Music by Aliens

[sleigh]

Our usual 12 tone diatonic musical scale runs in octaves: a scale starts with a note, and proceeds by twelve even intervals to a final note played at twice the frequency -- one octave higher. That what most Western music is built upon.

But it's not the only way. The Boston Globe has an article about the Bohlen-Pierce scale, which doesn't contain an octave. Instead, it's based on a "tritave", a note three times the frequency of the starting note (an octave and a half), and the notes between the tritaves are divided into thirteen equal steps, so that there are no octaves.

The Bohlen-Pierce scale was created (independently, supposedly) by three people in 1984: Heinz Bohlen, Kees van Prooijen, and John R. Pierce. Why Prooijen doesn't have his name attached to this, we'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

The result is some strange sounding music -- yet it seems almost 'right.' Here's Pachelbel's Canon transposed into the Bohlen-Pierce scale. Of course, a real instrument has to be restructured to play in this scale -- you can't just pick up a guitar and start to play chords based on the Bohlen=Pierce scale...

But it's interesting...

Comments

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Actually, I didn't know that!