Hearing Outside: Sound Experiment in Sixth Tones
Let's start with a sound
How do you hear it? Is your response positive, negative, indifferent?
Maybe it sounds fine to you. Maybe you’ve even perceived a mysterious or soothing quality. But if your ears are well-trained maybe you winced a bit hearing it… you were taught well, especially if you tune your guitar by ear, to hear this sound as “wrong.” Yes.. it’s out of tune. But the clip is only 3 seconds, and maybe you didn’t mind it so much… Your suffering was short-lived! Or maybe you’re not swayed much either way – strong positive or negative reactions may seem out of place for such a short clip.
We hear things differently depending on where we hear them. Few people would spurn the sound of a bullfrog chorus or a distant foghorn for being “off-key.” Outside sounds are allowed to exist outside tonal strictures. The train whistle. Humming wind. Church bells. Do we imagine J.S. Bach plugging his ears and recoiling from the sound of the great Gloriosa bell of the St. Thomas Church, which has echoed through the streets of Leipzig for hundreds of years, for not falling in line with his tuning system?
Microtonality
Microtonal musicians usually employ more than 12 notes per octave, which means consecutive degrees of a scale are closer in pitch than the standard semitone, hence the prefix “micro.” I’m not fond of the term microtonal – it sounds meticulous and clinical, like you need an audio microscope to make sense of it; my approach is nothing like that.
My desire to use more than 12 notes per octave is simply a desire to work with expanded tonal, melodic and harmonic vocabulary. Having more notes means there’s more you can say. Having more hues/colors means there’s more you can paint. I landed on the sixth tone 36 note per octave scale because it’s the Goldilocks of microtonal scales. It offers new tonal possibilities, but it’s not overwhelming, there’s no clinical precision to worry about. Sixth tones are easy to hear and grasp.
What are "sixth tones"?
The standard 12 note chromatic scale is built of semitones, or “half steps.” If you divide the half steps in half, you get quarter tones. Many people have heard of quarter tones. I find them a bit obtuse. If you go a step further, dividing half steps in three, you get sixth tones.
The sixth tone scale forms 36 notes to the octave. This is the scale I’ve come to embrace, the Goldilocks of scales. Traditional accidentals are used, and up/down arrows attached to those accidentals indicate tones sounding a sixth-tone (33.3 cents) sharp or flat, according to the direction of the arrow.
Hearing experiment
To demonstrate the expressive potential of this system, I had the idea to compare microtonal and non-microtonal versions of certain snippets out of my music. So let’s put on our lab coats and find out whether sixth tones bring something to the table. You can decide for yourself.
The sonority posted at the top of this article without any musical context will now make a musical appearance, 12 seconds into this excerpt from a piece for solo guitar, “Two Sisters.”
What idea came to you, to lead me out to these rocks?
Original/microtonal version:
Modified/NON-microtonal version:
In the heart of the Pampa
there lives a pepper tree
sun and wind give him life,
sun and wind
Original/microtonal version:
Modified/NON-microtonal version:
From the same piece, here’s the opening of the second movement:
Original/microtonal version:
Modified/NON-microtonal version:
Original/microtonal version:
Modified/NON-microtonal version:
Here’s another clip, composed later in 2018. It’s the opening of the last movement of my symphony, which sets the lyrics of a traditional Salvadoran lullaby. Vocalist Dinys Ortiz and I recorded a reduced orchestration (accompanied only by keyboard and guitar) of both the original microtonal and non-microtonal versions.
Sleep, little child
don’t cry, little one
Original/microtonal version:
Modified/NON-microtonal version:
Moving past the 12-ET mindset
Here’s an extract from a steel string guitar trio I composed in 2012, which adopts the intricate, multilayered Piedmont blues style associated with the mid-Atlantic and Southeast United States. Here I layer a descending microtonal scale upon an already very busy texture. There’s no possible translation of this into standard 12 tone tonality.
Thank you for reading and listening!
Credits
Sounds:
“Train Fog Horn Long Wyoming” recorded by Andy Brannon (freesound.org, CC attribution 3.0)
“Leipzig (G – S) The bells of St. Thomas Church” featured on the Glockenfampf Youtube channel
Featured images:
“Eastern Point Light” (c. 1910) (artist unknown)
Roger Hall: “American Bullfrog”
Elodie Givaudan: “The Twa Sisters”
“Tree desert woodcut” (artist unknown)
Reginald Marsh: “20th Century Ltd.” (1931)
Pablo Picasso: “Mother and child” (c. 1901)
Featured works by Lewis Krauthamer:
“The Two Sisters” from Virginian Ballads on Themes of Human Weakness (2014) for solo guitar
The Pepper Tree (2010) for guitar trio
Train Journey Fragments (2010/14) for guitar and mixed ensemble (reduced)
“Aria” from Chamber Symphony (2017-21) for mezzo-soprano and small orchestra (reduced)
Virginian Ballads on Themes of Human Sedulity (2016-17) for solo guitar
Piedmont Rag No. 1 (2012) for steel string guitar trio
Special thanks to vocalist Dinys Ortiz