Sevish Music

Microtonal scales are essential to my music. These scales have different aesthetic effects and moods. Mixing microtonal harmony with beats is something that I can't seem to get bored of. Starfish is a track in 22edo (22 equal divisions of the octave) that switches seamlessly between 10/4 and 4/4.

Xenharmonic bass music ~ from Sevish's album Bubble [2021]

This one didn't come out as wretched as I had predicted, but I'm posting it here for anybody who is interested to check out a version of Sevish - Longwayaway People retuned to 12 tone equal temperament. The melodies are mostly preserved because the step size of 11edo is so close to 12edo, however there are some moments in the bell part that the melody sounds a bit different. I believe that's because the scale here is an 11 note subset of 12edo, where one interval is a whole tone and the rest are semitones. When making this retuned version, I tried placing that whole tone in different locations of the scale then eventually settled on this one that I felt best preserved the melody.

What if there were no wholetones or semitones, only 7 equal notes? Fuschiamarine! From Sevish's album Bubble.

An atmospheric short piece from Sevish's recent album Bubble. 22 equal divisions of the octave (22edo/22tet). Bitwig Studio + ZynAddSubFX Visual animation is a cross-section of a Menger sponge. Mandelbulber

Take a microtonal song and try to play it in 12edo (standard musical tuning in the West). The original was in a just intonation scale built using only harmonic overtones. In my opinion the biggest difference in this 12edo version is not how the melody is affected, but how there is now a subtle chorusing sound on the synth instruments because the inaccuracy of equal tempered tuning creates a rich beating within the overtones of overlapping notes.

Wacky instrumental beat by Sevish. Kalimba and sampler instruments all tuned to a fixed just intonation scale (Centaur, Kraig Grady's 12 note just scale on C=264Hz) Of course got a lot of vibrato going for the wavy too. I like how the middle section came out.

Here's how it sounds when you take a microtonal track and try to fit it into the chromatic scale of 12edo. o_O

The scale used here is an approximation of 22edo using select harmonics between 128-256. All intervals are therefore some number over 128 and the scale is near-equal. In a sense all notes in the scales are related to some very low fundamental frequency. This 'justifies' the sound of the tuning somewhat but also allows for free modulation like you would expect from an equal scale. The idea to experiment with this kind of tuning came from the short story A Bit O' Blarney by George Secor. But these days the idea is being popularised by Zhea Erose and various members of the Xenharmonic Alliance Discord. From 0:58 the 4 chord progression modulates up by a minor 3rd (6\22) each repetition. In 12edo, this progression would return to its original key after 4 modulations, but in quasi-22edo (and 22edo) you end up in a key a semitone higher than where you started. That's because the minor 3rd is tuned wider, so the difference starts to really accumulate as you stack the same interval repeated.

Almighty Fractal uses a tetrachordal scale (same as 'The Entity Unmasked', see Scale Workshop link below). It is mostly one improvised take with overdubs. A nice property of small 'modal' sounding scales is that you can just jam and improvise easily. I intend to explore this approach more in some of my future music. Lofi ambient from my album Bubble

A chill beat with a subtle microtonal flavour from Sevish's 2021 album Bubble.

An early DEMO version of Dream Up that I thought would be interesting to share. Faster tempo. Brighter tuning. Different sound designs. Less finesse overall. The tuning is 140., 200., 310., 400., 540., 640., 700., 833., 900., 1040., 1100., 1200.

From Sean but not Heard (2012). Can't remember the tuning, something golden ratio related. Not the phi tuning I blogged about years back.

9/4 beat using the harmonic series as a tuning system. From my 2012 album Sean But Not Heard

Electronic music in just intonation. Trapped in a Cycle was originally for the 2 Minute Masterpieces compilation album on the Faturenet netlabel. That label is no longer active but while it existed it was fun and the folks involved were cool to hang out with. Can't remember when this tune was made, probably around 2011.

It might sound weird to some of you but around 2012-2013 I got curious about writing music in 12 tone equal temperament again. It's not that I got bored of microtonal tuning systems, it's that 12edo presented an interesting challenge in reverse - what would it be like to work within its limitations when I've already got my head so deep into the microtonal world? So I made day:dot EP with 3 tracks in 12 tone equal temperament. Asha is one of those tracks. Since then I've had no interest in returning to 12 stuff. Sometimes I'm in the mood for meantone or diatonic sounds but I tend to use alternative tunings for that like 31edo. By this point the tunings are pretty much essential.

