Just a showcase of C Neutral, a weird little microtonal scale. CAN NOT ACTUALLY BE PLAYED ON PIANO IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW!!! Try the interactive tutorial, or download the Sheet music here: musescore.com/...
the new microtonal playback is out on musescore 4.2! One thing I did is use the bagpipe and play a neutral 3rd at 60 bpm it really sounds like a car horn
Why have an Ab and not an A half-b? Makes it sound like some kind of detuned harmonic minor, or some middle eastern scale maybe. Wouldn’t it be a more neutral sound to have the A half-b?
@@zionfultz8495 iirc in microtonality sometimes you notate like that, for example in some tuning/notation system G# and Ab not same, (in terms of pitch (relative to root and anchor pitch ofc))
@@jeannotdenimes158 Both the A half flat and B half flat will give you the neutral sound, but B half flat has a stronger resolution because it is basically a leading tone similar to a how major 7 in western harmony works. It’s kind of like a major scale. A half flat with a Bb can be found in maqam Nairuz and its cognates in other cultures. This is by no means the only way to use these intervals in music, but you might find the following useful. Maqams use tetrachords, trichords and pentachords in a similar way to how chord progressions work. Often a maqam can be divided into two main tetrachords and smaller or larger derivations. In the neutral scale (Rast) with E half flat and B half flat, the two tetrachords (rast) are identical. C Rast+ G rast. CDEhalfFGABhalf Progressions (Sayr) often include modulations of the upper tetrachord of the scale, which might include the A half flat and Bb tetrachord. So C Rast+ G Bayati. CDEhalfFGAhalfBb. A cool modulation you can do is treat a natural note such as G as a microtone and flip all the other notes, which comes from Maqam Sika where the microtone is the tonic. I highly recommend maqamworld.com. Cheers
@@pamplemoo dang now that you mention it, it kinda does. Makes me want to try writing something using this scale, even though I normally don't touch 24edo, since I've written a ton of 12edo stuff using mixolydian b6.
wow, they really clah against rach other. i guess a neutral chord performs the same role as augmented or diminished in 12-tet. Ie, you use it to quickly resolve the progression or to modulate to other keys/modes.
depends on the edo. you can have the same chord type but with the cent difference from JI of the 3rd and 5th shuffled and it can carry different emotions. in 17edo I wrote an entire piece based around the neutral chord (would have to do some digging to find it) and the general response from peers was that it sounded really beautiful. the neutral chord in 24 I would definitely call a tension chord.
How come, even though i dont have perfect pitch, have done 0 ear training and have 0 relative pitch, i can perfectly tell when a chord is using a microtonal note? Like it sounds fundamentally different for some reason. It sticks out like a sore thumb even to my almost tone deaf ears. Its like a giga tritone or something, even tritones sound less dissonant
It is because they aren’t just major and minor chords with microtones roots, but instead fundamentally different triads (for the third set). And microtones often create a lot of dissonance in these structures. So, it is the same way you can tell major and minor chord apart
How did you make that? As far as I know, there are multiple kinds of neutral scales. There is the 3L 4s scale, also called 'mosh', which stacks neutral thirds up and down to make a 7-note scale. There are also scales that take the average between a major scale and a minor scale. But due to the minor 6th note in your scale, it is neither. Without the minor 6th, it would be the 3L 4s scale, specifically the 4|2 mode. What is your methodology to make it? Pretty interesting scale.
OK....I realize that I'm going to be the fly in the ointment here, but.....if you have the tonic, which is C in this case, remain as a "natural" C, the entire phrase remains in C. The issue I see with this "new theory" is that, although the scale is microtonal, the end result goes back to a "natural" tonic. Plus - with the chords and the scale, it isn't the odd sounding tonality that jars the ears but rather the upper partials and overtones that are clashing together. It's almost as if you're putting a slightly out-of-round tire on a car with 3 good tires. There's a reason why the tonal system that was created a few hundred years ago remains as it is today. If you were composing music for a movie score and wanted to use this as a way to emote a scene, then I could see this working. But on it's own it's just another way to be different, IMO.
Why should the root not be natural? You can have C major, C minor, C in all the modes, C diminished scale, C augmented scale, all of them have C as a root just fine. A microtonal scale should have no reason the root can’t be a natural note. Similarly all the scales you can put on C you could put on C half sharp, or A half flat, there is no limitations to what root you choose
@@zionfultz8495 - You can't have C in all the modes if you want it to be the tonic though, that's exactly what he is saying you can't do. C diminished or C augmented can't really be tonic chords in the general sense of the word.
31 Tet would have unique scales from 12 and 24 Tet. You can definitely make scales for it, but they’d have little relation to 12 and 24 tet as far as I can tell. Since 24 tet contains 12 tet. However 31 tet contains neither 24 nor 12. Not even sure if they’d share more than one note (ofc any two tets will always share at least 1 note). There may be scales on 31 with a similar feel to this one, but it is a lot different of a task than what I did here, as I have to start in essence from scratch
@@hyspecs7906Well jokes on you, microtones (for example 31-TET) are more "In tune" than 12-TET. You think these sound bad because your western ear isn't used to it.
@@TentacleTerrorMusicmy ears are like everyone's ears, they like consonance. I you're going to use microtonality, you should use it to reach the consonance "western" music can't.
