# Theory behind my microtonal text-to-music project.



## The Omega Cluster (Feb 20, 2015)

Hey guys I just wanted to share with y'all theory nerds some facts behind my new upcoming project called *Melopia*.

The first premise of the project is to _transcribe_ text into music.

So, how do we do that? 

Well, since I'm working in English, which has an alphabet of 26 letters, I decided to work in 26-EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave) -- while we usually work in 12-EDO, and very rarely in 24-EDO. 26-EDO is very exotic sounding, there are a bunch of intervals that sound roughly like in "normal" 12-EDO: the slightly sharp fourth, and slightly flat fifth, for example; and one that is the same interval: the tritone, or "diminished fifth".

And so, each letter (A, B, C...) represents one note on the chromatic 26-EDO scale. 

So how is the music constructed from text? It's very procedural, and there is no artistic input at this point, only the creation of a certain set of rules. One letter equals one eighth note in length, and its height is defined by the tuning system we will use (in paragraphs below). Chords are built by taking all the different letters present in a word, and playing them together. The bass tonic of the chord is defined by the first letter of the word, and the length of it by the number of letters in the word. The melody played above it is just the letters in the word played in the order in which they appear. That is how the textual information is written down in score.

But after this is done, we must settle on a tuning system. At first, I superimposed the letters alphabetically: the first note is A, the second is B, and so on. However, what resulted was a pretty "clustered" sound which bore barely any emotion. Here's how it looks like. The horizontal line represents the pitch inside one octave, the vertical axis represents the "strength" of the interval (I found that graph online, but I cannot find it now to give the source). Below the horizontal line, I've placed the letters how I initially did, I've put red lines and crosses in the "strength" line to show exactly where the 26-EDO intervals cross.





You can listen to a demo of how it sounds here:
https://soundcloud.com/dave-tremblay/melopia-ainulindale-alphabetical-tuning

And so, someone over facebook suggested I try other variations of the order of the letters. And so I read a little about letter frequency in English, and found some interesting things. There are pairs of letters that are more common than others, and I decided to try to craft a new tuning using that would be based on that: putting between the most common letters the most consonant, or "powerful" intervals. In 26 EDO, the most powerful one is 11 (or 15) steps apart and roughly equates the fourth (or fifth) of 12-EDO. It was a bit tricky to build a system based around that, but I've succeeded in coming up with the upcoming one, which I've called "Relative Consonant".




And here's a sound clip of the same part as before, but with the new tuning:
https://soundcloud.com/dave-tremblay/melopia-ainulindale-relative-consonant-tuning

That is how I decided to turn text into music.

Of course, at the moment, the music is very mechanical, but it's quite interesting to think of all the information it contains. However, to make it more appealing to the masses (and not only music nerds like you and I), however small those "masses" are, I'm teaming up with a few buddies. They will orchestrate and modify the music so that it fits what is happening in the text it's based upon. For example, that part will be fast and noisy, and that one slower, or that one will be choirs while the other one will be orchestral, or metal sounding, or whatever fits the text.

I find the idea really, really interesting, I sure hope I'm not the only one on that.

So, what do you guys think?


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## octatoan (Feb 20, 2015)

I find this somewhat similar (at least related to) Numberphile's "Math Rock" video, although a lot more work seems to have gone this project. I'll be following this keenly.


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## Hollowway (Feb 20, 2015)

I don't really understand the tuning system, but I love the overall idea!


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 20, 2015)

octatoan said:


> I find this somewhat similar (at least related to) Numberphile's "Math Rock" video, although a lot more work seems to have gone this project. I'll be following this keenly.



Thanks a lot man! I'll try to come back here when updates happen, but you can also check our facebook page.



Hollowway said:


> I don't really understand the tuning system, but I love the overall idea!



What do you not understand? I could try to explain it better.


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## Basti (Feb 21, 2015)

Coooool. I'll come back to this and study it all better, but it sounds fascinating so keep it up!


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## ace_operations (Feb 21, 2015)

Very cool! Subbed to the thread.


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 22, 2015)

octatoan said:


> I find this somewhat similar (at least related to) Numberphile's "Math Rock" video, although a lot more work seems to have gone this project. I'll be following this keenly.



Numberphile's video was really cool! I love that channel. But I don't think they used microtonal intervals in their music (unfortunately).


