Part 2

How far has working with alternative tuning systems led to creating different music for you personally? Are there creative ideas/pieces which you could not realize in equal temperament?

I think of there as being two broad classes of tuning approaches in my work, what I call “non-constitutive” and “constitutive.”

The former are places where the tuning enhances what you’re doing, maybe giving a shade of color or subtlety to the harmonies – but which you could easily envision in equal temperament without losing too much. Often, for me, this is more than anything about trying to push against the limitations of the sample-based approach – so that the subtle shading or imprecision of the tuning lends a greater sense of naturalism to the instrumental sound. It may be hard to put your finger on, and may not sound super microtonal, but the recording ends up coming across as somehow less synthy in the end.

But the “constitutive” tuning pieces are a whole other thing – and these are pieces you just can’t imagine without the tuning, that couldn’t be played in 12TET without something very fundamental being lost.

That early piece “May 3, 1997” is one example, and of course the new big crazy piano thing is another. What would that piece be without the microtuning? You certainly wouldn’t want to listen to it for 4 hours (not that you necessarily want to anyway).

Of course, these boundaries aren’t always quite so clear. Consider the case of my original “April 20, 2015” and the acoustic adaptation we did for Greyfade. The original, despite its clunky samples, is quite microtonal!

Take a listen:



That uses the process mentioned above of microtuning different systems of equal tempered material against each other, in this case hockets of violin and piano samples.

But when Joe Branciforte and I sat down to develop the acoustic adaptation, the first thing we did was throw out the microtonality – it was just too much to take on. That was definitely the right choice in retrospect, given the immense challenges we faced with the project. And it definitely works just fine in equal temperament:



The first thing you notice, of course, is the tremendous improvement in timbre, the richness and nuance our wonderful performers bring to the piece that my clumsy chopped-up samples just can’t achieve.

But what’s interesting, I think, on going back to that original source recording, is how the microtonality does lead you, in a very subtle way, to a different place. If you compare in particular the endings of the two versions, the very final sections, the acoustic version ends up being very, very pretty, very traditionally, consonantly sad, and that’s quite beautiful and works nicely for a clean and emotional ending. But the old microtonal version has, in retrospect, this very compelling ambiguity that’s been a little lost in the translation: where you end up at the end of the piece is somewhere subtly different, somewhere a bit more ambivalent, somewhere that’s perhaps, in its own quiet way, more interesting.

So maybe that line between constitutive and non-constitutive approaches isn’t so clear after all, and there’s still some interesting grey spaces in between.

With electronic tools, playing and composing in just intonation has become a whole lot easier. Do you find this interesting? What are some of the technologies, controllers and instruments you use for your own practice?

OK, now is probably the time to say that I am not, in truth, a just intonation person. I have many friends who are JI people, and I have some pithy quotes about why I don’t like JI – but I feel I should probably keep them off the record for fear my JI friends will run up and stab me with sharpened tuning forks.

But technology I can talk about – and wow, what a mess! It’s ridiculous! I mean, tuning is the simplest possible thing for a computer – it literally doesn’t care about equal temperament, it’ll do whatever you want. But every last piece of software made is either completely hardwired into 12TET or has some proprietary, idiosyncratic version of its own weird interpretation of what it thinks microtuning is or should be that completely contradicts every other possible piece of software’s approach or that just doesn’t actually do that one tiny thing you actually do want it to do! It’s hopeless.

Somewhere out there in the mist is MIDI 2.0, which is supposed to fix all this. But given that I’m still using the exact same MIDI protocol that came out of the box with the Yamaha DX7 I got in 1984, you can see why I’m a little pessimistic.

Some artists approach tuning systems from a strongly scientific angle. In case you're interested in this, what do you feel “research” could potentially uncover and provide in terms of tuning systems? Where do you see the biggest potential for exploration at the moment?

So the scientific process and the culture of science are deeply enmeshed in my artistic practice and my whole way of thinking.

I spent the first formative decade of my life as an independent composer supporting myself by working at a day job in science – I was the secretary to a famous mad scientist. And the whole ethos of that world slowly began to permeate everything I did, and in a really great way. I came to realize the extent to which scientists and artists are really, very deeply, after the same fundamental things. To this day, I still spend hours and hours every week reading scientific journals and trying to keep up with everything that’s happening.

So how does this intensive immersion in the philosophy and methodology of science relate to my tuning approach? It doesn’t!

Sure, the philosophy is in there somewhere, and at some level it informs everything I do, hovering quietly in the background and saturating everything. But in reality, as noted above, I basically just turn knobs, and tuning is just one more knob on my synths that I’m using to try to get a new or good sound.

Do you still use equal temperament? What are some of the aspects and goals for which you find it suitable?

Much as I love to go on a good rant about being a brave freedom fighter against the evil hegemony of the equal tempered empire, in reality, I use equal temperament all the time. It’s fine! It’s a great tuning system and there’s tons you can do with it.

Often, after going down some crazy microtonal rabbit hole for months and months, I’ll stumble back into equal temperament and be like, hey, this is OK!

So basically you shouldn’t listen to anything I’m saying.