Classical Convert

Losing Ones Temper(ament)

There’s a fascinating article over at Ask A Luthier on why guitarists with a good ear are constantly retuning their feisty little beast of an instrument. It’s all down to temperament, if you didn’t guess from the rather stunning pun of the title.

The problem is because of the fixed frets on a guitar. What I had not previously appreciated was that when (good) non-fretted musicians play their non-fretted violins or violas or cellos, they are constantly readjusting their “tuning” because they can deftly plonk down their fingers anywhere they like. That is to say, on an unfretted instrument you can press down a string to make it any length you desire, so that you can play any note — as long as it is within the physical limits of the string. On a guitar, when you push down a string it is shortened to the length of the next fret because the fret is higher than the board you are pushing against. Therefore you can only play the set of notes determined by the positions of the frets.

It turns out that guitar frets are arranged so that the guitar is in equal temperament. Equal temperament means that most notes are slightly adjusted from their mathematically “perfect” frequencies so that every musical key sounds pretty good when played on the instrument (if you try and make one key mathematically perfect — which is called just intonation — you find that the other keys don’t work). This means that it is impossible to tune a guitar to “just intonation”, and a guitarist with a good ear who tries to correct the tuning into just intonation will be prevented by the spacings of the frets.

However, there is a way around this. You can use a just intonation fingerboard. This means that instead of having frets which go straight across the neck, they are all over the place, like in the picture below (taken from Microtonal Guitar):

My favorite comment on the reddit thread where I originally found this article is this recollection:

Ha, reminds me of this guy in my music class last year. I’d say, ‘Julian, go get us an E’. He’d run next door, play an E on the piano, and hum the note as he walked back into the practice room. We’d tune to his voice.

Tags: guitar, intonation, temperament, tuning

Music Understanders Report In!

Yes, music understanders. I don’t care if mister high and mighty spellchecker thinks it necessary to shove a wiggly red line under it, it’s a word. Lexographical iniquities aside, here’s the meat of today’s problem: I’m dumb when it comes to music theory. I have no classical training, and barely any professional teaching to speak of. I do have a basic grasp of a bunch of stuff, but that sets a pretty low bar hanging to bang into. I’ll evidence this complaining and not-quite self-loathing with an example. Take these two sections in Mahler 6, juxtaposed here sequentially (filled with long words tonight we are) one from the exposition, and one from later on:

This is one of my favorite bits in the first movement, the unexpected change in that descending sequence is ridiculously satisfying. So what’s going on here? My not terribly educated guess is the second version modulates to some related major key (such as C-major) instead of dropping all in A-minor. At least, I assume it’s in A-minor since that’s the tonic of the symphony and it’s the first theme.

Sometimes I really wish I had had a bunch of music lessons.

Tags: classical music, keys, mahler, theory

More Thoughts on Automated Liner Notes

A few days back I wrote a post in which I longed drastically for a form of real-time liner notes. When you play an MP3 or CD on your computer you could click a button and choose from either the standard background information you get with the CD inlay, or a much more exciting commentary on the piece which updates as the music progresses. In its most simple form it would indicate when a new theme enters, or an old theme comes back, or when the exposition ends, for example. You could also choose a more detailed “expert” version which would give a more detailed analysis of the structure of piece: keys, inversions of melodies, etc.Two things became clear after some excellent responses to the post. One is that (somewhat unsurprisingly) this has (sort of) already been thought of. Multiple times. ACD brought my attention to the (fleeting) existence of the Concert Companion, a handheld device which one was given to use during a live concert: “the Concert Companion delivers explanatory text, program notes and video images in real time with the music”. Hmmm. That sounds like a bunch of people playing on the internet during a concert. Yvonne told me that in Queensland they tried something similar but it was actually projected on the walls of the concert hall.

Neither of these sound like a particularly great idea. The idea of a non-optional thing is just horrible for a start. If there is going to be an optional thing then I don’t think it should be an alternative stream of information to the concert at hand, which is kind of hard to pull off in a live setting as you tend to be watching the performance. Another problem is that in a concert-hall setting it’s probably not going to be particularly appealing to any experience level. I would imagine that unless it is extremely well designed, a listener unfamiliar with the piece will be given too much information, too rapidly, whereas a listener who knows it well will probably find it an annoying distraction.

I think it would be far better suited to a situation in which you can listen to a piece multiple times; that is, at home. The depth-revealing kind of information which is provided by liner notes is usually most interesting and valuable to me after hearing a new piece about four or five times (so that my head has a basic conception of the melodies and how they fit together). It also seems like the kind of situation in which it would be extremely valuable to be able to replay a section or movement. When you are informed that a new melody is coming in, for example, it’d be nice to be able to replay that bit until you can see it yourself, otherwise it’s just like listening to someone else talk about how well they know the music.