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## octatoan (Feb 22, 2015)

^ You like Nathan Parker, microtonal music, and Numberphile.
A4, you and I should really grab a coffee sometime


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 23, 2015)

I'll try to analyze a few random words for you here.

First, the most common one: THE
"THE" has "T" as tonic, and is 3 eighths long. The H is 19 steps above (or 7 steps below), and that makes it an almost perfect 5/3 interval, in the area of a major sixth. The E, relative to T, is 8 steps above (or 18 below), and is half-way between 11/9 (neutral third) and 5/4 (almost major third). That makes the interval T-E a... _submajor_ third? I know I might be creating words arbitrarily, but as long as you get what I mean, I think it'll be alright.

So, "THE" is therefore a T submajor 3rd submajor 6th chord. In 12-EDO it would be approximated as a major chord with an added 6th.

Remember that if you want to analyze a word, you have to move the scale left or right so that the "feel" line starts on the first letter of the word (where it starts on E in the image above).

Then, why not analyze Melkor, the _evil_ Ainu? Melkor starts on M, so we'll move all the scale so that it starts on M. The first other note is E, which is 5 steps above M. M-E is almost indistinguishable from 8/7, the septimal supermajor second, simply put, a larger major second. Then, L, to M, is 24 steps above, so that it is a bit short of a 40/21 interval; a _supermajor_ seventh. M-K is a 21 step interval, or a near-perfect 7/4, "harmonic seventh", and is also the inverse of the M-E interval. Then, with O, we have a 6 step interval (only one step above E), making a slightly sharp 7/6, or flatter minor third. Finally, the M-R interval is 20 steps wide (again, only one step different than K), and gives us a slightly flat 12/7, which gives us a sort of supermajor sixth. Again, R is the inverse interval of O (compared to M), which makes things oddly symmetric.

So, MELKOR is therefore 6 eighths duration, on M, and could be described loosely as a supermajor second, subminor third, supermajor sixth, subminor seventh and supermajor seventh chord. The "supermajor second-subminor third" and "supermajor sixth-subminor seventh" duos are really dissonant, being separated by only 46.154 cents (a bit smaller than a quarter-tone (50 cent)). That makes for a really uneasy feeling when that chord plays, it's oddly symmetric _and_ oddly appropriate, given the character it represents.


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## AngstRiddenDreams (Feb 23, 2015)

This is interesting as all hell. Super cool man


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## bostjan (Feb 23, 2015)

Cool!

I've never played with 26-EDO before. I love 19-EDO, 21-EDO, and 17-EDO, though. I love the idea of 31-EDO and 34-EDO, but find the large number of tones to be somewhat hampering.

What do you do about punctuation? You could get some different variations if you included some tones as punctuation marks.

MAybe you could do something with letter frequency so as to get certain intervals to appear more often. If those were the more consonant intervals, then the overall interpretation of the text should sound more melodic. I'd have to look into 26-EDO again, though, to see what intervals, if any, are consonant.


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 23, 2015)

bostjan said:


> What do you do about punctuation? You could get some different variations if you included some tones as punctuation marks.



Punctuations are rests. A comma is an eighth stop, while a period is a quarter stop. A change of paragraph, while not punctuation, is counted as a 4 time rest.



bostjan said:


> MAybe you could do something with letter frequency so as to get certain intervals to appear more often. If those were the more consonant intervals, then the overall interpretation of the text should sound more melodic. I'd have to look into 26-EDO again, though, to see what intervals, if any, are consonant.



That's exactly what I did. Read the paragraph above the second picture in my original post.


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## bostjan (Feb 23, 2015)

The Omega Cluster said:


> That's exactly what I did. Read the paragraph above the second picture in my original post.



Sorry, what I meant was not the letters themselves, but the transitions between letters. I didn't explain myself at all well.

For example, E-E would be a unison. If E is the root note, and you assigned I as the major second (the 5th note in your tuning), then I-E transition would provide an interval of minor seventh.

26-EDO has really sweet minor sevenths, only two cents off from just intonation. The fourth and fifth are not so great, being ten cents off from just intonation. 12-EDO has excellent fourths and fifths at only two cents off. 19-EDO has them about seven cents off and that doesn't make them sound particularly great, but I suppose ten cents off from a perfect fifth is still a more powerful consonance for some people than two cents off from a just minor seventh.

