Lydian concept on "Kind Of Blue?"

[jsaras]

F lydian is a much better choice over Dm11 than D dorian


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Overtones are generated from the sounding root. It’s a fact of physics. If you are playing a series of white notes and the bass player is sounding “D” it’s going to sound dorian, not lydian.


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[Christian Miller]

Overtones are generated from the sounding root. It’s a fact of physics. If you are playing a series of white notes and the bass player is sounding “D” it’s going to sound dorian, not lydian.


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Try it


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[John A.]

Try it


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I just did. ¯\_(?)_/¯ . Lydian sounds like Red Clay, Dorian sounds like So What. I couldn’t say which I prefer. If your larger point is that where you start and end in playing a scale over a chord results in different effects, true. But, um, so what? Running a scale over a chord is just one device among many others in improvisation. Sometimes one sounds better than another, or vice versa.

[Christian Miller]

I just did. ¯\_(?)_/¯ . Lydian sounds like Red Clay, Dorian sounds like So What. I couldn’t say which I prefer. If your larger point is that where you start and end in playing a scale over a chord results in different effects, true. But, um, so what? Running a scale over a chord is just one device among many others in improvisation. Sometimes one sounds better than another, or vice versa.

I see what yo did there

Best pentatonic on Dm7 is Am etc

No they are two different songs neither 'better or worse'. I was being flippant. But emphasis does change things. It also depends on how you practice your scales

[jsaras]

Try it


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I have. I took a two semester college course on the LCC back in the late 80’s with Ladd McIntosh. I’m extremely familiar with it.

Overtones are generated from the sounding ROOT. ALL other intervals are measured in relation to that. It is a fact of physics. All the other tones above the root are not the root. George Russell’s misinformed theory cannot change that.

If you were to play the notes of D dorian, but the bass was sounding an F, it’s simply not D dorian. If you were to play C ionian on the first bar of “All of Me”, but the bass was insistently sounding “B” it would not be C ionian. If you play a C7 chord, but the bass plays an F#, it’s an F#7 chord of some kind.


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[Christian Miller]

I have. I took a two semester college course on the LCC back in the late 80’s with Ladd McIntosh. I’m extremely familiar with it.

Overtones are generated from the sounding ROOT. ALL other intervals are measured in relation to that. It is a fact of physics. All the other tones above the root are not the root. George Russell’s misinformed theory cannot change that.

If you were to play the notes of D dorian, but the bass was sounding an F, it’s simply not D dorian. If you were to play C ionian on the first bar of “All of Me”, but the bass was insistently sounding “B” it would not be C ionian. If you play a C7 chord, but the bass plays an F#, it’s an F#7 chord of some kind.


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Don’t agree with all of this. Short version - The connection from overtone sequence to actual musical intervals is problematic in a number of ways. Certainly for Western Music.

I think this a long hangover from Rameau’s c18 project. (In c20 it became quite polemical in the mouths of anti-atonalists like Hindemith.)

In physics terms it doesn’t really work. A lot of very clever (mostly German) theorists spent a lot of time trying to square this circle, (which is where the notion of negative harmony originally comes from incidentally. Also the original version of Reimann’s theory of functions which is quite different from what we use today.)

Could explain more. How long have you got lol?

Also not a fan of LCC. It has some ideas I like though and have adapted.

The F lydian as opposed to D dorian over a D-7 chord thing is unconnected to a discussion of the origin of intervals or Russell’s theory (sorry OP). It’s just a matter of musical emphasis.

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[bediles]

Range and chord quality dictates what sounds like the root. Half dim really only sound like a half dim in root position for example. I think this is related to the overtone series. I also don't know of my post is related to this thread!

Power chord, dominant, lydian dominant bop... I think that's the first 16 overtones IIRC FWIW. Roots and 5ths low in the series so sound like roots and 5ths in the low range. I don't completely understand it to be honest

[Christian Miller]

Range and chord quality dictates what sounds like the root. Half dim really only sound like a half dim in root position for example. I think this is related to the overtone series. I also don't know of my post is related to this thread!

