11 Dwarfs
01 September 2015 Filed in: Music | Tuning
Theory
Listen to 11 Dwarfs
This is a “Silly Song” for the upcoming movie: “Snow White and the Eleven Dwarfs”.
It features “Sleepy” on shakuhachi, “Grumpy” on organ, “Dopey” on drums, “Sneezy” on penny whistle and “Bashful” on accordion.
Joking aside, this piece was created using a technique similar to that already used for a previous piece called “Piano 11” (you can read about it here, in Italian, or here, in English).
The tuning system is the same “extended just intonation” of the previous piece. “11 Dwarfs” is divided into two parts (the second one starting at 2:08). The first one uses a regular “extended just intonation”, the second one is a copy of the first one but using “dynamic modulation”, a device able to dynamically change the root key of the scale. This device would not make any difference for tuning systems with steps all the same size but here, as in any variation of just intonation, it creates dizzying microvariations of pitch. I programmed cycles of “dynamic modulation” four bars long where the first two bars of music are as before and the following two are modulated.

Sound sources are MOTU Ethno 2 for the following sounds:

Kawai MP7 for the organ sound and a drum loop cut in pieces to make it asymmetrical.
All retunings done with LMSO.