{"id":1018,"date":"2009-01-19T23:05:16","date_gmt":"2009-01-20T04:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/19\/more-musical-colors\/"},"modified":"2009-01-19T23:05:16","modified_gmt":"2009-01-20T04:05:16","slug":"more-musical-colors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/19\/more-musical-colors\/","title":{"rendered":"more musical colors"},"content":{"rendered":"

After writing about Jon Hassell’s “coffee coloured” global music of the future, I was intrigued to find out that Timothy Morton<\/a>, author of “Ecology Without Nature,” has been writing about the ecological implications (or something like it) of Just Intonation versus Equal Temperament.<\/p>\n

For those unaware of the fine details of musical tuning, Just Intonation is what’s considered to be a more “natural” tuning system (based on natural harmonics) than the one we’ve gotten used to after a few hundred years of piano-dominated equal temperament. The latter mathematically divides the scale into twelve equal parts (semi-tones) and then strings them into melodies and weaves them into harmonies. But those notes are found nowhere in nature; in fact, JI aficionados argue, it takes seriously detuned ears (like ours) to hear equal-tempered music – which describes most of what passes for music on radios and iPods today – as if it were normal.<\/p>\n

In “Ecru and beige versus magenta and blue sound”<\/a>, Morton argues that Equal Temperament, typified by the piano, “hard-wires” a certain way of listening which itself “reifies inner space” into a kind of permanent “brown” – the “metastasized cancer of the bourgeois ego.” When minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley started messing with this tuning in the early 1960s, they literally “opened up the non-reified spaces within.”<\/p>\n


\nMy favorite quote:<\/p>\n

“With just intonation you can’t do narrative, because the keys are radically different\u2014there’s no brown world anymore, no general background against which the sounds make sense. So you’re stuck with pure beginning\u2014which I call aperture\u2014the feeling of ‘is this the beginning?’ or ‘have we started yet?’ Aperture, openness.”<\/p>\n

(I’ve been dabbling with Just Intonation and related alternate-tuning systems in some of my own recent music. See Pluto Descends<\/a> for a few samples.)<\/p>\n

It’s all a bit more complex than that, of course, as I suspect Morton would admit. Tuning systems, as all music, work on us at a certain neurophysiological level, but also through levels of cultural entrainment of our bodies, bodyminds (which are rhythmic and melodic instruments), and the spaces between them. Simply listening to Just Intonation, even for hours on end, doesn’t retrain or “renaturalize” them any more than reading Thoreau brings us back to nature, or even to mid-nineteenth century New England with its factories, towns, fields, and forests. But it adds a certain counter-oscillation to the rhythms and sonorities that already fill the space around us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After writing about Jon Hassell’s “coffee coloured” global music of the future, I was intrigued to find out that Timothy Morton, author of “Ecology Without Nature,” has been writing about the ecological implications (or something like it) of Just Intonation versus Equal Temperament. For those unaware of the fine details of musical tuning, Just Intonation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[692399],"tags":[501],"class_list":["post-1018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-soundscape","tag-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-gq","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11991,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/06\/21\/pluto-descending-a-staircase\/","url_meta":{"origin":1018,"position":0},"title":"Pluto descending a staircase","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 21, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I've created a new page for my trilogy of piano recordings, made between 2006 and sometime in the mid-2010s, which made use of the Yamaha Clavinova's capacity for altering the piano's tuning system away from the \"equal temperament\" westerners (and now the world) have gotten used to, and toward some\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/06\/cover-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/06\/cover-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/06\/cover-scaled.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/06\/cover-scaled.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/06\/cover-scaled.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/06\/cover-scaled.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1027,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/02\/06\/pandoras-last-box-of-musical-delights\/","url_meta":{"origin":1018,"position":1},"title":"Pandora’s Last box of musical delights","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 6, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been getting into music networking\/streaming radio sites Last.fm and Pandora.com and thinking about how they and related forms of social and artistic networking relate to the ideas this blog is exploring. Google can search for words, but not (yet) for snippets of musical melody, harmonic progressions, jazz solos, visual\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10206,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2019\/12\/28\/musical-occasions\/","url_meta":{"origin":1018,"position":2},"title":"Musical occasions","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Music is an occasional topic on this blog (as shown in the Soundscape category). It was my first university discipline and love (when I was an undergrad at York's wonderfully eclectic Music Department), still figures in my scholarly work from time to time (as in my work on Cape Breton\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Music & soundscape"","block_context":{"text":"Music & soundscape","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/music-soundscape\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8394,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/18\/eco-humanities-glossolalia\/","url_meta":{"origin":1018,"position":3},"title":"Eco-humanities glossolalia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I'm currently teaching (in its third incarnation), \"Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.\" The course has also turned into a book project I'm working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities.\u00a0Both course and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13535,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2024\/03\/19\/musical-process-and-reality\/","url_meta":{"origin":1018,"position":4},"title":"Musical process and reality","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 19, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"A lot has been written about music and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: for instance, on Deleuze and music theory, on music after Deleuze, and on Deleuze's \"Thought-Music,\" and there've been some valiant efforts to put Deleuze to music, like this one, this one, and this one, and several related\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Music & soundscape"","block_context":{"text":"Music & soundscape","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/music-soundscape\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/c3xK35N0XKg\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4883,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/06\/28\/fine-tuning-the-mystical-experience\/","url_meta":{"origin":1018,"position":5},"title":"Fine-tuning the mystical experience","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 28, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Time magazine's Healthland supplement summarizes a recent clinical study of 18 healthy, spiritually inclined adults who were administered a certain drug over 5 eight-hour sessions. Among the results: Fourteen months after participating in the study, 94% of those who received the drug said the experiment was one of the top\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Spirit matter"","block_context":{"text":"Spirit matter","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/religion-spirituality\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}