I wasn’t able to attend the recent Bohlen-Pierce conference in Boston because I was out of town, but this is a fun vid/article from the Boston Globe about the scale.

“A different tuning system is almost like a different language,” said Ross W. Duffin, a music professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of the book “How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care).” “There are other languages that sound completely different [from English] - that have different grammatical systems, that have different words for the same thing. And yet those things coexist, and it’s recognized there’s great beauty in a French poem, for example.”

(via The Boston Globe)

This went around the blogs (and I think I saw it on the BBC site) a while ago, but I don’t think I ever got around to blogging it. Needless to say, as a fan of pianistic interventions, I love it. Although I’m sure it loses tuning like nobody’s business.

The Fluid Piano

This is pretty mind blowing! A piano with no fixed tuning. Each note can be separately tuned on-the-fly whilst performing. Which allows the very strict tuning of the westernised piano to become completely open to change limited only by the performers imagination.

(via plundr)

Tristan Perich’s Interval Studies are a set of speaker arrays that play with microtonal systems. These arrays take a conventional musical interval (like the perfect 4th from D1 to G1) and divide it up into very small intervals (so 99 steps from D to G instead of 4). Then (and this is the best part), the speakers play all of these steps simultaneously, allowing you to hear the space between the notes in a dense cloud.

Imagine banging your fist on the piano, except that instead of hitting 4 adjacent notes, you can hit 99 in the same tonal space. Awesome, right?

The work fits well into the rest of Tristan’s oeuvre: the tones emitted by the speakers are 1-bit pulse waves, and the economy of a simple array of bare speakers is quite aesthetically pleasing.

Here is a little documentary+interview with Tristan about the project (it only plays the sound for a moment, but I bet it’s better to hear in person anyway. Also, this embed won’t work for RSS or dashboard readers):

(via Networked Music Review)

Click to 0:45 to see shredder Steve Vai show off his special guitar with bent frets to ensure that all of the notes are “really” in tune.

As he (doesn’t really) explain: “It’s just the nature of the way notes work.”

I guess this is some kind of special temperament system, but I don’t know enough to tell if this is actually just intonation, or some other kind of special thing.

(via Musformation)

The Bohlen-Pierce scale is an alternative tuning system. The typical Western scale is based on an octave (which is a 2:1 ratio) divided into 12 equal parts (in equal temperament). Since we hear frequencies at multiples of two as being the same pitch class, this is a pretty consonant situation.

In a Bohlen-Pierce scale, the fundamental unit is not the octave, but the tritave—a ratio of 3:1. This interval is then divided into 13 parts, resulting in some pretty wild dissonances and resonant frequencies. Apparently there is a lot of math and such behind it, which you can investigate at the Wikipedia page, if you need to know more.

In any case, this video is an arrangement of Pachelbel’s famously consonant Canon in D into Bohlen-Pierce, titled “Canon in J.” Click to about 2:00 if you can’t listen to the whole thing to hear some elaborate, alternative tuning counterpoint!