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The words "microtone" and "microtonal" were coined before 1912 by Maud MacCarthy Mann in order to avoid the misnomer "quarter tone" when speaking of the srutis of Indian music. [2] Prior to this time the term "quarter tone" was used, confusingly, not only for an interval actually half the size of a semitone, but also for all intervals ...
Various units of speech have been used as a basis for measurement. The traditional measure of speed in typing and Morse code transmission has been words per minute (wpm). However, in the study of speech the word is not well defined (being primarily a unit of grammar), and speech is not usually temporally stable over a period as long as a minute ...
The earliest use I have found so far of the word "microtone" is in 1912 (two years before the earliest citation in the OED), but the article disparages the "widespread use" of the word. This suggests that, amongst ethnomusicologists at least, by 1912 "microtonal" and/or "microtonality" had already been in use for some time.
The word bassoon comes from French basson and from Italian bassone (basso with the augmentative suffix -one). [3] However, the Italian name for the same instrument is fagotto , in Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian and Romanian it is fagot , [ 4 ] in German it is fagott and in Portuguese it is fagote .
A tuning system is the system used to define which tones, or pitches, to use when playing music. In other words, it is the choice of number and spacing of frequency values used. Due to the psychoacoustic interaction of tones and timbres, various tone combinations sound more or less "natural" in combination with various timbres. For example ...
Today the main difference between Western and Eastern neumes is that Eastern notation symbols are "differential" rather than absolute, i.e., they indicate pitch steps (rising, falling or at the same step), and the musicians know to deduce correctly, from the score and the note they are singing presently, which correct interval is meant.
[43] Though that is not quite accurate, it does appear to be the first piece to employ chromatic clusters in such a manner. A solo piano piece Cowell wrote the following year, The Tides of Manaunaun (1917), would prove to be his most popular work and the composition most responsible for establishing the tone cluster as a significant element in ...
His technique included the use of polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones. Edgard Varèse wrote highly dissonant pieces that utilized unusual sonorities and futuristic, scientific-sounding names. He pioneered the use of new instruments and electronic resources (see below).