Looking at the other intervals in 26-EDO, I see a nice tasty diminished seventh, only about two cents off from just as well, and since you are at an even number of tones, you have the decent tritone at 600 cents, but the minor third is about seven cents sharp. Still, that's a nice representation of the diminshed arpeggio.


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 23, 2015)

If you mean that I should put the more consonant intervals between the most common pairs of letters, that's exactly what I've done. I read that the most common pairs of letters were TH and HE (and other ones too), and so I started with those and put them 11 steps apart (or 15 if that's impossible since it's the inverse of it) and continued like that. What resulted was a slightly more consonant sound.


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## ixlramp (Feb 23, 2015)

Sounds surprisingly good


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## AugmentedFourth (Feb 23, 2015)

The Omega Cluster said:


> THE
> "THE" has "T" as tonic, and is 3 eighths long. The H is 19 steps above (or 7 steps below), and that makes it an almost perfect 5/3 interval, in the area of a major sixth. The E, relative to T, is 8 steps above (or 18 below), and is half-way between 11/9 (neutral third) and 5/4 (almost major third). That makes the interval T-E a... _submajor_ third? I know I might be creating words arbitrarily, but as long as you get what I mean, I think it'll be alright.
> 
> So, "THE" is therefore a T submajor 3rd submajor 6th chord. In 12-EDO it would be approximated as a major chord with an added 6th.



I'm curious, does this chord sound at all like an approximation of a minor triad in 2nd inversion with H as the root (as it would sound in 12-EDO)?

Also, have you considered incorporating phonetics? Like, for each word you would write it out in both the Latin alphabet and in an IPA transcription and then match up the phonetic information with the letters. Then you could use it to control note lengths (or something else, who knows), e.g. a 't' is an eighth note when it's /t/, but a quarter note when it's part of a 'th' digraph and thus is pronounced /&#952;/.

It would probably be a bit of a pain, but conveys a lot more information and allows the potential to pronounce the same word two different ways, or even rhyming!


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 24, 2015)

AugmentedFourth said:


> I'm curious, does this chord sound at all like an approximation of a minor triad in 2nd inversion with H as the root (as it would sound in 12-EDO)?



I guess it would, but it would sound terribly out of tune if you expect a 12-EDO sound out of it.



AugmentedFourth said:


> Also, have you considered incorporating phonetics? Like, for each word you would write it out in both the Latin alphabet and in an IPA transcription and then match up the phonetic information with the letters. Then you could use it to control note lengths (or something else, who knows), e.g. a 't' is an eighth note when it's /t/, but a quarter note when it's part of a 'th' digraph and thus is pronounced /&#952;/.
> 
> It would probably be a bit of a pain, but conveys a lot more information and allows the potential to pronounce the same word two different ways, or even rhyming!



I haven't considered it, but it would be a good idea to explore, too! However, phonetic texts are much harder to come across, and it would necessitate a much wider octave, at first look (if we take only the English from a certain part of the world), it would need a 57-EDO, making the process that much more complicated (transcribing from text to music was the most tedious part, although it could be automated with a software, eventually).


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## AugmentedFourth (Feb 24, 2015)

The Omega Cluster said:


> I haven't considered it, but it would be a good idea to explore, too! However, phonetic texts are much harder to come across, and it would necessitate a much wider octave, at first look (if we take only the English from a certain part of the world), it would need a 57-EDO, making the process that much more complicated (transcribing from text to music was the most tedious part, although it could be automated with a software, eventually).



Well, I meant for controlling musical information _other than_ pitch. Like rhythms, dynamics, etc. As I said above.

Getting a phonetic transcription shouldn't be too difficult. Once you write lyrics, you can throw them into something like this ænd hæv mo&#650;st &#652;v ð&#601; w&#604;rk d&#652;n f&#596;r ju.


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 24, 2015)

AugmentedFourth said:


> Well, I meant for controlling musical information _other than_ pitch. Like rhythms, dynamics, etc. As I said above.
> 
> Getting a phonetic transcription shouldn't be too difficult. Once you write lyrics, you can throw them into something like this ænd hæv mo&#650;st &#652;v ð&#601; w&#604;rk d&#652;n f&#596;r ju.



