Making a 1000 Note Chord That Actually Sounds Good

Thank you for 1000 subs! I'm really happy that we are starting to build such a cool esoteric music theory community here. Hope you all enjoy this extreme 1000 note chord I've whipped up, a note for every one of you all!

Mumbo gumbo for the algorithm:
In this video we try to figure out how to voice a 1000 note chord. That is 1000 different pitches, or distinct pitch classes. For this crazy music theory experiment to work, we will have to dive into the wonderful world of microtonality. This means splitting an octave into 1000 different notes, instead of the usual 12 notes that makes up out 12 tone equally tempered system. This xenharmonic/microtonal device is how we can get 1000 different pitch classes. Once we've defined terms like what is a cent in music, and, how microtonality works, we try out a few chord building methods from composers like Reginald Smith Brindle, Arnold Schoenberg, and of course, Jacob Collier's famous all note chord. After some extreme chord reharmonization fun, we take the voicing style of 20th century serialist composer Fritz Heinrich Kleins infamous pyramid chord, and mother chord and apply it to our 1000 note chord. The Pyramid Chord contains all intervals from smallest to largest, while the Mother Chord also contains all intervals as well as all possible notes (in 12EDO), making it a true oddity in terms of 12 tone row cluster chords. A quick look into music psychology, music perception and music cognition gives us an understanding as to why this might be useful in our chord building. We define and answer what the Pyramid Chord as well as what the Mother Chord is in detail and then take a turn into the acoustic audio science of white noise. Looking at what creates white noise in the context of these serialist all note chords, and by a new musical device I've dubbed a "pitch band" can give us a pathway to orchestrating a thousand note chord which sounds "Good".

Levis Links:

Research Links:

Mother Chord, Pyramid Chord, and Grandmother Chord Wiki:

David Headlam's analysis of Kleins "Die Grenze der Halbtonwelt" (The Boundary of the Semitonal World), & Die Maschine:

Nicolas Slonimsky's "Thesurus of scales and melodic patterns" which contains useful formulation of a lot of 12 tone cluster chords:

#musictheory #chords #arrangement #orchestration #musiclesson #musicpsychology #psychology #acoustic #music #chordprogressions #jacobcollier #microtonal #microtonality #microtone #1000subscriber

[metadaat]

Awesome video, super interesting!! One thing I was wondering about, when you want to create white noise from all frequencies, it's also important to randomize their phase. If you just add together a huge number of sine waves you get this phasing effect, and it kind of sounds like a snap, pulse or zap sound (you can hear it in one of the examples in the beginning of your video), because they all start at the same phase. You can avoid this effect by slightly randomizing the onset time of all the notes (or indeed, their phase), doesn't need to be much, imperceptibly little, the length of the longest wave length (1 / lowest frequency). I just thought I'd mention this, in case you want to experiment more (I'd love to hear it :D )

Another thing is, I dunno if you're familiar with drumnbass music, but one of the classic bass sounds is called the "reese bass", and the earliest versions of it were simply two sawtooth waves, mixed together, tuned apart by about one eighth to a quarter note even (also usually a lowpass filter to remove the highs/treble and leave mostly bass). This creates the phasing/chorus effect you describe in the video, and together with a slight bit of distortion/overdrive, becomes the classic dnb "wobble" sound (or at least some of the earliest versions thereof, in modern dnb they do all sorts of other things too).

[skywardmicrotonal]

You could also use the harmonic series as a way to do this, although there would be a problem with it sounding like a single note with a buzzy timbre instead of a bunch of notes…

[d.lawrencemiller]

Hell yeah man. That sounded like Primus got a new band member and he's a Klingon.

[ekoi]

The piano has 88 keys, so the 912 other notes would be in unison with one of the 912 possible pitch locations across those keys?

[Rosshopkins]

I wonder what black noise sounds like. "Oh lordy lifting off shackles gonna be a freeman some day, pickin this cotton it ain't nothing cause tobby didn't gittn whippin today"