Talk:Quarter tone

Merge from Arab Tuning System

I suggest this should be merged with the Arab Tuning System article, as the latter is a subset of quarter tone systems. It's weird to have both "quarter tone" and "24-tone" on the tunings template. Rainwarrior 21:52, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

I support the merge, but I'd also love to hear a more detailed description of Arabic tuning in actual practice. The current article basically says "it's 24-edo and that's that". —Keenan Pepper 00:29, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

That would also be good. It's not that I think the Arab Tuning System page shouldn't exist, but at the moment I think it should be a smaller article with reference links to Quarter Tone, which should be a bigger article containing a section about the Arabic quarter tone system. Rainwarrior 07:34, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

You mean Arab tone system? Hyacinth 08:50, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes. Are you in favour of or opposed to this proposed merge? Rainwarrior 12:19, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

At that point I had no opinion. I now oppose. The Arab tone system is all about the three-quarter tone and not the quarter tone. Hyacinth 17:35, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Though it apparently never uses the quarter tone interval directly, all selection of notes for a particular mode come directly from a quarter-tone scale, or rather the quarter-tone scale. (The three-quarter-tone scale is called "8 equal temperament", and is not widely used.) (17:54, 5 April 2006 (UTC)) Perhaps what I mean to suggest is that it should not be on the Template:Musical_tuning as the reprasentative of "24-tone", given that 24-tone and quarter-tone have equivalent meanings, and this quarter-tone page is definitely the more general form of 24-tone tuning. I think this placement in the template caused me to believe that the Arab Tone System page was being used in place of quarter tone. I will withdraw the merge tags, but I will amend both pages in the near future. Rainwarrior 18:17, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Unicode characters

Unicode actually does have characters U+1D132 MUSICAL SYMBOL QUARTER TONE SHARP (𝄲) and U+1D133 MUSICAL SYMBOL QUARTER TONE FLAT (𝄳), but even so, perhaps they should not be used because they're outside the Basic Multilingual Plane and fonts rarely include them. Do they display on default Windows and Mac installations? —Keenan Pepper 18:35, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

I can't see them, and I have a few of the multinational fontsets installed. There isn't a universal quarter tone sharp or flat anyway. (The half a sharp and backwards flat are fairly common though, which is what I'm assuming these are.) - Rainwarrior 05:41, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Ah, but that's the beauty of Unicode. Unicode doesn't specify what shape the glyphs should be, just what the characters mean. —Keenan Pepper 15:45, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Rast

Neutrally speaking, I wonder if it is correct, under "Music of the Middle East," to say "Many Arabic maqamat..these follows." Since my knowledge does't suffice, I can't claim, I haven't heard any maqamat, dastgah, gushe, radif, etc. in Arab music notwithstanding (well..I can't remember any genuine traditional music of Arab oops..Rajaz?) but as far as I'm concerned Arab dont have such word as "Rast." This might has happend since part of Persian music history (that after say Barbad) is in Islamic Iran and composers lived from Bukhara to Baqdad.

hhmmmm!? /:{>

Downtownee 19:25, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Notation?

I would love to include an example of how quarter tones would be notated. The article includes a list of some composers that implemented quarter tones in their music (Most notably Charles Ives, I would say) - does anyone have an image of proper quarter tone notation?Deep treble 15:01, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't have an image, but the notation I've seen most often looks like the following:

1. half sharp - one vertical stroke with two horizontal (looks like a sharp cut in half)

2. sharp and a half - three vertical strokes with two horizontal

3. half flat - same as a regular flat but written backwards (horizontally flipped)

4. flat and a half - a backwards flat stuck to a regular flat (they share the same vertical stroke)

There are other notations, but this is the one I've seen most, and it is fairly simple. - Rainwarrior 15:23, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Requested media

This page cries out for audio. I'm not set up to record, but maybe, failing a real performance, someone knows how to upload a midi from the maqam image I just made? Sorry I cant find the arabic fonts...Sparafucil 10:21, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I uploaded some midi files. Hyacinth (talk) 22:50, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Quarter tone tuning

• Several songs by the American alternative rock group Ween are detuned by exactly one quarter tone. "So Many People In The Neighbourhood" is in F-half-flat Mixolydian, "Baby Bitch" is in F-half-sharp minor, "Back to Basom" is in A-half-flat major, and "Buckingham Green" is in A-half-flat minor. In concert, Ween perform the last two songs in Concert A.

I removed the above as it is unsourced and does not describe any music with quarter-tones. Hyacinth (talk) 16:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

• American rock band Everclear often records songs in a tuning a quarter tone higher than standard, such as in the song I Will Buy You A New Life.

The above was removed as nonapplicable. Hyacinth (talk) 23:46, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Interval table shading

Why are random intervals in the Interval size table shaded or darker than other intervals in the table? Hyacinth (talk) 18:03, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Quarter-tone music

