Just waiting for the opportunity. I'm fairly optimistic that I'll have a chance next week.

Gordon

If you can, you should do a video demo too! I'd love to see it.

Er, I could do a montage of close ups of me playing from various angles instead of raking up some piece of public domain oddness.

Wouldn't be synced but what the hey.

Oh, and excuse me, Charlie D, "wacky"?

I am doing serious, scientific, proper grown-up, po-faced research here, you cheeky young whipper-snapper, you. Mark my words, if I catch you sniggering at the back of the class when I am talking about the completely non-humorous frothatrill and twangulator again I shall probably pout. I might even huff!

Hmm.

Hmm?

Hmm!

Hmm?!

Hmm...

Hm, hm, hm. Hm. Hmmm.

I've been practising my isophasic trochoids again. Well, almost. Truth is I've been letting my arms drift around in the approximate vicinity of a theremin whilst my mind wandered. Noticed that, moving clockwise, sounding the bottom of the circle i.e. describing a smile, produced a happy sound. Sounding the upper half, a down-turned mouth, was a disappointed sound.

I hummed them. Yup, these are little happy and sad sounds. Hummed a few different sounds - questioning, satisfied, puzzled, quietly amused, forlorn - mimicked the sounds on the theremin, drawing the shape of the sound in the air.

A feeling can be expressed as a sound of varying pitch, which can be created by describing a glyph in the theremin field.

I have a name for it - Mercurial Calligraphy.

Sorry, Gordon. I wish you luck with this most seriocomic of solemnisides. (Beat that, Encyclopaedia Britannica!)

Thank you. :-)

As the cyberman said, You will be rewarded by force!

I have uploaded The Plummeting Man, featuring use of isophasic trochoids, frothatrill and twangulator to SoundClick and the Podsafe Music Network.

Enjoy if you dare!


Video to follow...

... sooner or later.

Gordon,

I really like this. Very listenable.

You may want to consider adding panning and other stereo effects to your mix. The frothatrill would sound all the more interesting if it moved around in the stereo field -- perhaps shooting across from side to side.

Your recording quality is clean and clear. Nice job!

-- Kevin

I'm delighted you like it.

Excuse me why I wander off on a diversion - point coming soon. Been looking again at music theory - tonal and micro-tonal - I get it a teensy bit more this time around (and found a couple of neat links - comparative mp3s of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik using two different scales, and a real media stream of Harry Partch's "The Bewitched"). It's not so much about the absolute frequency of a note as the steps between notes. but it's still all about notes - sounds of a constant pitch. Nary a word about sounds of varying pitch.

So I came up with my own theory to explain this absence. "The notion of in-tune and out-of-tune only applies to sounds of a fixed pitch." In other words; if I keep everything moving I won't have to worry about it. Moreover as two tones vary at different rates there will be transitory moments when they are in simple harmonic relationship to one another.

Seems to me we can rely on the auditory system to latch onto these as moments of musical goodness and emphasise them in favour of other parts of the sound. And the more tones wandering up and down the scale, the more moments of musical goodness. So I went for it big time! Which is my theory (finally he gets to the point!) as to why you find it listenable.

Thought about panning, but didn't want to over-egg the cake. Also I rather fixed on the idea that plummeting didn't involve too much sideways motion. :-)

Sound quality - that's down to the Amadeus 2's noise removal system, and fairly ruthless deletion of a whole bunch of bits that overloaded the mic. I recorded all three tracks basically playing continuously, with the idea to carve out chunks to give it a nice organised structure, but by the time I had muted most of the naff stuff there was little hope of that. I liked what was left anyway, so no problem. I can still hear some slightly buzzy bits, but I know where they are, which I suspect biases me a bit.

Gordon, the tuning issue you mention is really quite sophisticated.

In an ensemble, such as a choir, a string quartet, a band, or orchestra the musicians listen and tune to each other.

However, a keyboard instrument such as a piano, is tuned in advance and the notes do not tune to each other interactively.

Pythagorus studied this -- he tuned a perfectly-in-tune 5th (called a perfect fifth or P5 for short), and then tuned that fifth to the next one, and so on... clear around all the notes and discovered that he didn't end up where he started. Yep, Mother Nature decided to arrange the perfect intervals in a spiral rather than a circle! This "extra" space between where we ended up and where we started is called the "Pythagorean comma".

Keyboard temperaments, then, are specifications for distributing the comma between the notes. Some temperaments keep certain keys "perfectly" in tune at the expense of other keys being "way out" of tune. "Equal temperament" distributes the comma equally per note such that everything is not-quite-exactly in tune but is in-tune-enough to be playable.

You will notice that in piano concertos, for the most part, the orchestra plays, then the piano plays, then the orchestra... back and forth! Individual instruments or small groups may play along with the piano (because they can tune to match the piano!) however you rarely hear a bunch of instruments and the piano all going at once? And the reason is the very tuning issues that you mention.

Gordon,
As a concert piano tuner, I agree with K.K..
The piano has it's equal temperment set in advance of every performance.
The intonation of almost all other instruments is set by the ear/mind of the player. Guitar and bass guitar being an exception.
teslatheremin