Do you create your own scales? How?
Hi everyone,
I'm interested if there's people here building their own tools to work with their own scales. What's your approach? How do you design the scales? How do you compose? How do you perform?
Thanks
how to compose with custom scales is the wrong question.
how to design them, well i´d suggest two main strategies:
1. start making experiments without any concrete ideas. for example use randomness and see what happens. then try the most simple algorithms you can think of.
2. see what is already there. there are people who are doing "scales" in full time, for some of them it is a religion. the best place to start with this is the free scala application, it has several tools on board where you can create scales in certain, more or less common ways.
Hi! Thank you for your response. I already have experience designing scales, composing with atonality, microtonality, serialism... whatever. I'm trying to study (for a final project at university) how people is building their own tools to create music computationaly using custom scales, or hacking existing tools (for example Ableton).
It looks like you have experience. What's your approach? Do you design scales? Do you compose then? Do you create your own tools (for example with MAX/MSP) to produce music? I'm really interested.
Thank you
i wouldnt say i design scales, maybe i did that some day for 3 hours but that´s it, so i won´t be of much help here - i found that there are so many very simple methods as well as so many readymade scales and existing methods around, that it should not be neccessary to think up a custom system and recreate the generation in max.
so like most people i mostly use existing scales with max, with the main focus of those which have more or less than 12 keys per octave.
some of the existing methods to construct scales are quite complicated. and most people seem to be focussed on what i would call "variations", they talk more about commas and stuff than about microscale approaches. my main interest is more how the connection between harmonic content of a synthesized sound and a scale can go together.
if you give me a equal tempered scale to compose with, i might also use that for the additive synthsesis, so that the scale would be wrapped into itself. ;)
You may find William Sethares' book Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale (Springer Verlag) to be of some use to you....
I am quite a bit into designing my own scales / harmonies. You can check my NIME paper to see if my approach interests you and the book that Max recommends is my goto source as well considering microtonality, X-tet tuning, stretched tuning, just intonation, etcetera. It is all based on minimising the dissonance curve for a chord.
http://nime2021.org/program/#/paper/110
linear/regular temperaments is my favourite way.
it is like a microtonal circle of fifths, but it isn't a fifth that is the repeating generator inside a period of an octave, rather it is an exotic interval of your choosing.
for example in 31 notes per octave tuning you choose the sixth step as a generator (it approximates the just ratio of 8/7 very well) and stack it up how many times you want inside an octave as long as you achieve Moment of Symmetry, which means there are only two (1 large 1 small) intervals between consecutive scale members. Moment of symmetry gives the scale of sense of unity, our 12edo major scale also has moment of symmetry.
there is also the just intonation version of this method, it also has it's own merits.
I've been making Max and MaxForLive synths which use the Scala tuning system Roman mentioned. Here's one simple example I put up on the MaxForLive site:
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/6716/lk-scalasynth
Been using mc objects a lot recently and exploring the harmonic and subharmonic messages for tuning things. Most everything else I do in Max I calculate frequencies using just intonation.
>>Do you create your own tools (for example with MAX/MSP) to produce music?
I would ask myself first what I want to achieve. While MAX is fantastic for experimenting and discovering, eventually you might want to approach it with a specific goal. If you want to dig a hole you might not want to use hammer, and if you want to build a house you might not want to use a shovel. Of course you can use a hammer to help build the shovel to dig the hole, and you can use the shovel to dig the foundation to use the hammer to build the house.
With MAX you can use the shovel to dig the hole to get the minerals that you need to make the hammer to make the shovel to dig the foundation to build the house on using the hammer! Or you can start with the hammer first and make the shovel to dig the hole to get the minerals to make the hammer and use the hammer to just destroy everything that you think you want to know!
The point is your questions are very open and ancient.
>>What's your approach? How do you design the scales? How do you compose? How do you perform?
“it depends on…” is the simplest answer.
Hi! Thank you all for your answers. Very useful. I had a long flight last weekend so I used it to read Sethares TTSS. Amazing book.
My intention with this question was:
· trying to see how people who has the hability to create their own software creates their tools to compose/produce with other systems rather than 12TET
· learn from what you are already doing to see if there are common approaches that can be used to remove the current constraints in music production software.
Do you think software like Ableton could able people to compose in different tunings? How?
Thanks <3
You should probably ask that question in the Ableton forum. Besides that, depending on your proficiency with MAX it is probably more versatile to really make your own tuning system using knowledge from the Sethares book. And you might also want to look into the bach library. We forgot to mention that.