositional style that works well in BP and not in other tunings!

[@cactusowo1835]

If you want to listen to things in 12edo, then, What are you doing here? If you go to a silver mine trying to find cobalt, surprise, you've found nothing of which you came for.

[@p.g.v.3765]

@@cactusowo1835 what

[@cactusowo1835]

@@p.g.v.3765 Read OP's comment whining about matching BP with 12edo/TET because "its out of tune¡!¡!1¡"

[@allegoricalstatue]

@@cactusowo1835 This is now my new favorite idiom. Thanks. > If you go to a silver mine trying to find cobalt, surprise, you've found nothing of which you came for.

[@henrikljungstrand2036]

Since we usually use octatonic scales in Bohlen Pierce (8 out of 13+), by analog with heptatonic scales in Pythagorean/Meantone (7 out of 12+), we should really use the name "nona" instead of the name "tritave" in place of the "octave". In a heptatonic octave-based setting this "nona" would be called "twelfth" instead. The interval 3/1 that is.

[@aakashchakrabarty4262]

Which software did popped at 2:00 and continued to be till the video ends? 🤔💭

[@JLMoriart]

That's Hex from DynamicTonality.com =)

[@aakashchakrabarty4262]

@@JLMoriart Thank you 😀

[@Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

Would have liked to see mention of 19-EDT (because it is very close to 12-EDO). (Or is that not considered to be part of the Bohlen-Pierce family?

[@chadgetjajet7033]

Wouldn't really consider that in the same realm

[@Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

@@chadgetjajet7033 I have since learned that the real similarity to pursue is 41EDO being very close to quintupled Bohlen-Pierce.

[@chadgetjajet7033]

@@Lucius_Chiaraviglio Wonder if anyone's ever tried combining a Kite guitar with BP scales and melodies

[@Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

@@chadgetjajet7033 I don't know, but the Xenharmonic Wiki lists some Kite Guitar recordings and videos at the end of their 41EDO article, so I'm going to have to check some of them out.

[@ZXLegend1]

Are the “generators” here actually just generators of cyclic subgroups (or products of cyclic subgroups) of the rationals?

[@JLMoriart]

I'm afraid your question is going over my head. What do you mean by "cyclic generators of subsets (or products of subsets) of the rationals"?

[@ZXLegend1]

@@JLMoriart Basically I'm wondering if this is closely related to some concepts from group theory, as many many things in music are surprisingly :)

[@TheApostleofRock]

@@ZXLegend1 probably. I mean...the math is way over my head, but skimmed over many an article on the xenharmonic wiki that has a lot of group theory lookin stuff.

[@krisrhodes5180]

@@JLMoriart Basically, my question is: What is a generator?

[@romeolz]

Wow, you really did a good job compacting this video down! 1 question, though: I see you're using 'hex' to play the MOS examples. How did you get it to work? Mine stays exclusively in 12 and I can't get it to microtune! I've tried switching the track to 'non-DT(no tuning info)' and back but nothing works for me!

[@JLMoriart]

Thanks for watching =) If I remember correctly, I just used Hex for the visuals and recorded the audio separately. I think it should work as long as you're sending the midi-out to a Dynamic Tonality synth though. (And maybe non-dt synths, as long as they handle multi-channel pitch bend correctly.) Where were you sending the midi?

[@romeolz]

@@JLMoriart I wasn't sending it anywhere, but hex uses the default microsoft wavetable synth midi thing, which was working perfectly in 12 but didn't microtune. I will try sending the midi to a synth next time!

[@JLMoriart]

@@romeolz Ah right, my memory is that the default microsoft wavetable synth actually *did* respond correctly to multi-channel pitch bend (from Relayer), so it's possible it's a bug with Hex. Definitely give it a shot with a DT synth and a standard synth to see what happens.

[@romeolz]

@@JLMoriart sure! Thanks!

[@EchoHeo]

cool

[@wizard1370]

ed5 is cool

[@josslujano7615]

But cool video :) I'll sub

[@JLMoriart]

I'll take it!

[@josslujano7615]

I literally did not understand a single thing

[@JLMoriart]

Haha oops xD

[@simondeldesierto7381]

Was it necessary to talk so fast? It makes me think that you’re not that interested in people learning from you. Tried 0,75 speed but it’s crap.

[@JLMoriart]

Thank you for the productive and thoughtful feedback

[@eboone]

not even talking that fast lol