# Look At That Fucking Hipster, pt. 1/3... - Site: Analog Industries - Author: Chris Randall - Date: 2010-11-25 - URL: https://analogindustries.com/2010/11/look-at-that-fucking-hipster-pt-1-3/ Two points: 1\. I'm totally in favor of building your own instruments and composing for them. I think we can all agree, however, that Harry Partch didn't create this concept. 2\. 43-notes to the octave makes my teeth hurt. Now, I'm not bashing on Harry Partch just for the hell of it. I just think that academics can display some truly remarkable blindness to the world about them. (Note: I kited this from [GetLoFi](http://www.getlofi.com/?p=3776)) ## Comments (19) **stretta** (2010-11-25): I agree that academics can be blind, but I really enjoyed the video. **bleen** (2010-11-25): "hipster" isn't too far removed from "hippy".... **noisegeek** (2010-11-25): I'm reminded of something one of my profs used to say: Just because it's art doesn't mean its any good. While it's good to know that people are out there exploring and trying new things, that doesn't necessarily mean everyone needs to know about them. **shamann** (2010-11-25): I wouldn't characterize Harry Partch as an academic. Dude was even a hobo for a decade. I'd recommend reading Genesis of a Music, his work on extending an octave wasn't just a trick, but an attempt to create a way for music to match the intonations of the spoken language and to suit physical/dance performance. I really love his music, have since I first heard it when I was teenager. **MrBiggs** (2010-11-25): The kinda goofy images of people playing those instruments -- I wonder if videos of people playing Lemurs and iPads and Monomes will look as goofy in twenty years. **synthetic** (2010-11-25): The only non-chromatic music that didn't make me laugh out loud was Wendy Carlos "Beauty and the Beast." And that was only parts of it, other bits seemed designed to make my teeth hurt. Although "harmonic tuning" is kinda cool for sound design. **seancostello** (2010-11-25): I thoroughly enjoyed that. On a whole bunch of levels. I liked the sounds, liked the ridiculous pretension, liked seeing the crazy old man avant garde guy. "Dude was even a hobo for a decade." - YOU DON'T SAY! The best quote: "Harry Partch liberated us. Not everyone. There's still too many people who don't know who he is." See, that's what's going on here. CR isn't liberated, MAN. I have a soft spot in my heart for out of tune music. However, I always find it ironic when avant garde music gets so far into the academic theory that it sounds like pure randomness, or noise, or someone having a seizure on a piano keyboard, or a guitar with a few mistuned strings. **seancostello** (2010-11-25): Harry Partch constructed a series of radical new instruments from #10 cans of beans, bindles, fires built in oil drums, secret railroad signs... **Chris Randall** (2010-11-25): Yeah, I know bass players that have been indistinguishable from hobos their entire career. It ain't a 4-Square badge or anything. I was talking to my wife the other day about art, and I posited that the only thing that made something art was your ability to explain it as such, and explain it in a way that others would assign value (intellectual or monetary or whatever) to it. -CR **Paradigm X** (2010-11-25): @ CR Interesting, I had virtually the same conversation once, art is anything you can convince other people is art. :) See Martin Creed and his blue tack on the wall... http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/5/martin-creed/images-clips/51/ **shamann** (2010-11-26): "12TET. It is a capable scale. Have a nice day." Very true, always what bothered me most about 20th century tonal experiments. They were very dogmatic, their way was good, all others were bad. Rigidily conservative, considering how iconoclastic those movements are generally portrayed. I prefer a "it takes all kinds" approach, which is something I think a lot of composers tried to get across in the latter quarter of the century and the years since. **mad ep** (2010-11-27): Is it just me, or does the garbled tape slurs make the 43-tone music sound even better? step 1: spend weeks/months conceptualizing and building new instrument. step 2: compose a piece for said instrument. step 3: perform and record the piece to cassette or VHS. step 4: find that one tapedeck you have that always chews up your tapes - play it through and record the result. step 5: enjoy the awesomeness. **Peppe** (2010-11-27): I'm trying my best to avoid harsh words, yet failing miserably: I found these videos extremely uncomfortable, not because of the tuning or