Auld Lang Syne for Kite Guitar

[wolftune]

Hi all, long time with no real output from me. That's changing. Here's the first taste https://youtu.be/sZGZmgGkYzI

The Kite Guitar is itself an amazing innovation, the solution to thousands of years of dilemmas around how to get practical harmonic tuning. And because several of us are GNU/Linux, Free/Libre/Open folks, we're organizing everything about it to be aligned with those values.

The arrangement of my recording is at https://en.xen.wiki/w/Kite_Guitar_Trans ... _Lang_Syne

And it's in Musescore. And I plan to add a staff part with the notes ASAP (it takes extra "up" and "down" accidentals to show the tuning correctly).

Happy New Year!

[milo]

Cool stuff. I went to www.kiteguitar.com to learn more, and it's a really interesting idea. I like the sound of your arrangement, and it's obvious from your facial expressions on the video that this is deeply satisfying to play. You seem to just want to linger on some of those gorgeous chords. Very nice, and thanks for sharing.

+1 for Christmas songs!

[wolftune]

Auld Lang Syne isn't a Christmas song (and I happen to kinda hate Christmas songs), it's a **new years** song! But nevermind that

I chose to linger on the chords because you can't hear what's so special about the tuning if it just flies by. You can spend a LOT longer on some of these chords and really get lost in them. Of course, I made a point of trying to express the performance appropriately for the slow speed.

I plan to do a follow up where I might play faster and other variations but then go and actually talk about it, play important bits and essentially show off the interesting stuff. There's a line that both is perfectly smooth and blended and yet uses 4 pitches in exactly the space you'd expect only 3. It goes from the Major 6th to the 5th of the scale, and it has *two* minor 6ths on the way instead of just one.

Microtonal music can easily do crap like that just to be microtonal, but this is carefully chosen to be harmonically blended, so it's very subtle instead of being weird just to be weird and stand out.

[jeanette_c]

Nice guitar tone and good harmonisation. A little too adagio perhaps, but sweet and enjoyable.

[wolftune]

I didn't mention for some reason originally: the software I used in this was Guitarix, Ardour, and Kdenlive.

As stated in previous reply, Adagio for the purpose of hearing the tuning subtleties. It could be way slower even to really listen to how these chords are not the standard 12-edo ones.

[milo]

One thing about this recording that really appeals to me, and which not incidentally makes it a good advertisement for the kite guitar, is that it is so listenable. It is really pleasing to the ear.

I am all in favor of pushing the boundaries of what has gone before in music, but the projects that end up being successful are the ones that subjectively sound good. For example, how much more successful was Stravinsky than Schoenberg? Can you imagine a Schoenberg piece making the cut in Fantasia? And Brubeck succeeded in his time signature experiments because he made it listenable, and even danceable. Insert your own examples, but the bottom line is that experimental music has to be listenable to succeed.

I'm not necessarily saying that you're Stravinsky, but I do think that you're on to something good. So keep at it!

[wolftune]

Thanks!

The world of "microtonality" has a spectrum from weird-for-the-sake-of-weird to sounds-totally-normal-except-particulary-harmonious. There are those of us who sometimes want completely traditional music but noticed that you simply can't tune an A chord and a G chord by ear to both be as smooth as possible on the same regular guitar. The reason to go for different tunings isn't to be deviant, it's to simply have the damn chords actually be in tune!

Of course, once we have a wider palette of pitches, some wonderous new sounds are possible. And I can get into "weird" sometimes too, but that's not my point. And **the** reason for the Kite Guitar is that it can indeed just play beautiful harmonies, dare I say *healthier* harmonies, like they blend smoothly enough to just feel great and want to just play them and bask in the relaxing but intriguing sound. It's not about making people uncomfortable (though I can do that if I want), it's about helping people get comfortable and connected to the music in ways they might not have realized were possible!

All this will be clearer in future videos! Happy New Year!

[Rainmak3r]

While I was listening I thought "it's beautiful, but it sounds a bit out of tune", and then I got my answer reading the thread: microtonality!

