Techniques of Polytempic Polymicrotonal Composition

  What is JND? Just Noticeable Difference , which has nothing to do with just intonation , btw, is a psychoacoustic metric associated with the smallest interval detectable by the human ear . There is no point in making microtonal scales that can not be heard at their smallest division. Or is it?  The Greek schisma is a 2-cent interval created by subtracting the Syntonic Comma at 22 cents from the Pythagorean Comma , at 24 cents ( Ditonic Comma ). Ben Johnston used this 2-cent interval in his music. To truly hear a 2-cent interval, one would have to count the beats in between this narrow structure. I believe it was Marin Mersenne who discovered counting beats for intervals back in the 1600s, and this technique was discussed in Ellis-Helmholtz . Nevertheless, if Johnston used the schisma, then what stops the rest of us from using the cent itself?  Ellis-Helmholtz suggested the ten-cent threshold, while David Whaley , in his 1975 dissertation on the  microtonal ca...

Examples of Polytempic Polymicrotonal Music are found in my archive . Please explore my Internet Archive.  So, rather than take snapshots of sections out of context and paste them in each blog, I thought that the interested reader would rather look through my work to see how I have used Polytempic Polymicrotonality , polymeter , and polyrhythms and microtones in general.  List of Works in Score Thoegersen freely distributes his scores via the   Internet Archive . Scores for all the works below are available there. Dates indicate composition. Drumset 3:4:5:7, for Solo drumset #1 1995 Solo for Drumset #2 2022 Solo for Drumset #3 2022 Solo for Drumset #4 2022 Solo for Drumset #5 2022 Solo for Drumset VI 2022 STSOMA Drumsolo #7 2022 solo for drumset #8 2022 Solo for Drumset #9 2022 Solo for Drumset X: polymixtures 2022 Drumset solo #11 2022 Vocals and other instruments Always Sleeping 2006 Facebook Song Cycle: What's on your mind, 2017 Solo works Dreams Like Little Movies,...

  What is Polytempo?   What is tempo? First of all, we must understand what tempo is. So I will explore this topic as deliberately, naively, and as guilelessly as I possibly can, to ask the most basic questions without the pomp, rhetoric, and expectations of my doctorate, telling both me that I damn well know what tempo is, when in fact, do I? Jean-Baptiste Lully thought he knew what tempo was when he accidentally crushed his toe with his staff, pounding the tempo onto the floor while conducting Te Deum . Lully was 'tempoed' to death. There is no more concrete example of tempo than this. Now imagine three more Lullys pounding the floor at different rates of speed with their staffs. This is polytempo, and hopefully not the accidental polydeaths of the three additional Lullys.  Today's version of this would not be so much the conductor, but perhaps a drummer? Or more precisely, the click-track pounds the tempo into the ears of hapless musicians via headphones for them to p...