"?-TET": Is there music that doesn't use discretely pitched notes?
Is there music that doesn't use notes with discrete* pitches, but rather has instruments playing continuously changing frequencies?
I know there are microtonal tunings as high as 72-TET, but is there music composed in what might be called "?-TET"?
*as opposed to continuous (not "discreet")
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I'll go against the stream here and say no, there is no (or very little) music that does not use discrete pitches, at least as resolutions. The very bendiest blues still lands on very solid chords- it slides around a lot, but the scale is there. Sure, there is certainly stuff with no discrete scale implied, but how many of you can hum a tune of it? Music is almost always employed with discretion, at least implied.
A trivial answer : yes. When I was quite young I wrote a computer program to spit out a succession of 'beeps' at random frequencies not related to any musical scale; I suspect many people who have a computer and a bit of an interest in music have done the same. In practice how close you could get to infinity (!) would be limited by the resolution at which the computer could represent pitch, but conceptually that's a case of continuously changing frequencies.
The thing is, once you have decided that you have all frequencies available to you, what do you do with them? If you've listened to compilations like the Computer Music Journal sound anthology, Computer Music Currents, or Cultures Electroniques, you'll probably have heard pieces made up of non-scalar pitch grains or gradients (sorry, I can't remember the titles of any examples!). Some of these are fun, but to someone with fairly conventional musical tastes they can sound like variations on the sound of someone's broken plumbing; many listeners tend to yearn for harmony, which means forming relationships between pitches, which brings us back towards scales again.
There's another sense in which “?-TET” is perhaps closer to commonly-heard music that we might think, in that a lot of styles use glides/bends/portamento in a way that is integral to the sound of the music, but does not necessarily tend to be notated precisely. Blues is the most obvious example, although it tends to be more free in some ranges of the octave than others. I'm also thinking of some Eastern vocal styles, and quite a lot of violin playing (even in the classical tradition).
Musicians will also stray from ET tuning towards more pure 'Just' intonation where possible, so this is another sense in which music isn't really anchored to a fixed set of pitches.
In a way, perhaps you are describing a type of atonality that isn't limiting itself to a 12-tone scale; on the other hand, The concept of atonality is usually associated with avoidance of an obvious tonal centre, which wouldn't have to be the case just because the music is freely-pitched.
"Harmonies" by Gyorgy Ligeti is an interesting example of microtonal music.
It's written for organ, but it's intended to be played with reduced air and manipulation of the stops, so the pipes don't play at their designed frequency. With (mainly) slow chord changes and wide voicings the overall effect is a slowly evolving harmony and dissonance through the piece.
Not everyone will love the piece itself, but I've picked on this as an example because it has an undeniably "impressive" sound, and the method of tweaking the instrument is interesting.
Well, how about the starting clarinet solo in Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue"? It's been almost a century ago. Granted, doing the glissando continuously on its last part was not written into the score originally but was rather an impromptu trick by the clarinetist that the composer then insisted on incorporating into the premiere, but it has been very much mandated practice from then on.
John Luther Adams created a sonification for weather, astronomical and geological data in real time, called The Place Where You Go to Listen
The sound parameters (mostly pitch, by I think others too) change "continuosly" (between comas, as of course we are talking about discrete digital events incrementally changing in time) according to the actual external conditions. However, most times changes are so slow that it sounds more like a continuous sound than a continuously changing one.
On the same "auditory experience" vein, the 9 Beet Strech project presents Beethoven's 9th symphony time stretched to a duration of 24 hours. What's interesting (and perhaps relevant to this question) is that "instant" events in real time turn into pitches slowly and continously changing in time.
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