I suggest to rename this article to Quarter-tone music, analogous to Viertelton-Musik, and to better association with Microtonal music of which quarter-tone music is the most disseminated kind. Microtone and quarter-tone are pendants, exactly as quarter-tone music is a pendant for microtonal music. Olorulus (talk) 08:26, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps, but "quarter tone" is also analogous to "semitone" and the many other interval articles on Wikipedia. This article devotes an entire section to discussing the various types of intervals that may be called "quarter tones", without regard for their use in music. I notice also that the great majority of other Wikis (perhaps because they are following the English Wikipedia) have articles on the interval, rather than the music. Dutch Wikipedia is a minor exception, with "Kwarttoonverdeling" (Quarter-tone division), but that is not actually much different. They do add "of het kwarttoonsysteem" (or the quarter-tone system) to the lede, however. Serbian Wikipedia appears to be the only one that adheres exactly to the form of the German article, though I am not competent to evaluate the Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese article titles.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:23, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Both articles (quarter tone and microtonal music) in English WP at present discuss actually the same. To make things clearer to a reader, they should be organized more coherently. 'Microtone' and 'quarter-tone' are microintervals, the music where they are implemented, is another subject (logical organization of sounding material, or in Kholopov's terminology, intervallic genus). If 'quarter-tone' should stay untouched and unchanged, then a microtone article should also be present (and not be just a feeble 'redirect' as it is configured now). 'Microtone' article by the way should also incorporate links to articles Diesis (with its 2000-years history spanned from Philolaos to Vicentino), Schisma and diaschisma (from Boethius onwards), and of course to comma. At present in this WP all these microintervals are even not called 'microtones' by definition. Olorulus (talk) 08:25, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Huh? They don't. Quarter-tone music is just a subset of microtonal music, and the "microtonal music" article simply defines microtones as intervals smaller than a semitone – so that all the intervals you mention are indeed microtones by WP's definition. Double sharp (talk) 09:13, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Click on Diesis, Schisma, Comma etc. They are not 'microtones' by their definitions. I suggest to make a separate article Microtone (presently there is a meaningless redirect, just click microtone to be sure) where your clever extrapolations would be fixed in a written form. Olorulus (talk) 09:35, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Microtonal music: "microtones—intervals smaller than a semitone". Does this definition really have to be repeated on each article on every interval? I think that just about anyone specifically looking for information on any of these commas is well aware that they are microtones, and is more interested in their ratios and how many cents they span – information that all these articles give, and which makes it blatantly clear that they are smaller than 100 cents, and hence microtones. Also, these articles state that these intervals are all commas, which is in any case a sub-category of "microtone". Double sharp (talk) 13:53, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

The Chinese title is just "quarter tone", and the article gives a stubbish definition of the interval (that it is half of a semitone); and I think the Japanese title is also just "quarter tone". I don't know about the Arabic title. Double sharp (talk) 12:16, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

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Blues Quarter Tone Bend

Surely this page needs to include a discussion of quarter tones in blues, as a separate thing?

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=quarter+tone+blues&oq=quarter+tone+blue GreenAsJade (talk) 00:15, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

Delection of references to rock groups

This article used to mention a member of the rock group TNT who used quarter-tone guitar. I also added a reference to the American rock group Jute Gyte that issues wholly quarter-tone albums. However, another editor, Jerome Kohl, deleted these references, referring to the absence of sources.

Here's the deleted fragment:

Norwegian guitarist Ronni Le Tekrø of the band TNT used a quarter-step guitar on the band's third studio album, Intuition. Quarter-tone avantgarde black metal music is also played by the US band Jute Gyte.

I reverted his edit, quoting my sources in the following comment: What concerns TNT, the use of quartertone guitar is described at Ronni Le Tekrø's wiki page. As for Jute Gyte, they directly state using quartertones here: https://jutegyte.bandcamp.com/album/discontinuities

Nevertheless, Mr. Kohl repeated his action, referring to the absence of sources.

Though I am not fond of either TNT or Jute Gyte, I regard the information about them as important, because it shows that quarter-tones are used not only by composers, but also in the rock context. I believe that Wikipedia should be unsided and objective, which means that relevant information about rock groups is as important as references to composers who wrote their music in 24-TET.

Therefore I decided to undo Jerome Kohl's edit. If the quoted sources aren't good enough, I ask other users to explain which sources will be regarded as adequate and sufficient so that I could find and present them.

As I noted in my re-revert edit comments, you need to put the citations into the article. It is not my responsibility, nor is it any other editor's, to do this for you.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 19:26, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for the answer. As for TNT, according to the information from http://www.metal-jukebox.net/viewtopic.php?t=13064 Ronni Le Tekrø definitely used quarter-tone guitar only in one song, Wisdom. That's why now I have doubts whether the band needs to be mentioned in the article, and leave it for other editors to decide.

What concerns Jute Gyte, I put the imformation about it in the following way: Several quarter-tone albums have been recorded by Jute Gyte, a one-man avantgarde black metal band from Missouri, USA.

You are welcome. I agree with you that a single song with a few quarter tones in it hardly qualifies as notable. As for Jute Gyte, I have not yet checked the references, but you now seem to understand the citation procedure correctly.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 00:00, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

References

Bug in Score Player w/ Ives Chord

The score player, for whatever reason, is rendering Ives' quarter tone chord incorrectly. I am talking about this:

Composer Charles Ives chose the chord C–D–F–G–B♭ as good possibility for a "secondary" chord in the quarter-tone scale, akin to the minor chord of traditional tonality. He considered that it may be built upon any degree of the quarter tone scale Here is the secondary "minor" and its "first inversion":

As you can plainly hear, this is (for whatever reason) rendering it in 12-equal with no quarter tones at all. This looks like a bug in the score player? I am not sure where to post this bug report so I am just removing the player from the page in the meantime. 2601:42:702:9F90:50CB:C35E:58B:CC6D (talk) 19:51, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

You're correct that this behaviour is based on the the score player's fundamental assumption of the basic 128-note MIDI standard. I understand that quarter and other micro tones can be achieved with pitch bend events, or with specialized instruments. The latter are not available in Mediwiki's LilyPond implementation, the former requires a level of LilyPond coding that, I guess, few would be prepared to explore. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:52, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Edit First Mention of Quarter Tones from 1900's to 1600's

Quarter tones were referenced in Sylva Sylvarum written by Sir Francis Bacon in 1639. See page 262 with reference to New Atlantis. (5th edition) 162.195.86.82 (talk) 23:44, 17 January 2024 (UTC)