Pretty cool. But for rhythm, it's already a part of my system, I don't know how it would apply to phonetics, but I've used it like this: each letter is one eighth, and commas are one eighth rest, periods one quarter rest, and paragraph changes 4 time rest.


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 24, 2015)

I also wanted (but forgot) to compare the words we obtained (THE and MELKOR) in the new "relative consonant" 26-EDO tuning to the alphabetical order one. Let's see if our ears cheated us with the analysis of the same words.

THE, in RCT (relative consonant tuning), gave us a Tsmaj3smaj6 (T, submajor 3rd, submajor 6) chord. In AT (alphabetical tuning), the first interval, T-H, is 14 steps wide, which makes H a slightly flat 16/11, and can be called a _subfifth_, neither a perfect fifth or a tritone. Already we can see that this interval is much "less powerful", or consonant, than in the RCT. Now, T-E is a good 11 steps apart, that is a great interval, a slightly sharp fourth. Now that would make THE a Tsus4s5 (T, suspended 4th, subfifth) chord. The dissonance between the slightly sharp 4 and the sub fifth is almost equal to 3 quarter-tones, and makes the chord a bit uneasy.

What do you think is more consonant? THE in RCT or AT?

Now on to MELKOR. We established that in RCT, it gives a MSM2sm3SM6sm7SM7 (M, supermajor 2, subminor 3, supermajor 6, subminor 7, supermajor 7) chord. I hope I won't ever come across that chord in music sheet. Now, let's see how it sounds like in AT. M-E is 18 steps wide, giving us a superminor 6 (sharper minor 6th). M-L is 25 steps wide, almost an octave, and is super dissonant with the tonic: a supermajor 7. M-K is 24 steps wide, that makes another, yet different, supermajor 7. Hello dissonance. M-O is a mere 2 steps wide, a subminor 2. I just want to say now that we have four different notes within the range of 2 semi-tones (in 12-EDO)... just pointing this out! Finally, M-R is 5 steps wide, almost a perfect 8/7, a supermajor 2. So, if we add it all up, it gives us a Msm2SM2Sm6SM7SM7' (M, subminor 2, supermajor 2, superminor 6, supermajor 7, supermajor 7 prime (to point out that they are two different supermajor 7s)).

Definitely, the MELKOR word sounds bad in RCT, but it sounds horrifyingly ugly in AT!

So, is that convincing evidence that RCT is more consonant than AT when we use it with the English language? It's only two words, I know, but THE is the most common English word, and MELKOR is an example of really uncommon word, I guess!


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 25, 2015)

WELL... I've run into some problems now. Apparently, I just *now* notice that the chords I have made using Reaper, and that you have been listening to from me, are not genuine. In fact, and I should have known, Reaper (and many other DAWs) use CC pitch bend to recreate the microtonal notes. However, there can only be one pitch bend value at a time, so the chords are mostly detuned because of that. In other words, it would need more than one pitch bend value for the vast majority of chords derived from words, and these programs can do only one.

Maybe some of you can suggest something that would avoid the problem? Is there a DAW that can attribute different pitch bend values to many notes at a time? How or what would you do to avoid the problem?


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## octatoan (Feb 25, 2015)

Ouch. 
Maybe you could try finding a plugin or something?


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## bostjan (Feb 25, 2015)

Only one pitch bend at a time?! That is your problem right there. That sounds like a bug rather than a shortcoming. I have MIDI programs from the early 1990's that allow you to bend several notes at a time.


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## AugmentedFourth (Feb 25, 2015)

AFAIK and can tell from testing, Omega Cluster is correct. At least in REAPER's MIDI editor, you cannot assign pitch bends to individual events. Rather, it is solely time dependent and affects all notes played at any given time.


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 25, 2015)

AugmentedFourth said:


> AFAIK and can tell from testing, Omega Cluster is correct. At least in REAPER's MIDI editor, you cannot assign pitch bends to individual events. Rather, it is solely time dependent and affects all notes played at any given time.



And that sucks. I sincerely thought it was kinda like the velocities of MIDI hits, a small slider within every note! How come nobody has that yet?


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## The Omega Cluster (Feb 26, 2015)

NEVERMIND my next to last post. Everything's fine with the chords.

But how they do it just baffles me.

