12-tat Music

Two short pieces in a harmonic tuning

by David J. Finnamore

323
[646 KB]
The Clock Is Ticking, Gentlemen
[1233 KB (1.2 MB)]

I call this a "3-base Otonal" tuning by which I mean that all the tones are harmonically related, and that it starts on a duple of harmonic 3. I rather like Fred Reinagel's suggestion of the name 12-tat. In this particular case the tuning consists of the harmonics 12 through 23 (making it a form of the PLOT 23-limit Exact), plus 27 added, in the spirit of musica ficta, for flexibility (the 27 allows for a complete triad on 18, or 9), so it's really a 13-tone tuning.

Alternatively, it could be considered a harmonic fragment tuning, the octave fragment 14-28, missing 25.

Both pieces were written for custom levels of a computer game. They were composed in such as way as to be able to loop indefinitely. That's why they seem to stop abruptly at the end.

The odd fact that the file size for 323 is exactly twice that number in KB is a complete coincidence. The name was chosen long before I converted the MIDI file to mp3, and refers to a structural principle of the DooM level it was written for. Just one a them weird things.

with any questions or comments

Music copyright ©1999 by David J. Finnamore, all rights reserved.


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