I applaud the effort, and you played it really well, but it's really and definitely not my cup of tea... The only microtonality I can tolerate is usually the one you can hear in traditional middle-Eastern and Eastern music, where they do fit nicely I believe. In modern classical music and more modern attempts, I really cannot appreciate it, and it's not just a matter of how pleasant it might sound overall: I can't stand neither Stravinsky nor Schoenberg, for instance And Ligeti and Penderecki are nice when you want those 5 minutes of anguish (which they convey very well, which is why soundtracks are sometimes inspired by them), but a whole concert or symphony?

Weirdly enough I do enjoy genres like Dark Ambient, who use a lot of droning that can sometimes fit in microtonality, but even in that case there's a limit to how much I can listen before needing a more traditional approach.

[wolftune]

Thanks for the reply and perspective.

I assure you that this type of "out of tune" you are experiencing is simple familiarity. Like being in a place where cars drive on the left and you think "this is wrong!" If you listen again (a few more times perhaps), you'll hear that it doesn't have the honky-tonky sound of actually being out of tune, it's pretty-well tuned. I can't say that for all "microtonality", much of which is indeed out of tune. But the chords here are in tune with the harmonics pretty well.

Another analogy is in language: people may find a new term irksome, deeply, not just intellectually. Hearing singular "they" for the first time in "I'm visiting my friend later. They are a librarian." sounds just *wrong*. But after you get used to it enough, the "wrongness" fades. There's nothing fundamentally wrong about it, but it violates patterns we previously built up.

In contrast, harmonies that are actually out of tune with harmonics will create beats and tension that will sound out of tune no matter how many hundreds of times you hear them.

Your comfort with non-Western tuning in some other context fits just as I'm saying. You have this subconscious box where it's expected when you hear the rest of the signals that it's some non-Western music. Just like "casa verde" sounds good because your brain turns on Spanish while "house green" sounds wrong and "verde casa" sounds wrong.

We'll be making a lot more videos about the Kite Guitar and explaining this with examples in a way that I think will help you really grasp and be open to the distinction between non-12edo but *in-tune* harmonies vs fundamentally out-of-tune microtonality.

[Rainmak3r]

Thanks for the insight, it's been an interesting and helpful read! And indeed that's why I said I'm simply unable to appreciate it: I realize there's more to it, but it just doesn't strike my chords or resonate with me. I have tried multiple times to listen to many 20th century classical composers, to see if I could overcome this, but to no avail: I'm afraid I must resign to the fact that, on this and probably only this, I'm a "conservative"

I'll definitely keep track of what you'll share next, though, so thanks again for posting this!

[wolftune]

Just to be clear: I'm saying that the 20th century compositions you describe are WEIRD in a way that will be forever weird, same with other microtonality. I'm saying that "unable to appreciate it" is not so fixed as you describe. I'm suggesting that conservative listeners *appreciate* well-tuned harmonies but NOT the *weird* type of microtonality.

Listen to barbershop harmony, you'll find you can appreciate it, but it uses the same sort of harmonies in many cases. It's a bit more subtle and you don't expect something different, but really good barbershop is similar.

Anyway, not to argue further, and yes, the later stuff will help clarify. But just wanted to be clear: I'm insisting that there's stuff that will NEVER reach most people (e.g. the atonal 20th century stuff which gets appreciated *for* its weirdness in a sense) and that such examples are weird for a *different* reason than tunings that are harmonically tuned but just unfamiliar.

To put plainly: totally untrained listeners usually find the 20th-century and "weird" microtonal music to be out-of-tune or off or unlistenable. But those same naive untrained listeners almost always find my Auld Lang Syne totally fine and don't even realize anything is unusual at all. This is the common reaction. It's only a partial set of well-experienced trained musicians like you who find the Auld Lang Syne to be unusual.

[Basslint]

Very nice, sounds like something Bill Frisell, my favorite guitarist, would play. Awesome!

[modusjonens]

This tone is downright glassy!