Three Dollar Quill

Okay, I've been poking at a few marimo notebooks today, (and filed another bug; don't worry about it), but I've ended up in a frame of mind again where I want to totally overdo the architecture of music-related stuff. Maybe if I describe what I'm thinking about there, it'll alleviate the urges somewhat.

So, background. Historically, the intervals between different notes were rational numbers with small-enough numerators and denominators; this basically equates to "sounding consonant". Using rational numbers for this purpose has some good qualities, and some qualities that made it hard to compose certain kinds of music. In the western musical tradition, this system was overtaken by one based on the twelfth root of two. This greatly simplified composition and tuning, though it did result in some intervals sounding off. However, they're consistently off, so that's good enough, especially now that people are used to them.

Now, that's all well and good if you're not a huge nerd, but I'm over here wondering about stuff like "But what would it sound like to use one of the old systems?" (Yes, systems, plural. There were varying ideas about "the right way" to choose rational intervals.) "In the context of roots, what if we use a different root than twelfth, or a different base than two?"

There has already been a lot of investigation into this, and a bunch of existing software. From a modeling perspective, it would be "nice" to be able to track intervals in terms of fractional powers of primes, but actually doing all of this is a bunch of effort that other people have figured out the right way to go to.

While I was writing that paragraph, I had a look at the tools page on the Xenharmonic wiki, and tried some of them out. With what I've found in the course of a few minutes, here is what I've decided is the sensible thing to do:

• Focus on "traditional" (twelve equal divisions of the octave) stuff at first, in whatever tools feel good.
• Figure out what it takes to replicate the basics of such compositions in a tool that supports xenharmonics.
• Start tweaking things to make use of less traditional tunings.

That's, like, effort and stuff, compared to trying to come up with weird algebraic representations that only need to work in theory, but it really would be better to focus on practical matters.

Later, because it's late now and I'm tired.

Good night.