John Chalmers
ΚΑΘΗΓΗΤΗΣ ΠΑΝ/ΜΙΟΥ ΚΑΛΙΦΟΡΝΙΑ
John Chalmers is a scientist and microtonal theorist.
John H. Chalmers is a retired astrobiologist and prebiotic chemist from the University of California, San Diego. In addition to working in the fields of genetics, industrial microbiology, biochemistry and chemistry, he has had a long-term interest in microtonality and is the author of “Divisions of the Tetrachord,” a book inspired in part by Ervin Wilson’s work. Chalmers is also an actor with the Village Church Community Theater in Rancho Santa, California, where he resides, and has recently become a computer artist, having exhibited his music-theory generated polychrome plots in a number of venues in San Diego and one in San Francisco.
Vasilis: I ran your scale (kanonion) from the back cover of
your book through my music graphics program. Since the program works with
octave-limited scales, I added the 9/4 as 9/8 to the first octave and ignored
the octave duplicated notes. The second diagram shows the pitches in cents and
3 kinds of plots--a rectangular plot with fifths running horizontally and major
thirds vertically, a triangular plot with fifths horizontal and major thirds at
60 degrees ascending, minor thirds 120 descending descending, and a circular
plot from 0 to 1200 cents going counter-clockwise.
The polychrome plot depicts the melodic transformations of
the scale as the sizes of the fifths (horizontal axis) and major thirds
(vertical axis) vary from 0 to 1200 cents. This artwork grew out of a project
many years ago when I was constructing scales from triads of various kinds
--4:5:6, 10:12:15, 6:7:9, 5:6:7, etc. One day I decided to do the computations
by computer rather than by hand and then plot the results. Since this kind of music theory is rather
unfamiliar to most people, I started exhibiting the plots as abstract art and
have been in several art shows locally and one in San Francisco. Each colored
region represents a particular ordering of the notes as the sizes of the
generating intervals varies. The normal tuning of this set of notes would
probably lie one of the green zones below the center and to the right. (I
forgot to print the coordinates on this run-the program takes over an hour to
run on new computer).
Margo Schulter
The polychrome plot depicts the melodic transformations of
the scale as the sizes of the fifths (horizontal axis) and major thirds
(vertical axis) vary from 0 to 1200 cents. This artwork grew out of a project
many years ago when I was constructing scales from triads of various kinds
--4:5:6, 10:12:15, 6:7:9, 5:6:7, etc. One day I decided to do the computations
by computer rather than by hand and then plot the results. Since this kind of music theory is rather
unfamiliar to most people, I started exhibiting the plots as abstract art and
have been in several art shows locally and one in San Francisco. Each colored
region represents a particular ordering of the notes as the sizes of the
generating intervals varies. The normal tuning of this set of notes would
probably lie one of the green zones below the center and to the right. (I
forgot to print the coordinates on this run-the program takes over an hour to
run on new computer).
ΑΜΕΡΙΚΑΝΙΔΑ ΜΟΥΣΙΚΟΛΟΓΟΣ
Γεώργιος Χατζηθεοδώρου
Georgios Chatzitheodorou
Άρχων Μαΐστωρ της Μεγάλης του Χριστού Εκκλησίας - Θεωρητικός
Άρχων Μαΐστωρ της Μεγάλης του Χριστού Εκκλησίας
Ιωάννης Σπετσιώτης
Ioanis Spetsiotis
Συντ/χος εκπαιδευτικός -καθηγητής Εκκλησιαστικής μουσικής
