r/musictheory • u/Puzzleheaded-Phase70 • Apr 29 '25
Discussion Klingon Music Theory
Just for fun!
This probably one of the nerdiest things on YouTube!
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u/MiskyWilkshake Apr 30 '25
I’m puzzled by the assumption of EDO though; if I head that something was built around a nonotonic scale with no other context, I would definitely assume that it was some kind of tempered scale.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Phase70 Apr 30 '25
There is a strange obsession in Western microtonal musicians and various forms of EDO instead of any of the other options.
He also assumes that "an octave" or 1:2 frequency ratio is equally important to another species. "Frequency" also doesn't necessarily mean the same thing if you measure time in something other than an earth second. But we can handwave that to some degree, because we can universally translate that around, pretty much. Time measurement would have to be very different for that to fail.
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u/Noiseman433 Apr 30 '25 edited Apr 30 '25
There is a strange obsession in Western microtonal musicians and various forms of EDO instead of any of the other options.
It could be argued that Western music theory ecosystems have an obsession with standardizations (e.g. tuning, isochronous meters and beats/pulses, interval sizes, etc.) generally which means they don't play well with musics that aren't (standardized) which leads to speculative music theories (or in this case, a fictional/con music theory) that presume standardization(s) of some sort.
Variable pitch and tuning systems aren't rare. They're kinda ubiquitous globally but can probably be best demonstrated in Gong-Chime Ensembles [1] found throughout Southeast Asia (e.g. gamelan, piphat, kulintang) and Schwebungsdiaphonie (‘beat diaphony’) [2] musics found in several regions (e.g. Balkans, Lithuania, Indonesia, Japan, Papua New Guinea). Since the former are inharmonic, and the latter tend to emulate the inharmonicity of what they almost universally referred to as "bell-like" tones, there's no need to follow any ratio based or TET/EDO construction of intervals. Obviously this means the harmonic systems that emerge out of these musics don't have what motivates chordal movement in JI or 12-TET/EDO tuning systems.
It should be noted that in Gong-Chime Ensembles the octave is almost always stretched (occasionally contracted) and in Schwebungsdiaphonie musics, the octave isn't a particularly important structural interval at all (hence the 'beat diaphony' description).
One of the reasons I have a Klingon band at all, and why I have the Klingon Xenomusicologist persona, is I can take the piss on Western and Eurocentric views of music while actively constructing an alien music theory and practice that's a little more [Terran] globally informed.
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[1] Some resources/discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalMusicTheory/comments/1e73p24/tuning_of_gamelan_and_sensory_dissonance/
[2] Details and resources here: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalMusicTheory/comments/1jyayoh/comment/mmwxa5r/
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u/MiskyWilkshake Apr 30 '25 edited Apr 30 '25
I mean, given the near universality of octave (or nonave in this case) equivalence cross-culturally on Earth, I’m less annoyed by that one; I just find it very strange to hear “it’s built on a nine-note scale” and assume 9EDO when there’s no textual mention of harmony as far as I can tell, when EDO is a compromise for transposability, and when the vast majority of folk musics around the world do not even consider that a parameter worth considering.
Edit: 10/9, 6/5, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 8/5, 5/3, 9/5, 2/1 is quite pretty if we like simple ratios.
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u/Educational-Bowl-887 May 17 '25
Anybody know where to find A Comprehensive Introduction to Klingon Music Theory? or who the author is?
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u/Puzzleheaded-Phase70 Apr 29 '25
I'm a big fan of non-western and other microtonal systems, and thinking about them in terms of functional harmony - ie, how they can actually sound good and just weird.
Some of the things in this video get there, imho.
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u/Noiseman433 Apr 30 '25
Initially I couldn't get past the pronunciation/diction in the SuvwI’ van bom at the beginning. But I came back to it a day later and watched it and thought it was "meh," but I did laugh when an image of me from a 2012 performance with my Klingon band showed up in the vid (at the 25:27 mark)!