Nebula Chick Productions

Of all the PDFs I could find nothing has directly related to my research project. There are some studies on hearing and interpretation of complex tones that give a good background to how they built and recorded complex tones from simple tones, which will be helpful for building my own complex tones in a year or so. And there are 2 articles on log e scales, although both very different from my own. There are also a huge number of papers going into the log 2 and ratio scales from a historical point of view. There is one study on tuning and perception which is very interesting and concludes that our brains are good at interpreting things and that musical tuning is more about familiarity then harmonics in nature, which is interesting and very reasonable considering how good our brains are at interpretation. 

Of the papers I have, the most useful pages I think are the ones on the practical side things, how to do fourier transformations, how many overtones and undertones are considered reasonable for a given complex tone. There are plenty of weird and wonderful new scales that exist, but it seams even the ones built on mathematical theories only give the frequencies to retune your instrument to in order to play on that weird new scale. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried retuning and playing on these scales as there is no indication given in the papers about how they sound or of any practical difficulties encountered when retuning or playing in these scales. Which just makes me even more curious about the effect that complex tones will have on my scale. 

It is important to remember however that there is nothing particularly special about my log e ratio scale, it is only a case study to test various theories and processes on. I could easily only test them on the “standard” log 2 ratio scale but the reason I want to use a different case study scale is because anytime you want to apply a different process some adjustments will have to be made. Using an unusual scale is a good way to test and see how to adjust and apply these processes to an unusual scale. If there are no issues applying these processes to this log e scale, than they shouldn’t be too hard to adjust to any other scale system.

This blog post should be backdated to about July 2018. Before I can get into the Nitty gritty of my research project, I need to do a formal literature review, just to make sure there is a gap in the market so to speak. If a similar project has been done, even if it is based on a different scale, the theory is still the same and can therefore be applied to any other scale including my log e ratio scale. 

In order to do a formal literature review therefore I needed access to as many papers as I can find on the topic of scales and harmonics. I was kind of lucky on this front as the idea of the project had been in the back of my mind for some time, and during my honours project it certainly became a clear next step in the protect. This gave me a fair amount of time to start on a very unofficial lit review, it certainly gave me enough time to scour the Con library for anything that might be even slightly related to my project. 

This looking forward and downloading PDFs of potentially useful information turned out to come in very handy indeed. As it was at this time I discovered that there was nothing directly related to my project so I just got my hands on whatever I could find that may relate however indirectly to my project and base my lit review on that. 

This project very much builds on what I learnt during my honours work and is very much a direct next step at least in my understanding of scales and harmonics. And while I did use my direct access to the Con library to help acquire some background material for my post-grad research, I count the official start of this project at mid 2018 after receiving my second rejection letter for post-grad research. This is when my project and of course lit review, the first step in this project, started.

So I thought a bit of background on this research project may be helpful and as I said it did very much grow out of my honours project. By the time I got to third year of my undergrad, I became increasingly intrigued by the relationship between musical scales and the harmonic series, seen as they do not aligne how we often assume they would. This also brings to question the power of the human brain in interpreting and adjusting for the inconsistencies between musical scales and the harmonic series. 

It seams to me at least that our brains and amazing skills at interpretation are hardly ever given the credit they deserve. I think so many people just listen to music for fun, which is great, but I don’t think most people realise just how much power and interpretation actually goes on for you to have the conscious thought of “hey, this music’s quite good, yeah I like it” or something similar. Musicologists and researchers have known music is complex for a very long time and when mathematical tools and discoveries into harmonics were made, it didn’t make understanding music any easier. In fact I think it probably made it seem even more mind boggling that our brains aren’t constantly mind boggled by music. 

My honours project consists of research into three main sections that go into understanding musical harmonics. the first is what we learn from music history, by far the most subjective interpretation of harmonics as the rules of musical harmony change with each new fashion. The second is the mathematical and scientific, more of a useful tool for understanding music. It’s far more objective but very much built in a space that assumes log 2 and agrees that harmonics are built with ratios. The third is the weirdest, it’s the human brains interpretation and understanding of music. The weirdness comes from the juxtaposition of human biology and interpretation. Biologically human ears are “designed” for a ratio based music system but our brains don’t panic if we don’t hear that they adjust. 

So I figured if our brains can adjust our understanding of a “non-biological” and “non-harmonic” musical system then surely they can do the same for a musical system that isn’t even trying to conform. If we understand the rule behind the scale then surely we can interprete and understand the scale. In order to test this theory I made up a log e ratio scale, I didn’t want anything too outlandish, hence a ratio scale, but at the same time I didn’t want the scale to sound to familiar so log e worked well.

In mid 2018 I received my second rejection letter from uni regarding my application for further research, this is also when I officially became an independent music researcher/scholar. 

In my honours research I was looking into scales and harmonics and became fascinated with the human understanding of music. So in my further research I will be looking into this in much more detail using the aid of a log e scale as a comparison tool to the standard log 2 scale. 

I will also be using these blogs and a series of video research diaries on YouTube to help keep me on track with this rather large project.