New Sevish album Formless Shadows coming September 17th 2021 — it's a quite cinematic album with a variety of moods on it. You can listen on streaming and Bandcamp. This is the first time I've been able to release two albums in the same year. But you'll find Formless Shadows quite a different listen to January's Bubble. I just really had the urge to make music like this so here it is. As I write this I'm already making plans for future projects that go in a totally different direction. So big thanks to everybody who listens and supports my music making!

I Won't Forget is a piece for kalimba tuned in just intonation with a septimal minor flavour.

An ambient meditation - Hexdeep is the track 1 on my new album Formless Shadows. The tuning for 'Hexdeep' is 1.3.7.9 hexany. It has only 6 notes. Some of the intervals include 1/3-tone, subminor third, supermajor third. Lots of septimal flavours, just intonation smoothness. The piece is quite long so it gives enough time to get used to feel of the tuning. I composed this music by improvising one layer and then overdubbing more improvised layers on top. Then I spent a good while editing the MIDI parts to sculpt the complete piece from those performances.

Garden of Light from my ambient album Formless Shadows. The scale is 5ed2; a pentatonic where every step is of exactly equal size. What makes a good scale for people trying alternative tunings for the first time? I sometimes recommend 5ed2 as a first scale to try. It sounds very different to 12ed2 so it's obvious when you've got it working. It also doesn't have any wrong-sounding combinations so you can jam and mash on it and it can still sound alright. Though you may outgrow it quickly, there are 'many' other tunings to explore after that!

From my ambient album Formless Shadows, Big Numb is a piece of music in 22ed2. I made Big Numb in 2020 and the original plan was for it to feature on Bubble. But as Bubble took shape I realised that this track would have ruined the pacing of that album (which already had a 10 minute ambient finisher - Almighty Fractal). So I carried Big Numb over to the Formless Shadows project - an ambient album that I wanted to do for years. Here I think it works a lot better.

Short ambient piece in just intonation from Sevish's album Formless Shadows. If you were wondering what a 540 degree field of view looks like, this one is for you.

Thundersnow by Sevish from Formless Shadows. This scale glacial[7] is quite an odd feel. If you're familiar with the whole tone scale you might hear glacial[7] as a modified version of that. The whole tones are somewhat narrow at around 185 cents, such that when you stack 6 whole tones atop each other, you're left with enough space at the top to fit a semitone. In melody, that semitone can function quite usefully as a leading tone to establish a tonal center while still having wholetoney feelings between the other 6 notes. Aside from the comparisons to the whole tone scale, glacial feels xenharmonic to me, giving me impressions of desolation and dreaminess. I've used POTE tuning here which means the 2/1 (octave) is tuned pure while all the other intervals are compromised by some kind of optimal tempering. 13ed2 would also be a fine way to tune glacial[7].

Never Coming Home from Formless Shadows. The original ambient version, not the drum and bass remix! So this track was recorded during my time in Beijing. The 'home' in the track title isn't a reference to my home country, instead it's about a dream where I accidentally teleported myself so far away from Earth that all I could see were stars and galaxies with no indication of which way was home. At that moment I felt some regret but also an acceptance that I was never coming home.

A musical improvisation using a golden ratio tuning and golden ratio related timbres. The tuning system I've used here repeats at acoustic phi (~833 cents or ~1.618) and the inner intervals are found by successively dividing the largest interval into golden proportions (i.e. dividing by logarithmic phi). The resulting scale is about as golden as you can get. This tuning approach is something that I wrote about in my 2017 article "The Golden Ratio as a musical interval" and in this 2021 recording I've finally used it. https://sevish.com/2017/golden-ratio-... An alternative tuning approach could be a rank-2 scale where the period is phi and the generator is (phi^phi)/phi or ~514 cents. Such a scale would be Moment of Symmetry (MOS) at 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 notes. Look familiar? Those are Fibonacci numbers! Of course it's not a coincidence. This scale is golden all the way down. I hope that interested readers try building this scale for themselves and sharing any discoveries.