Power chord, dominant, lydian dominant bop... I think that's the first 16 overtones IIRC FWIW. Roots and 5ths low in the series so sound like roots and 5ths in the low range. I don't completely understand it to be honest

It’s ok no one does. And if they say they do they’re selling something…


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[Bop Head]

Don’t agree with all of this. Short version - The connection from overtone sequence to actual musical intervals is problematic in a number of ways. Certainly for Western Music.

I think this a long hangover from Rameau’s c18 project. (In c20 it became quite polemical in the mouths of anti-atonalists like Hindemith.)

In physics terms it doesn’t really work. A lot of very clever (mostly German) theorists spent a lot of time trying to square this circle, (which is where the notion of negative harmony originally comes from incidentally. Also the original version of Reimann’s theory of functions which is quite different from what we use today.)

Could explain more. How long have you got lol?

Also not a fan of LCC. It has some ideas I like though and have adapted.

The F lydian as opposed to D dorian over a D-7 chord thing is unconnected to a discussion of the origin of intervals or Russell’s theory (sorry OP). It’s just a matter of musical emphasis.

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His name is Riemann. "ie" in German is pronounced like "ee" in English, "ei" in German is promounced like "I" in English.

[Christian Miller]

I really wanted someone to ask me and all I got was Bop Head correcting my spelling.

:-(

[CliffR]

Oh, that's cool. Because I've been thinking of asking you . I seem to remember it's something to do with the third (and co) not being a precise multiple of the fundamental frequency?

[CliffR]

Oh, that's cool. Because I've been thinking of asking you . I seem to remember it's something to do with the third (and co) not being a precise multiple of the fundamental frequency?

I guess I didn't put that very well. What I meant to say was: assuming we divide by the 12 semitones so that each is 12th-root-of-two times the frequency of its predecessor, then we get the property that the octave is exactly double the frequency of the root. For the fifth, we get 12-root-of-2 to the power 7 (7 semitones between the fifth and the root). This gives approximately 1.5, meaning that the second octave of the fifth has *approximately* the same frequency as the third octave of the root. Similarly, the frequency of the third is given as 12-root-of-2 to the power 4, which is roughly 1.25. This means that the fourth octave of the third is approximately the same frequency as the fifth octave of the root. These correspondences between higher harmonics of the root and its intervals may account for the fact that these intervals sound consonant. However, these correspondences are only approximate, and depend on how you choose to divide up the octave.

[Christian Miller]

Oh, that's cool. Because I've been thinking of asking you . I seem to remember it's something to do with the third (and co) not being a precise multiple as the root frequency?

It's frankly a whole can of historical, philosophical, mathematical and physical worms. This goes back thousands of years as an avenue of human inquiry.

The, ahem, Cliff Notes - not all 'ideal' intervals are easily found within the overtone sequence. You can't derive the behaviour of, say, Western tonality from the overtone sequence and first principles. Music theorists of the C19 and early C20 spent a lot of time trying to derive the other important intervals from the OS.

Trying to cut a long story shorter, and without going into the arithmetic - our conception of the just intervals or perfect intervals comes not from acoustics (which was unknown during the early modern era when the basis of what we call tonality was being established) but from mathematics of the monochord and the issues surrounding temperament of keyboard instruments. In the end, it was agreed that the just intervals were the 'purest' despite some breaks with the Pythagorean tradition on which medieval musical thought had been based, much as with the heliocentric cosmology I guess. In fact I it was Ptolemy who proposed what we think of today as the just intonated scale today which was championed by the influential theorist Zarlino during the Italian Renaissance.

Later JP Rameau got very excited that the major triad arose naturally from the acoustic overtone sequence (he called it the 'corps sonore' which sounds a lot cooler than 'overtone series') - perhaps sensing the possibility of an Enlightenment Age rehabilitation of the ancient idea of the Music of the Spheres. This became a bit of music theory trope as theorists were keen to ground musical aesthetics in a sense of objective physical reality. Schoenberg does it, for example. This is typical of what Gjerdingen calls 'wonderful nineteenth century intellectual arrogance' (see also 'all the physics has been discovered') which extend well into the early twentieth century and also ties into ideas of European Cultural Supremacy. Our music is better and I can prove it with maths.

