Tuning system wackery

Here's someone who believes that A=440 is a bad idea, not because they like baroque instruments, or because Verdi knew singer's ranges best, but because "432hz vibrates/oscillates on the principals of natural harmonic wave propagation and unifies with the properties of light, time, space, matter, gravity and electromagnetism." Um. Okay. But even that makes sense, as compared to this maker of a microtonal keyboard, who somehow mixes Pythagoras, chakra/pitch identification, Georg Cantor, Egyptian pyramids and 666 together in search of a tuning system.

More microtonal nonsense

The Bohlen-Pierce musical scale is based on odd harmonics only, and uses 13 equal tempered steps to the 3:1 interval (the 12th of the conventional scale). Apparently you can develop the harmony along the same lines as Western harmony, using the mathematically natural generalizations. Here's a BP version of the "Pachabel canon", a work which the uploader says "constitutes an elegant mathematical proof that the diatonic scale is emergent, not a cultural or academic contrivance". It actually starts to sound okay, after a minute or two. A little longer, and I realize that there are fewer BP notes: a tritave, the 3:1 BP replacement for the 2:1 octave, is 50% wider than an octave, and you can't fit as many in the useful range of human hearing. Hence the contra-bass and squeaky treble.



Even nicer is this brief improvisation on a BP clarinet. The clarinet is almost completely missing the second harmonic naturally, so the BP scale doesn't have overtone clashes.

Microtones

This interesting Slate article on tuning conventions through history had a number of comments from tuning geeks. One is in an improvisational microtonal collective; a video is below. To me, after less than a minute of listening, it just sounds out of tune. Maybe more exposure could help. But there's gotta be a limit; 12 tones per octave might be too few, but 200 (!) sure seems like too many.