A.B., Special Concentration in
Experimental Live Electronic and Computer Music,
Harvard College, 1995
Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences,
School of Architecture and Planning,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
September 1997
©Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1997
All rights reserved
Author
Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences,
School of Architecture and Planning,
on August 8, 1997,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences
Abstract
By default, all MIDI synthesizers are tuned to 12-tone equal temperament (12TET). This is the most convenient tuning because it is applicable to all Western music and can be controlled from conventional keyboards. Although it is convenient, it is not necessarily musically desirable. For example, harmonically speaking, many musicians find its major thirds less consonant than they would like. Fortunately, MIDI synthesizers are only tuned to 12TET by default, for convenience's sake. They can in fact be used to realize pieces with each note tuned arbitrarily. Thus, like the violin or the voice, they do not have to conform to a tuning at all. This thesis investigates how this dynamic intonation capability can be applied to the realization of pieces of Western music. It investigates dynamic intonation from two perspectives. The first perspective is theoretical, presenting and evaluating a variety of alternatives to 12TET. The second perspective is practical, presenting software that was written in order to allow dynamic intonation on MIDI synthesizers. This software can be used to create MIDI files with dynamic intonation. The software can also allow a conventional MIDI keyboard to be used to perform a piece using dynamic intonation. It does so by following along in a score of the piece that has been annotated with intonation information, transmitting retuned versions of the notes it receives from the keyboard.
This research was sponsored by Microsoft and the Things That Think Consortium.
The following people served as readers for this thesis:
Reader
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Will ``Billy-Dee'' Oliver, for his scrutiny of drafts of this work.
Thanks to Teresa Marrin, for being a supportive and fun office-mate with whom I had many stimulating discussions about this work.
Thanks to Bernd Schoner, for reading a draft of this work and providing stimulating opposition to some of the ideas within.
Thanks to my advisor, Tod Machover, for allowing me to pursue a topic that is only tangentially related to our group's work.
Thanks to Graeme Boone for being a generally inspiring musicological force and, specifically, for the pre-publication draft of his article on intonation in Dufay.
Thanks to Bill Sethares for pointers to important references.
Thanks to my first theory teacher, the composer Sotireos Vlahapolous, who introduced me to the wonderfully odd subject of tuning.
Colophon / Software Acknowledgments
This thesis was typeset using Christian Schenk's MiKTEX, a port of Leslie Lamport's LATEX and related utilities. LATEX is a set of extensions to Donald Knuth's TEX. The font is Computer Modern, designed by Donald Knuth. Musical examples were typeset using Daniel Taupin's MusicTEX extensions to TEX. The musical font is musikn, designed by Angelika Schofer and Andrea Steinbach.
Contacting the Author
The author can be contacted by email at bdencklaRemoveThis8495849583845@media.mit.edu.