While acoustics is obviously relevant to music - we can use acoustic phenomena in orchestration, guitar chord voicings, instrument design, electronic musical synthesis etc etc and influences many musical traditions - including middle eastern, Indian and so on, it is obviously not the end of the story.

However people like Paul Hindemith (a classic music of the spheres guy - he wrote an opera about Kepler using Kepler's own music of the spheres ideas) went further and used this to justify his rejection of atonality as 'unnatural'.

All of this stuff IMO is unsupportable. Which is also not to say music has nothing to do with acoustics including the overtone sequence.

For the Hindemiths of this world, a big issue is that many of the intervals in common use in Western music are absent form the overtone sequence, or at least are only approximated to a degree that sounds quite alien to the Western ear. OTOH many common intervals, such as the minor third and major sixth (!) only appear high in the sequence, and the perfect fourth is a famous omission. Clearly while the overtone sequence is important to music, one cannot derive the grammar of Western harmony from the overtone sequence.

Some theorists tried to address this by allowing inversion of the overtone sequence. The undertone sequence if you like. I'm thinking of Ernst Levy who influenced Steve Coleman and Jacob Collier (I think Collier probably got it from Coleman/M-Base). This gives rise to the infamous meme-tastic Negative Harmony that you'lll here about in certain corners of the internet. Here's the article if you need a headache. (I think Riemann had some similar ideas)

It's much more enjoyable to listen to negative Bohemian Rhapsody.

I think it's interesting that jazz and pop musicians took something that is essentially mental gymnastics to justify the 'naturalness' of the Western tonal system into a vehicle for creative expression. Collier's ideas of major and minor follow from this - he sees minor as an inversion of major, and major as a stack of fifths, like Pythagoras and Russell)

While these ideas are interesting, I find them unconvincing as explanations of Western harmony derived from physics.

So where does all of that leave us?

• Acoustics including the overtone sequence is influential on music and could hardly not be. Some intervals, such as the octave, fifth and major third are unambiguously present in the overtone sequence and can be used as a model for tuning etc.
• The behaviour of Western music is not emergent from the overtone sequence alone, although we can tie it to elements of many world musics
• We've become a lot more aware of different musical cultures - both in the west, including obviously jazz, rock and non-tonal music and non-western musics. This includes Middle Eastern music where the microtonal nuances of notes that aren't defined by the overtone sequence are subject to cultural differences. NB: Phythagoras also influenced Middle Eastern and Indian traditions.
• Equal Temperament is a MASSIVE elephant in the room. There are no pure intervals in 90% of modern western music. Some intervals are closer than others. Ask Van Halen.
• There is no evidence to suggest that perception of the major third, say, as consonant, or the invariance of the octave are culturally universal, which should be apparent from careful attention to the history of Western music alone.
• The idea of the Music of the Spheres and the grounding of music in physics, astronomy etc is remarkably sticky. While expressions of this vary, most musicians seem to believe music is grounded deeply in the nature of the universe rather than a purely social practice. This seems to extend to many contemporary music theorists.

[Christian Miller]

My own thoughts on it -

• In jazz world, we are often concerned with what we can do to extend a chord.
• It seems to me when we do this we are not extending a single note - as in George Russell's theory or the Overtone Sequence - but from at least two notes.
• In this sense, it might make sense to take GR's (Pythagoras's :-)) fifth stacking idea and apply to combination of notes.
• For a triad we end up with a stack of fifths on the root - which includes the 5th

C G D A
And a stack of notes on the third. For a major third
E B F# (C#)
Which clearly generates the Lydian and Warne Marsh two octave scale. You can Jacob Collier's lydian too, whatever that' called.
(GR's prejudice against the C# is one of things that turned me off his ideas, Warne Marsh had no problem with it.)

And for minor
Eb Bb F C
Which give a Dorian tonality

So you can root CST in this.

