Sevish Music

is tuning is mavila temperament taken out to just 7 notes. With 7 notes it works well on a kalimba. My kalimba remained tuned to mavila for years actually. It's in 7edo at the moment but I kinda miss the way it was before. Mavila is a microtonal musical temperament with very flat fifths. If you stack 4 of these fifths on top of each other, you'll get a minor third instead of a major third. As you continue generating more pitches by stacking fifths, you'll eventually get an "anti-diatonic" scale where all the major chords become minor chords and vice versa.

An oldschool Sevish track using a tetrachordal scale where each successive interval is a superparticular ratio. A tetrachord is a scale segment containing 4 notes and spanning a perfect fourth. A tetrachordal scale can be formed from two tetrachords. The two tetrachords are separated by an interval of 9/8 (a major second). In this case, I have used the intervals [10/9, 11/10, 12/11] for both tetrachords. Do you notice a pattern with each of the used intervals: 9/8, 10/9, 11/10, 12/11?

The opening track from Sean But Not Heard (it's pronounced seen but not heard). First 11 seconds are straight up 12edo but the rest is in 9 equal divisions of the fifth aka Wendy Carlos' Alpha scale. The tuning lacks octaves so it makes you think hard when writing and it also sounds very spicy (lavendery, perhaps). For what it's worth, lavender is my favourite flower and one of my favourite smells too. The award for worst camera work goes to me. A few years ago I went to some nearby lavender fields and was just messing around with my wife's DSLR. I decided to use some of that wonky footage in this new video.

Sorry no Scale Workshop link because I can't remember exactly what tuning was here. It isn't an edo, so I guess it could have been TOP? Anyway it's some tuning of mavila temperament taken out to 9 notes. The kalimba is tuned to a pentatonic subset. The flute at the end is some randomly-tuned tourist whistle that my buddy bought for me in Cambodia. Video footage was recorded at Beachy Head on the south coast of England. Chilled out and atmospheric microtonal music from the Sevish vaults.

Check out the wacky melody near the end, which I made by hitting a cup of tea with the side of a teaspoon. I recorded this without a metronome using a portable recorder in my kitchen, then I imported it into Ableton and time warped the audio to get it exactly on beat. Because pitch and playback rate are correlated, the note-by-note changes to the playback rate introduce changes to the pitch of each note. This resulted in a lucky little melody with lots of chance microtonal pitches in there. It's not in 17edo, but I liked how it stood out from the rest of the track, so I kept it in.

Detached and Distant is microtonal music tuned to 14 tone equal temperament. The track is from my 2012 album 'Sean but not Heard' and it's one of the tracks I'm quite fond of. I'm curious what new listeners here will think about this one.

The tunings used here are 17edo and just intonation. Mostly 17edo though. I think only the bells are tuned to JI - a 22 note tuning based on the 1.3.7.9.11.15 eikosany.

Spuffled Gnorclacks is a drum and bass track in 17edo from Sean but not Heard (2012)