I just wanted to expand on my description of Wendy Carlos. Though she might have escaped notice by people not into synthesizers or thorough students of classical music, a much larger group of people have heard of Tron, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining. Wendy Carlos scored these films. Of course, Tron, in particular was really well-suited to the more electronic and futuristic sounds available on a synthesizer.
Something else that the Switched-On Bach 2000’s liner notes introduced me to was the idea of non-traditional tunings. I still only have a vague idea of what that’s about, but here’s my nutshell description. If you play a digital piano, you have 88 notes to choose from, always and forever. Scales have 8 notes. You’ve got flats and sharps. From Middle C, there’s 7 white keys and 5 black keys to the next C. It’s all well-defined and there’s sheet music to read. But, suppose that between Middle C and C above Middle C, we put more than 12 notes, say 24 or 36. Yeah, you’d have to play with the guitar tuning peg or electronic keyboard pitch bender to get to those in-between notes. And then you’d have all these notes that were slightly off the written note. Why? Well, apparently some of those combinations of notes that are a little off what were used to sound good.
Here’s the mind-bending investigation that Wendy Carlos has done: What if you have a way-out number that doesn’t even get you to the next octave, such as 15.385 or 34.188 notes per octave. Of course, that means you have all these notes and you can’t play a silly octave. I know it sounds bizarre and without an instrument to manage it on or a notation system to communicate it with it, one wonders what’s the point, but it does make you think. Oww!
