Stephen Taylor's Sonic Sky

Nothing can thrill us more than announcing the launch of this web documentary on the work or Erv Wilson.
http://www.thesonicsky.com/

Hobo Coffee

In a letter from Erv the other day, he found it important that the recipe for Hobo Coffee he learned from Partch be included in the Archive.

Black Coffee
(one) whole Cardamon seed.

Since Hobos could not carry milk the cardamon seed was the replacement

A lucky accident concerning some non octave scales

 I happened upon two different Wilson documents which where quite separated but i had viewed recently enough to remember and realized their relationship which are  presented below.  First a letter which i assume was to Brian McLaren followed by the paper in Novaro referred to. The third is Wilson respelling of the two points in a scale tree type way that shows the relation of novaro's ideas to this series. It was lucky enough to stumble upon some time before and showed Erv how Novaro series can be generated as a Pascal triangle or in a series like this. He ran with it.
It also explains some of his other division of a tetrachord in a like fashion. The method shows a quite way of generating non octave structures.

Hexany Voicings

 

Here are two papers of Erv working with different voicings of the hexanies based on the simplest set of 24 permutations. He often thought of such held chords as sound sculptures and we can see in his notes his subjective responses they invoked as he played through them .

A System of Color Coding.

I quite remember the set of hebdomekontany bars that Erv refers to here but did not realize how he had determined the color coding he used.

Marwa permutation in 17. Part 1

Here is an undated one page investigation of some of the possible Marwa cycles one can do in 17. It is one of the few examples i can recall of Wilson applying this idea into scale unit sizes as opposed to strict ratios. One could think of this as a tonal or modal modulation as opposed to a real one. He often liked to play with a subset.

 I will speculate he might have been thinking of his own favorite just 17 tone scales [Evangelina] but could easily apply to those interested in 17 ET or other 17 tone constant structures. The bottom box appears to be tetrachordal possibilities that expands upon the ones found in this sequence [3 being the disjunction] that he thought to pursue later.

The 30th root of 3 and the 44th root of 5 scales

Many of the extremely early papers we now have access to is due to John Chalmers.
 These two show a method not common today, but a line he abandoned. Possibly i am wrong but i don't think i have seen these particular scales mentioned since. Wilson prefers to do his innovations rooted in the past. It reflects his work with plants [which carry their history within] and the direction his tunings grow are informed by that knowledge .

Halberstad Mappings of microtonal scales, 2 and 3 ranked

Erv outlines here the idea of mapping scales out onto a Halberstad like keyboard based on complementary Moments of Symmetries