Knead & Fold Kitchen Appliance
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What is it?
The Knead & Fold Kitchen Appliance helps you create a
certain kind of Scale Pattern that is made from two
different intervals. (Scale Patterns are what define your scale
and are like the dough from which you make your scale.)
Some of the types of scales which this appliance can mix up
are meantone & linear temperaments, and MOS scales.
Every scale you can make in Knead & Fold is a linear scale.
Some of these scales will be Moment of Symmetry (MOS) scales.
MOS scales are the linear temperaments in which there are no
more than two different step sizes in the scale.
Which of all these you call meantones is a matter of taste
and philosophy. Many historical tunings are meantones in
which the Folding Interval is an octave and the Kneaded Interval
is a slightly flat fifth. Some might want to restrict the
word meantone for these scales. Others might want to call
a much wider set of scales meantones.
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If there is no Oven visible, you won’t be able to select Knead & Fold,
nor any of the other entries in the Scale Pattern Menu.
This is because all the functions in the Scale Pattern menu
affect Scale Patterns, which are part of the
Recipe, which is inside of an Oven — so you need
to have an Oven open first.
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You create a Knead & Fold window by
selecting that entry in the
Scale Pattern Menu.
A Knead & Fold editor will then be opened for the
Oven which was
topmost when you opened the
Knead & Fold appliance. You can open multiple kitchen
appliances at a time if you wish, one for each Oven that
is open.
How does it work?
You can knead an interval in your scale and make
it a little bit bigger or smaller — some people call
this squeezing process tempering though it’s really
more like the squeezing and stretching done during kneading:
Imagine that you make a long chain of these
kneaded intervals, each one connected to the end
of the one before. Now you can pick a second
interval by editing the Repeat Ratio in the
connected Oven, which becomes your Folding Interval.
The Folding Interval folds that kneaded chain back so that
it wraps back around into the Folding Interval just
like a necklace made of blueberries, or the
rim of a pie’s crust:
You also pick how long the chain is that you will fold
in. However long it is will affect the number of notes that end up
being included within one repetition of the Repeat Ratio/Folding Interval.
You can keep your Knead & Fold Dialog open
as long as you like and can have every Oven that
is open have its very own separate Knead &
Fold window. When you change the Repeat Ratio or
the Anchor Key in the Oven,
that information is instantly updated in the Knead
and Fold window associated with that Oven.
The graphical display shows you what the Scale
Pattern will look like once you do the fold. As
you experiment with the details of your Knead
& Fold, the display shows what the result
would look like.
When you press the [Fold]
button, the new scale pattern is automatically
written to the Oven and the Knead & Fold
window is closed. Also at this time, the settings you
used are saved so that if you save your recipe,
the last used Knead & Fold settings are saved
along with it, showing the Scale Recipe’s history
or derivation.
If instead you press [Cancel],
or close the window, your edits are discarded and
the last changes to the Knead & Fold settings will
not be saved.
MOS Detection
A MOS or
Moment-Of-Symmetry tuning is one in which there are no
more than two step sizes. An equivalent term is to say that the scale
has
Myhill’s Property. It means the same thing. Most popular
Baroque meantone scales are also MOS scales. For example, the 1/4 Comma
Meantone scale with a length of 12 steps consists entirely of steps that
are either 117 or 76 cents.
Since MOS scales can be of special interest, LMSO helps readily
identify which scale lengths give MOS scales. The scale
degrees in the scale display appear in a brighter shade of blue for MOS scales.
Example
When your Repeat Ratio is set to 2/1 (the octave)
and your generating interval is the fifth and it
has been kneaded a little bit, say by a quarter
of a syntonic comma — well then you have 1/4 comma
meantone, the famous Renaissance and Baroque tuning.
You can make the chain be 12 units long total and
if you do, you’ll have a standard tuning for use
on a regular keyboard.
If you like, you can extend the chain to 16 or
19 notes or more and you’ll have an extended meantone
that includes both views of the enharmonic notes like
D# and Eb.
Next you can try to stretch or compress the Repeat Ratio from
the octave to see what effect that has. Then try
making up tunings with a different Repeat Ratio
altogether — try folding 12/7 into 7/3, or the fifth
into the harmonic 7th (7:4) or whatever crazy scheme
you can think up — see how they all sound! This
handy kitchen gizmo isn’t just a meantone maker, it’s
a generalized whatchamawhazzit widget! Yes,
it kneads, it folds, it does your laundry and
decorates your pie tins! It’s the one widget you
won’t want to be without!