• Things get wierder and more interesting the further you go up!
• Also there is no 'inside' to a dominant chord which is why G7add11 sounds more consonant than Gmaj7#11

Pratting around with a piano and using overtones is interesting.

This was back in in 2018 by the way. I'm not sure I'm that sold on this stuff any more. But I like some of them chords.

Equal Temperament favours the fifth over he third for this because the third is quite out of tune in ET (ET approximates the Pythagorean intervals better than the Ptolemaic). This has, IMO, shaped the harmonic style of jazz and rock in the past century, which coincides with the adoption of ET.

That's my hunch anyway. Not sure if anyone shares my thinking?

So interesting, but also - WHO CARES?

Most important takeaway - none of this has much with learning to play guitar. Beware music theorists! They have baggage. Trust and use your ears. You'll be fine.

[Christian Miller]

I guess I didn't put that very well. What I meant to say was: assuming we divide by the 12 semitones so that each is 12th-root-of-two times the frequency of its predecessor, then we get the property that the octave is exactly double the frequency of the root. For the fifth, we get 12-root-of-2 to the power 7 (7 semitones between the fifth and the root). This gives approximately 1.5, meaning that the second octave of the fifth has *approximately* the same frequency as the third octave of the root. Similarly, the frequency of the third is given as 12-root-of-2 to the power 4, which is roughly 1.25. This means that the fourth octave of the third is approximately the same frequency as the fifth octave of the root. These correspondences between higher harmonics of the root and its intervals may account for the fact that these intervals sound consonant. However, these correspondences are only approximate, and depend on how you choose to divide up the octave.

That's certainly a big factor, but ET (while known) wasn't used to tune keyboards during Mozart or Bach's era for instance (C!8 Well Temperaments had quite different properties to ET), so I regard it as incidental to the development of trad Western harmony. Basically if Mozart came back and heard a modern instruments performance of one of his piano pieces I suspect he'd find the tuning a bit rank haha.

But I think ET is very influential in C20 music. Think of power chords for example. Also, I think it is influential in extended jazz harmony.

The history of ET is a whole other rabbit hole...

[James W]

The idea of the Music of the Spheres and the grounding of music in physics, astronomy etc is remarkably sticky. While expressions of this vary, most musicians seem to believe music is grounded deeply in the nature of the universe rather than a purely social practice. This seems to extend to many contemporary music theorists.

As you know I certainly agree that music is a cultural, social practice, rather than something that can or can't be justified with reference to physics or what have you. But I am surprised to read that many contemporary music theorists (and most musicians) still continue to think it's still grounded in the nature of the universe...

[CliffR]

Many thanks Christian!

[supersoul]

My own thoughts on it -

• In jazz world, we are often concerned with what we can do to extend a chord.
• It seems to me when we do this we are not extending a single note - as in George Russell's theory or the Overtone Sequence - but from at least two notes.
• In this sense, it might make sense to take GR's (Pythagoras's :-)) fifth stacking idea and apply to combination of notes.
• For a triad we end up with a stack of fifths on the root - which includes the 5th

C G D A
And a stack of notes on the third. For a major third
E B F# (C#)
Which clearly generates the Lydian and Warne Marsh two octave scale. You can Jacob Collier's lydian too, whatever that' called.
(GR's prejudice against the C# is one of things that turned me off his ideas, Warne Marsh had no problem with it.)

And for minor
Eb Bb F C
Which give a Dorian tonality

So you can root CST in this.

• Things get wierder and more interesting the further you go up!
• Also there is no 'inside' to a dominant chord which is why G7add11 sounds more consonant than Gmaj7#11

Pratting around with a piano and using overtones is interesting.

This was back in in 2018 by the way. I'm not sure I'm that sold on this stuff any more. But I like some of them chords.

Equal Temperament favours the fifth over he third for this because the third is quite out of tune in ET (ET approximates the Pythagorean intervals better than the Ptolemaic). This has, IMO, shaped the harmonic style of jazz and rock in the past century, which coincides with the adoption of ET.