It's true that DAWs using CC pitch can only attribute one pitch bend value at a time. However they are channel-independent. (!!!) So the software sends notes with different pitch-bend values to different channels, so that the DAW can put different values at once.

Wow, this is so cool!


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## octatoan (Feb 27, 2015)

^ Good. Melkor had to be dissonant anyway.


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## The Omega Cluster (Jul 24, 2015)

[SC]https://soundcloud.com/dave-tremblay/ainulindale-intro-demo-progress[/SC]

Here's some progress on the project! This is the first three paragraphs of the Ainulindalë chapter of the Silmarillion. The first one is actually the titles, and then the two first paragraphs. The first is orchestral, fanfare-ish, while the second is more minimalistic (because of what's in the text), and the third part is actually metal-oriented! 

If you feel like it, I'd enjoy some feedback on the project


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## The Omega Cluster (Jul 6, 2016)

Necrobump! You can stream one song from the album now, prior to its release, for now scheduled for September.

https://melopoeia.bandcamp.com/releases

Tell me what you think. I've worked so long with this 26-EDO system that I find that it sounds normal to me, now. It sounds "good". Tell me how you feel it.


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## bostjan (Jul 11, 2016)

I dig it. It certainly sounds microtonal to me, although, I'm not sure what "normal" is supposed to sound like. 

Maybe the sound is how it is because the vocals are atonal and the vocals and percussion make up >50% of the song.

I'd love to hear more of this project, but I guess I have to wait until September.


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## The Omega Cluster (Jul 13, 2016)

I referred to normal as 12-edo music. I'm just really used to the sound of 26-edo now because I've worked on this so much and I must concentrate to make sure I hear microtones. I will try to put out more preview songs before September!


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## The Omega Cluster (Sep 15, 2016)

I described it in lengths on Toilet ov Hell!

http://www.toiletovhell.com/on-tolk...icrotonality-a-guest-post-from-dave-tremblay/


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## Explorer (Oct 23, 2016)

I just listened to a bunch of what you put up.

It gave me the same joy as when my old bandmate and I used to listen to Oliver Messiaen.

Personally, I find stochastic and procedural music as a great starting place for constructing music which is very different from the norm. I don't think I could go full on the the practice myself, but these compositions are very interesting.


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## The Omega Cluster (Oct 23, 2016)

Explorer said:


> I just listened to a bunch of what you put up.
> 
> It gave me the same joy as when my old bandmate and I used to listen to Oliver Messiaen.
> 
> Personally, I find stochastic and procedural music as a great starting place for constructing music which is very different from the norm. I don't think I could go full on the the practice myself, but these compositions are very interesting.



Thanks a lot! I guess it's a new take on procedural music composition. However, I want to make the process slightly more free next time around. I want to treat words as tone rows, basically. Still in 26-EDO but with more artistic input in the process. This album is very much text-to-music, with only a few liberties on the arrangement of parts, but I want to mess with the process and explore what else it can do.


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## Explorer (Oct 23, 2016)

In a slightly nerdy way, I wonder if you could gain something by exploring repetition.

In my view, good music normally contains sustained pleasant surprise/novelty. In other words, a completely sttatic structure gets boring, and constant sudden jumps get boring because there are no expectations from which one can then vary. 

In the case of text-to-music, I wonder if one could choose one main textual theme and have it as a strong reappearing musical theme, along with other subtexts. The instrumentation can change, as well as tempo, but such themes should be recognizable and repeating, in order to establish a basis against which variances can be recognized. 

The Pink Panther theme is a great example of pitch and tempo variations build on the expectations established just a moment before. Another less straightforward example is the Mission: Impossible theme. 

In the case of literature which actually has chapter titles, one can have that title as the musical foundation for such themes. 

Just a thought!


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## The Omega Cluster (Oct 23, 2016)

Yes, that's also something I was willing to experiment with. Also, like I said I would've taken the words as tone rows only, and not as metres for the measures anymore. So, I could take one small word and play a long time on its notes, while a longer word gets played a shorter amount of time, for example. Moreover, since the words become riffs, chords or leads, I could then take them as themes for a piece and repeat a word or a string of words when the song calls for it.

There's definitely a lot of things to experiment with!


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## Explorer (Oct 24, 2016)

Aargh!

(...i'm finding the lack of a like button disturbing.... *laugh*)


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