31 equal temperament

In music, 31 equal temperament, 31-ET, which can also be abbreviated 31-TET, 31-EDO (equal division of the octave), (also known as tricesimoprimal), is the tempered scale derived by dividing the octave into 31 equal-sized steps (equal frequency ratios). Each step represents a frequency ratio of 2^1/31, or 38.71 cents ().

History

Division of the octave into 31 steps arose naturally out of Renaissance music theory; the lesser diesis — the ratio of an octave to three major thirds, 128:125 or 41.06 cents — was approximately a fifth of a tone and a third of a semitone. In 1666, Lemme Rossi first proposed an equal temperament of this order. Shortly thereafter, having discovered it independently, famed scientist Christiaan Huygens wrote about it also. Since the standard system of tuning at that time was quarter-comma meantone, in which the fifth is tuned to 5^1/4, the appeal of this method is immediate, as the fifth of 31-et, at 696.77 cents, is only 0.19 cent wider than the fifth of quarter-comma meantone. Huygens not only realized this, he went farther and noted that 31-ET provides an excellent approximation of septimal, or 7-limit harmony, which was an advanced insight for its time. In the twentieth century, physicist, music theorist and composer Adriaan Fokker, after reading Huygens's work, led a revival of interest in this system of tuning which led to a number of compositions, particularly by Dutch composers.

Scale diagram

The following are 21 of the 31 notes in the scale:

The remaining 10 notes can be added with, for example, five "double flat" notes and five "double sharp" notes, or by half sharp and half flats, similar to the quarter tone system.

Interval size

Here are the sizes of some common intervals:

The 31 equal temperament has a very close fit to the 7:6, 8:7, and 7:5 ratios, which have no approximate fits in 12 equal temperament and only poor fits in 19 equal temperament. The composer Joel Mandelbaum (born 1932) used this tuning system specifically because of its good matches to the 7th and 11th partials in the harmonic series.^[1]

This tuning can be considered a meantone temperament. It has the necessary property that a chain of its four fifths are equivalent to its major third (the syntonic comma 81:80 is tempered out), which also means that it contains a "meantone" that falls between the sizes of 10:9 and 9:8 as the combination of one of each of its chromatic and diatonic semitones.

References

1. ^ http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-6016%28199124%2929%3A1%3C176%3ASACONT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G Six American Composers on Nonstandard Tunnings: Douglas Keislar; Easley Blackwood; John Eaton; Lou Harrison; Ben Johnston; Joel Mandelbaum; William Schottstaedt Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 29, No. 1. (Winter, 1991), pp. 176-211.

External links

• The Huygens Fokker foundation for micro-tonal music, in Dutch and English
• Fokker, Adriaan Daniël, Equal Temperament and the Thirty-one-keyed organ
• Rapoport, Paul, About 31-tone Equal Temperament
• Terpstra, Siemen, Toward a Theory of Meantone (and 31-et) Harmony
• Barbieri, Patrizio. Enharmonic instruments and music, 1470-1900. (2008) Latina, Il Levante Libreria Editrice
• M. Khramov, “Approximation to 7-Limit Just Intonation in a Scale of 31EDO,” Proceedings of the FRSM-2009 International Symposium Frontiers of Research on Speech and Music, pp. 73-82, ABV IIITM, Gwalior, 2009.