ACDs second link showed me that he was thinking along similar lines after learning the horror (for him) of the dreaded Concert Companion. Over two years ago he wrote:

“And then, in an epiphanic flash, it struck me. While the Concert Companion in the concert hall is a genuine horror, there really is an appropriate and proper place for the device: in the home, keyed to a specially prepared classical music or opera CD or DVD coded in manufacture to deliver the proper signals to the Concert Companion.”

I think there is an even greater advantage now with the rise of the MP3 format and truly digital music. It would be almost trivial to write a piece of software that would display notes in sync with a particular recording of a classical concert (since each performance has different speeds you would have to adjust the timings accordingly, but that would be pretty easy. If you wanted to be really crafty you could try and do very basic sound recognition and use that to automatically adjust the timings), You could even incorporate it directly into a website with a built-in music player. There would be a little applet in which you could select a piece, and real-time information would be provided alongside it. That would be great, and not terribly hard to set up, as long as you had non-copyrighted music to use, and of course the liner notes!

I think the big advantage of mp3s and the internet is that people can independently create the liner notes for a particular piece, or individual movement, completely independently from the people who originally performed the piece. It doesn’t have to be incorporated into the CD itself and the recording company doesn’t have to write any special software. The work can be done as an add-on by enthusiasts and freely distributed on the web.. I’d love to put something like this together, and I don’t think it would be too hard given the right textual and musical resources.

Anyone want to try it?

Lessons in Listening

Ooo I kind of like this. These two musicians have decided to run “lessons in listening” out of their home: they pump you full of light refreshments and then play classical music at you. Well sort of. The idea is to experience classical music without the snobbery, but with a pretty expert guide leading the way a bit. Now if they could stick some of their classes up online it’d be pretty great and I’d gush over it.

And if that isn’t an incentive I can’t possibly conceive of what is.

Admittedly their webpages could do with a little tad of touching up - the text is all overlapping everything when I view it in Firefox, but that doesn’t really detract much from the niceness of the concept. I hope it’s successful. Also, The Green Hornist is a pretty cunning name.

You can read a bit more about their aims an, errr, stuff where I read about ‘em originally, on Kenneth Wood’s blog here and here.

*************

On a completely unrelated note - I just listened to Prokofiev’s violin sonata no. 1 for the first time and it kicks arse. I think it has certain standard Prokofievy elements to it (there’s something frequently common in the scales he uses, and of course there are the omnipresent slow-fast changeups) but instead of sounding all “Ahh yes, Sergei’s at it again. How cute.” it’s a little more biting, a little sharper. It has a mouth packed full with a little more teeth.

When my new headphones get here tomorrow I’ll be able to listen to it a lot more, they bloody died by accidentally getting crushed into a knot in my hand luggage on my recent Trip of Doom and Despair.

Automatically Understanding the Emotional Content of Music

I’m back from the bright and sunny reaches and beaches of the Northeast. Me and my girlfriend slipped away to Maine for a couple of memorial weekendified discount workdays, where we climbed over multiple forts, waded out to islands (well, one island) in the freakin’ frigid Atlantic water, and ate several huge, unhealthy and thoroughly delicious meals. After churning through mountains of read-this and meet-then style eMails from my supervisor, I finally have a bit of time to feed this site a rather needed update.

While we were up pottering around Portland I remembered a project I thought would be really cool, once upon a time. The idea was to write software which would automatically analyze the tonal relationships throughout a piece of music, telling you what the key changes and harmonies were, and when they occurred.

It was driven by my lack of understanding of musical theory. I recognize modulations and harmonies which make me feel a certain way, which obviously encode some kinda fundamental emotional response (either natured or nurtured, I’m not sure which and I bet a ton of people disagree) but which I can’t point to and say: “Aha! Clearly it’s a iv-I modulation that is making me existentially angsty.” That frustrates me, and I feel like learning this stuff from scratch via really properly learning a musical instrument is gonna take way more spare time and (more importantly) devotion than I have on hand.

So, I thought an automatic type shortcut would be fantastic. It doesn’t even seem too terribly tricky (but then, nothing like this ever does until you start doing it). Since each note has a characteristic frequency (well, I guess a bunch of them with all the harmonics) it seems like pretty much all you need to do is to do a bunch of Fourier transforms to work out which notes are being played, and bam, you’ve got your harmonies. By looking at which notes are coming up in short periods of time you can work out the key.

Someone has to have done this already. This page has a bunch of links but most of them seem all 404ey. Actually, this seems much more along the lines of what I’m thinking of. I reckon I need to have a good old search around the internet for projects like this, I’ll let you know what I come up with.