other issues (which don't bother me at all), but because turd is being polished and some fine words are attached to it. To me, that's "crap". To someone else (possibly not as narrow-minded), it's "art" or "wow". And yes, I'm sure people will laugh at iPadsters later on. I already find it a bit hard to concentrate on any R. Devine video without bursting into an uncontrollable laughter. I mean, whatever's the plug or gear, the output's always "ffmiggleBRRRIPgnap-gnap-ZZAPswoosh-erb-erb-erb". Hmm. Maybe I'm blind/deaf and just missing all the good parts. Actually, I grabbed the soundtrack of that video and put it through PaulStretch. Sounds better, imho. **ricemutt** (2010-11-28): allright, I gotcha. It just sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder against JI evangelists who think that JI is the shit and anything equal tempered is the devil. I would disagree with those people too. I write a lot of microtonal music but also love playing regular ass ET music, and my mood kind of decides the flavor. I think, for some instance, some stuff is really great in normal temperament... debussy's music, or pretty much all jazz.... bach, the list goes on. I DO think that Just intonation is a great way to get new sounds and that more people should check it out--but it does require work to make it sound good, just like anything else new and interesting. carry on ;) **bongo_x** (2010-11-28): Work; I'm agin it. bb **seancostello** (2010-11-28): There are lots of instruments where just intonation just sort of happens. Lap and pedal steel are great examples. The open intervals you tune a lap steel to tend to be just intonation, and the slants tend towards mathematically consonant intervals (assuming you can pull them off). Pedal steels are adjusted by tuning each interval created by a pedal/knee combo such that it sounds correct, and it is far more likely to end up being in just intonation. Standard electric guitar is a little harder to get into just intonation, but I've found myself "leaning" on the fretboard to get certain intervals more in tune, when playing through fuzzboxes that really bring the intervals into focus. The Univox Superfuzz (and the Boss FZ-2, which was a great low cost Superfuzz substitute) have a full-wave rectifier as part of the circuit, that generates a TON of intermodulation distortion. An interval in 12TET will have too much ugly beating, while a justly tuned interval through such a fuzz will sound consonant - or even generate bass notes below any of the notes of the chord. And yeah, I know that talking about it in this way makes it seem overly neckbeardish, but when actually playing the instruments it is far more natural and instinctive to play in just intonation, without thinking of it in those terms. **brsclts** (2010-11-30): "In JI, these emotional ties to our animal hindbrain are simply not existent, as westerners have been trained through five centuries of popular music using a single tuning system. " But that tuning system has changed so much in those five centuries. For example, key changes used to be meaningful, great lengths were gone-to in order to describe the differences between them all... volumes of literature we're talking here... now everything is stretched to be equal; there are no different, distinct "colors" inherent in the keys... http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory27.htm 43 note scales (or whatever denomination further), from what I've studied, are usually used as a bridge from the present back to the past, as a means to use some of those old intervals again... but it does get a bit ugly and distracting if/when the composer is shooting for some Schoenbergian level of intricacy, i.e., the piece ain't done till you use all 43 notes of that sumbitch... A listen so some of Ben Johnston's string music might sit a little better with most people. He was one of Harry's "students." **shamann** (2010-11-30): "A listen so some of Ben Johnston's string music might sit a little better with most people." I agree, his string quartets are very approachable. His String Quartet No.9 is one of my favourtie pieces of music, the third movement is especially beautiful. **seancostello** (2010-11-30): My old boss, Scott Van Duyne, has some 72-note scale work from his composer days: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~savd/ The music side of the site has a few compositions you can listen to, while the publications side lists a book, "Preliminary Studies in the Virtual Pitch Continuum" that he co-wrote. I haven't read it - I met him when he was well into the computer music / DSP side of things.