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ThomPete

There are many ways do divide an octave.

Steve Vai created a scale called the Xavian scale wich is dividing the octave by 10.

He used in on Deep Down Into The Pain

http://www.guitarflame.com/2008/xavian-scale-steve-vais-own-...

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Hey, why stick to octaves? The Bohlen-Pierce scale divides the tritave in 13 (a tritave interval is a 3:1 pitch ratio).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60SYLdMYvcE – check out the keyboards!

That song is terrible (and I love Devin Townsend, the singer).

Of course it's terrible it's using the xavian scale which you are not used to.

no, it's terrible because it sounds like a bad technical exercise (music graduate here)

So does Jazz to a virgin ear. That doesn't mean it is.

Jazz sounds awful. There's a reason pop music sticks to the four chords of victory - they sound great!

1. "Not sure if serious"

2. Jazz is barely a genre anymore there's so many different sub-genre's and movements within it that actually using the term how you did is disingenuous.

3. You did the same as above with about the same effect for "pop music". Seeing as you addressed harmony, you'll actually find that there are lots of common harmonic (chord) progressions that are shared between the two idioms. They reflect each other more than they are different to each other. If you really wanted to make the point you were trying to make I'd suggest looking for some form of obscure ethnic music (Pakistani throat singing or Indonesian Gamelan perhaps) that has not really had much chance to mix with western music and absorb its paradigms.

To the virgin ear, yes.

Virgin? http://www.last.fm/user/superjoe30

According to this website I listen to 60 tracks every day.

60 Jazz tracks? That's what I mean with virgin ear.

You are not used to listen to Jazz so it's more likely to sound horrible to you since it's often rather complex.

Why do you think that parents of the 68' generation hated Beatles despite it being what we consider pop culture today.

You need to understand this in context rather than in absolute terms.

Makes sense except for one point: Why would a person purposefully subject themselves to a musical genre that sounds bad? You said yourself, to the virgin ear, jazz sounds bad. That means that everyone who likes jazz music at one point thought that it was terrible music yet listened to it anyway.

That is up to the individual.

Many people as they start playing instruments they start developing a more and more sophisticated sense of harmony.

It's not different than code looking like nonsense to the noob.

This is where culture comes in. Jazz used to be pop-music, people grew up with it.

Context history culture sophistication at any given subject.

Jazz sounds awful.

I can understand styles of music sounding awful, but what does it mean for a whole genre of music to sound awful? How does that even make sense?

Just to be clear, do you think this (Desafinado) sounds awful?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So718wk426c

Crazy talk.

This song isn't actively bad. I wouldn't mind it in the background. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't really utilize "jazzy" chords either. It's just kind of gentle and peaceful and doesn't ask for too much attention. I wouldn't use this as a good example of Jazz music.

What I'm referring to as what sounds awful are songs that try to use "creative" chords that are really just dissonant or don't belong together and "advanced" notes that are really just out of key. As far as I can tell this song isn't doing that.

I think a big part of music is familiarity which is why you see the overuse of the I, V, vi, IV progression. So to me Xavian sounds like chromatic played out of tune. Nice idea though.

It's not just that; the musical intervals we tend to favour are based around natural resonances and constructive / destructive interference. Hence why a perfect fifth sounds good and a diminished fifth jars; the waveforms don't compliment each other.

I'm willing to be persuaded and don't claim to have made a large study of this but I'm yet to hear a microtonal tuning that didn't just sound off. The sounds actively work against each other because the resonances just aren't there.

(I'm aware in this that modern keyboards are even tempered and so we don't actually _quite_ have perfect intervals any more, but the differences at that level are far smaller.)

Don't be afraid to be right. I did study music theory and I can confirm that the intervals as we know them are just a way to modelize the natural physical relationships between the waves we hear. It is a way to remeber where to put your finger on a violin to make the two string sound good together in a given harmonic context.

One can alway declare to prefer microtonal or whatever invention, but the level interference (or harmony) between pitched sounds can be determined rationaly. This, for once, is not placable under cultural relativism. That's why it is probable that quater tones in Indian or Iranian music are not really tones, and are more like little bends to the natural scale.

(This fact do not please avant-gardists, because it means there is roughly nothing new to invent in this field, but reality is not supposed to always be pleasant, right?)

By the way, I couldn't read the OP (blocked), sorry if my contrib is not related enough.

And I guess also why they don't really use chord progressions like we do in the west no?

I'm thinking about a music application that lets you place tones in arbitrary locations on a continuous line (representing the tone space) and assign them keys on the keyboard.

Something close is

http://www.morphwiz.com/

and

http://misadigital.com/index.php?target=home&lang=en

They are both interesting because they are using touchscreen meaning that they are fretless.

Cool. I've started fretless bass, and reading about accommodations you make for playing with e.g. vocalists who run flat more often than sharp, or upper register of piano that are sharp.

Remember to check out Jaco Pastorious then!

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