Adding Microtones to the Axis keyboards

[MusicScienceGuy]

Hi,
I have just got to stop posting so many things to these forums. This latest suggestion will probably be so weird that it will get me kicked off, but I'll risk it.

It has long struck me that, with Max/MSP or Pure Data, or one of the other midi programming languages, that it would be dead simple to make some pairing of Axis keys produce, instead of the normal, boring "Note A + Note B" combination, instead produce a hybrid note with unusual features.

While the sky is the limit as far as what the term hybrid note can mean, what pops immediately to mind is microtonality. There are very many people investigating and working with microtonality, but one limit, up to now, has been the availablity of keyboards, the few keyboards available are very expensive and often unwieldy.
Aside: the other limit has been a theory of microtonality: I will someday post simple insructions on how to make a microtonality slide-rule style chord calculator, but I digress.

With the Axis keyboards, most of the keys have 3 neighbour connections that are available for making hybrid notes, unlike on a regular keyboard that only has one. This gives dazzling possiblities - an Axis-49 could be made to play nearly 300 micro-tonal notes. These would be available in real-time, without large hand movements, just small finger movements. Of course, since this robs the axis of the ability to play adjacent-note intervals, a player might need 2 keyboards to make decent chords, but the microtonal people may not care.

I have no time and little interest in pursuing this particular ball (learning complexities of the regular scale is my challenge), but if you know people in the microtonality world that would be interested, please let them know.

Ken Rushton
MusicScienceGuy

[boultoa]

Can you elaborate on what you mean by hybrid note, e.g. give examples.

I suspect I've been thinking along similar lines for a while but it's still very much a work in progress, here's a jumbled sketch of some of the idea fragments I have so far, which hopefully may stimulate useful ideas for other people:

- much music can be thought of as made up from notes, little sonic packets that are discernable as separate entities, like ATOMS of sound
- notes are often combined into chords, collections of notes, like MOLECULES of sound
- the timbre or sonic quality of a single note can be broken into a spectrum of pure sine waves or harmonics, analogous to ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
- the subjectively judged dissonance of two combined sine waves follows a fairly simple and consistent pattern across humans, whereas this is not true for two combined notes with a richer timbre
- the harmonic effect of some note combinations (e.g. intervals) can sometimes be explained simply with reference to how their harmonics interact (e.g. see http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/ttss.html )
- subtle and complex pattern recognition in the human auditory system decides when to treat simultaneous sounds as one thing or several separate things

These fragments suggest to me that there may be value in shifting away from thinking of the atoms and molecules and instead consider the elementary particles as the more fundamental building blocks for sound. If so, then it raises the question of what would be interesting ways to map a keyboards "button field" to trigger collections of harmonics.

[MusicScienceGuy]

re: hybrid note. right now, when you press a key and the one, say, to the right of it, you get 2 notes. But you don't have to. You can change it so that a combination of keys generates something different. Say a single note that is a quarter-tone sharper than expected.

The harmonics interaction could be shown using a Max/MSP tool (or even a spreadsheet) - it's fairly straightforward arithmetic: take a root note: generate it's harmonics as colored entries in the rows and columns. Then add others notes and have the values from the new notes interact with the root note value per the laws of psychoacustics. Warning: the summation is not always linear. consider that a middle C and a C# combination is about 100 times (20 decibels) louder that middle C + middle C.

If shown in realtime, it would show interesting things - there are some subtle chords missing from our standard western music.

Gotta go.
Ken Rushton,
MusicScienceGuy

[synchrotone]

I'm totally with you on the interacting harmonics. One practical caveat with using 2 keys to produce 1 tone, though. When do you trigger the tone? If you require exactly 2 keys, that's easy. But if you let the user press C alone to produce a C tone; or let them press C + C# to produce the quarter tone in between, then you must open a timing window (oh no, more latency!) to collect both before triggering any. Still, I think it could be manageable and it is a cool idea; would be easy enough to implement, I think.

[MusicScienceGuy]

Yup, you are right on on this requiring the introduction of latency.
No one in the microtonal world seems to have been interested, and in any case, there is always the Tonal Plexus.
Ken.

[synchrotone]

Ah yes, I almost mentioned the Tonal Plexus. They're temptingly affordable now, but still look really hard to play! I will stick with wicki-hayden for now because it's the best layout I've ever found. Even so, I am very interested in more than 12-TET. Some of the eastern tunings, 17-TET etc. sound really good to me. Perhaps there is some generalization of WH that could apply to microtonality...

[xjscott]

I'd have commented on this but I wasn't able to relate to what usefulness the proposal had in relation to microtonal composition or performance. I have found my Axis-64 to be indispensable for microtonality as it is already.

It would be really helpful if you folks could post some examples of your microtonal compositions so I can get a handle on what sort of work you are doing. I'd love to hear it. Thanks in advance.

Some of mine are here: http://www.soundclick.com/xjscott/
And a couple tracks from one of my microtonal albums can be downloaded here: http://www.nonoctave.com/tunes/ZNM.html
And I've got some pieces in the music player on this page: http://xenharmonic.ning.com/profile/XJScott

(Not trying to promote my work, just wanted to reciprocate before asking to hear some of your all's music.)