Sevish Music

Microtonal with a beat / 19edo + just intonation Album: Rhythm and Xen (2015)

I was going for a fast and frenetic 808 style. It just so happens that the tuning is 22edo, which has some interesting harmonies and intervals. Ahh forget all that theory nonsense, it's just music and I hope you enjoy it.

Sleep Deprived Cooked Alive is a drum & bass tune using 14-tone equal temperament. Yeah just take the normal Western tuning system, add 2 extra notes in there, then make them all equal size. It has some interesting properties as it is formed of 2 interlocking scales of 7 equal sized notes with a "neutral" feel, i.e. they are neither major nor minor. This track uses a lot of seventh chords in the harmony at times, and even things like tritone substitution, which work well in 14-edo but sound definitely warped.

Mysterious breakcore 22-tone equal temperament, 5/4. From my album Rhythm and Xen.

Music for levi-biking around the Sea of Tranquillity, while checking out the magenta lights of the lunar cityscape. Why not take some pictures and telegram them to your friends on the Neptune Colony 8? Moonopolis is a chill electronic track using 15-tone equal temperament, a very yummy microtonal tuning.

My new electronic music album using microtonal scales. Free your ears from the tyranny of Western standard tuning! Microtonal music is more than just "quartertones" and even many academy trained musicians don't realise this fact. Case in point... this track is in 23-tet, not 24-tet. Each note is slightly bigger than a quartertone such that 23 would make an octave. ;)

11-edo is a really odd scale... How alien does it sound to you? It's definitely an acquired taste. For one thing, the melody can be surprisingly similar in shape to standard Western tuning. But on the other hand the harmony is totally different. The chords in this piece utilise the 11th harmonic. It sounds like a fourth but it's a quarter-tone sharp. In the end all I want is for this piece to mess with and reconfigure your brain... It sounds super normal to me now.

This track actually samples one of my older tracks (do you know which one?) and flips it into a chilled hip-hop tempo tune. There is no systemic approach to microtonality here. The pad in the background is just intonation, and other elements were free-pitched or used a microtonal equal temperament. The Rhythm and Xen download includes liner notes with more information about each track.

The first part of the piece is 11-limit just intonation (JI) and the second half is 7-limit JI. The first part was actually based on an improvisation... The second half was played and sequenced perhaps a year later while resting in a hotel in Hong Kong. From Rhythm and Xen by Sevish.

it's tuned to 11-edo but it reminds me of just intonation. From Rhythm and Xen.

Microtonal music using 53-tone equal temperament. If you like beautiful melodies and bittersweet emotions then Orwell[9] is a musical temperament to try. I hope this piece captures some of that. It's a mix of downtempo chillout beats and drum & bass. Droplet was produced using Ableton Live, using VST software instruments such as Xen-Arts IVOR and FMTS 2 which support microtonal/xenharmonic music.. The tuning was created using Scala based on information from the Xenharmonic Wiki (a great resource if you're learning microtonal music). Melodic downtempo / drum and bass from Rhythm and Xen by Sevish.

This piece is tuned to 23-tone equal temperament. Some atmospheric drum & bass from Sevish's 2015 album Rhythm and Xen.

This track uses a 9 note subset of 313edo. It was suggested to me by Gene Ward Smith around 2014. Apparently 313edo is an optimal tuning for the madagascar temperament. Though for madagascar you would normally need many more than 9 notes - say 19 or more. But by taking the scale out to just 9 notes you can get barbados temperament. 313edo is a pretty good tuning for that, but not optimal. These two temperaments seem to be named after islands for some reason. The scale steps are: 53 12 53 12 53 12 53 12 53 Adjacent intervals are all whole tones (Large) or quarter tones (small) in this pattern: LsLsLsLsL. This is sometimes called 5L4s Melodic electronic music from Rhythm and Xen by Sevish.

This piece is an improvisation in the Bohlen-Pierce scale. It's a really cool scale which doesn't contain any octaves, but it does contain perfect twelfths. The instrument is an AXiS-49, by C-Thru Music (who recently went out of business). The markings on the AXiS-49 don't correspond to the Bohlen-Pierce scale, so I just try to ignore them. This video is cut from a larger video which was streamed live earlier today. Sorry about the quality, my poor laptop couldn't handle it. The sound designs in this piece were hastily programmed during the live stream, but in case you wondered: the accompanying pad is u-he's ACE synth and the lead is Xen-Arts' IVOR synth.

Just for fun, here's a piece I wrote quite a few years ago. Yeah yeah, it's not 100% authentic, but you get the idea. :) Just intonation is a kind of musical tuning which uses rational numbers for the intervals of the scale. Some people say this tuning has a mathematical purity, some would even go as far as to say that it has DNA healing properties but I wouldn't be inclined to agree. In this case, I've used a 13-note just scale to make microtonal chiptune music in a drum'n'bass style. It's boss music for an alternative music theory.

The 22-tone equal tempered system is, without a doubt, my favourite tuning system for solo piano music. This piano improvisation was recorded about 6 or 7 years ago. Despite the many mistakes it has a quality that I like. It was recorded in two takes - one take for the chord and melody, then another take to overdub those low, punctuating notes. If I'm ever able to find the original MIDI recording then I would love to render it in higher quality.

A drum'n'bass journey from Sean Archibald aka Sevish. This piece was on day:dot EP released by Faturenet Recordings. At almost 10 minutes long it was one of my longest tracks. It's also one of my happiest and most melodic tracks - I am inspired in general by Omni Trio who writes very melodic drum & bass, and for this piece I focussed more on melody than texture. Longer Than String is not microtonal/xenharmonic - I went back to 12-tone equal temperament in order to remember music's past. :)

Imagine if you died 10 years before the release of Chrono Cross, and as a result a parallel universe was created where Chrono Cross was released on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive instead of the Sony Playstation... This is what the theme "Fields of Time" would sound like on the Sega Mega Drive. It's the overworld theme for the Home world in Chrono Cross. This piece is based on the main title music from Chrono Trigger on the SNES. I think I've completed Chrono Trigger at least 20 times, and I'm currently on my second playthrough of Chrono Cross. For this cover I tried to keep with the tropical vibeyness of Chrono Cross instead of the more orchestral sound of Chrono Trigger. This cover was arranged using Ableton Live 9.5 and FMDRIVE. I bought FMDRIVE a few weeks back and I love it - though I wish they would add support for microtonal scales. ;) Soundfonts can bite me, but FMDRIVE sounds pretty good.