That's my hunch anyway. Not sure if anyone shares my thinking?

So interesting, but also - WHO CARES?

Most important takeaway - none of this has much with learning to play guitar. Beware music theorists! They have baggage. Trust and use your ears. You'll be fine.

The video, I liked it! I hadn't quite thought of it that way before; stacking fifths on both a root and a third to take advantage of the perfect 5th bias of equal temperment. Your post and the video embellish eachother.

Everyone knows this, but 12-tone equal temperment is what we use today because it allows modulation to all 12 keys. Everything else, there are at least a couple keys that just don't work, where a simple triad is too sour to use. So we're stuck with equal-temperment.

Glimmers of the overtone series poke through in the form of a note's upper harmonics, and your video illustrated a way to get to them through the equal tempered scale. And in a way that connects to jazz harmonic thinking. And I agree with you, it kinda works, it kinda doesn't, but it's more interesting than it's not interesting.

[Christian Miller]

The video, I liked it! I hadn't quite thought of it that way before; stacking fifths on both a root and a third to take advantage of the perfect 5th bias of equal temperment. Your post and the video embellish eachother.

Everyone knows this, but 12-tone equal temperment is what we use today because it allows modulation to all 12 keys. Everything else, there are at least a couple keys that just don't work, where a simple triad is too sour to use. So we're stuck with equal-temperment.

Glimmers of the overtone series poke through in the form of a note's upper harmonics, and your video illustrated a way to get to them through the equal tempered scale. And in a way that connects to jazz harmonic thinking. And I agree with you, it kinda works, it kinda doesn't, but it's more interesting than it's not interesting.

Thanks! Perhaps the best we can hope for is to be interesting…. The secrets of the universe might be a stretch….


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[Christian Miller]

As you know I certainly agree that music is a cultural, social practice, rather than something that can or can't be justified with reference to physics or what have you. But I am surprised to read that many contemporary music theorists (and most musicians) still continue to think it's still grounded in the nature of the universe...

Well when it comes to the overtone spectrum, there’s the spectralists of course…


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[wolflen]

which is easier to understand..

How to balance a checkbook (remember those)

How to explain the Overtone Series

Somewhere in my past life as a finance manager..I met a musician who used Lotus 123 (now Excel) to
chart out the note progression of the OS..I do remember dogs howling as the notes went past the Van Allen belt
and it was way past the thousands on the spreadsheet.

I forget the reason Ted (Greene) tried to explained the OS to me.
bet he seemed to recognize the glazed over look on my face and
he said something like..dont worry if you dont understand this..I'm not sure I do either..

Christian..while I do enjoy most of you posts..On this subject I think you need to get out more.

[Christian Miller]

That said, I think I could write something with those chords in that old video.


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[Christian Miller]

which is easier to understand..

How to balance a checkbook (remember those)

How to explain the Overtone Series

Somewhere in my past life as a finance manager..I met a musician who used Lotus 123 (now Excel) to
chart out the note progression of the OS..I do remember dogs howling as the notes went past the Van Allen belt
and it was way past the thousands on the spreadsheet.

I forget the reason Ted (Greene) tried to explained the OS to me.
bet he seemed to recognize the glazed over look on my face and
he said something like..dont worry if you dont understand this..I'm not sure I do either..

Christian..while I do enjoy most of you posts..On this subject I think you need to get out more.

OK - I absolve you. It's fine if you neither understand nor are interested in what I'm on about, it's not especially relevant to playing Rhythm Changes etc. Some people find these rabbit holes more interesting than others. It doesn't make you a bad person or less clever than others etc.

There, feel better?

[AllanAllen]

There, feel better?

I feel better. Once I realize c18 isn't a chord, I know I'm lost. It happens every time, oh, what's a c19 chord? Does he mean minor c 9? AHHHHH! I'm falling.

[Christian Miller]

I feel better. Once I realize c18 isn't a chord, I know I'm lost. It happens every time, oh, what's a c19 chord? Does he mean minor c 9? AHHHHH! I'm falling.

Well at least I don’t write CXVIII


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