Sonido 13

Sonido 13 is a microtonal music system developed in 1895 by the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo while he was experimenting with his violin. As Carrillo was placing his finger over a violin string, he noticed that he could produce different sounds than the ones defined by musical convention. This way, he realized that the string could be divided into an infinite number of pitches, creating many more possibilities for music composition. This was a development that intended to change the world of music, at least in Carrillo’s mind, but it never proved to be practical as literally everything in music had to be modified to allow for Carrillo’s ideas to become the new standard.

The Western musical convention up to this day divides an octave into twelve different pitches that can be arranged or tempered in different intervals. Carrillo termed his new system Sonido 13, which is Spanish for "Thirteenth Sound" or Sound 13, because it enabled musicians to go beyond the twelve notes that comprise an octave in conventional Western music.

History

Early life

Julián Carrillo was a native of the state of San Luis Potosí in Mexico. He attended the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, where he studied Violin, Composition, Physics, Acoustics, and Mathematics. The laws that define music intervals instantly amazed Carrillo, which led him to conduct experiments on his violin. He began analyzing the way the pitch of a string changed depending on the finger position, concluding that there had to be a way to split the string into an infinite number of parts. One day, Carrillo was able to divide the fourth string of his violin with a razor into sixteen parts in the interval between the notes G and A thus creating sixteen unique sounds. This event was the beginning of Sonido 13 that led Carrillo to study more about physics and the nature of intervals.

Professional life

Carrillo became an excellent musician at the Conservatory and received a scholarship to study in Leipzig Royal Conservatory. After Carrillo returned to Mexico in 1918, he became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra and in 1920 he also became Principal of the National Conservatory of Music. It was during this time that he began to invest a significant amount of time on Sonido 13. His achievements in this area were extensive and consisted of writing over 20 books, making more than 40 compositions, patenting fifteen pianos capable of producing small intervals, and organizing the Sonido 13 Symphonic Orchestra that performed in different parts of the world, playing microtonal music composed by Carrillo in different intervals. In 1933, Ahualulco, the town where Julián Carrillo was born, was renamed to Ahualulco del Sonido 13 in honor of Carrillo's work.

Music theory

Introduction

Julián Carrillo did not found microtonal music, but he was the first person to formally study it and create a new music system based on his findings. Before Carrillo, the real users of microtonal music were the Greek, Arab, and Hindi musicians as their octaves used more than 12 different notes, a factor which caused their music to greatly contrast from Western music.

Julián Carrillo started dividing whole tones (major seconds) into 16 intervals, but he did not stop there. Through experiments, Carrillo noticed that he could divide the string into an infinite number of intervals, or into as many intervals as it is physically possible. Carrillo created intervals of 3, 4, 5, 16, 32, 64, and 128 tones within a major second, leaving the formula to create more, if desired. However, as the number of intervals increases it becomes harder to distinguish the notes from each other.

Music notation

Because new sets of sounds were created, it was imperative to make a new notation system. Carrillo developed an easy method for notation, which would help people not familiar with previous forms of notation to quickly learn to read and write music.

To show how easy the new writing system was, Carrillo gave two New York elementary school boys, who had no prior knowledge of Sonido 13, a simple work by Bach to convert to his notation system. The boys accomplished the task in less than an hour, proving that the new writing method was easy to learn.

The new writing system is not as graphic as the conventional staff or stave, and instead of calling the notes by a letter they are represented by a number. The numbering system starts with a zero and increments by one until the last note of the octave is reached. Within this system, the number of notes in an octave is dependent on the number of intervals that one wishes to create within a whole tone.

Carrillo used many intervals, although mainly in multiples of 4 such as 16, 32, and 64 so that between each of the whole tones, 16, 32, or 64 additional notes were created. Carrillo called these intervals sixteenths of a tone, thirty-seconds of a tone, and sixty-fourths of a tone, respectively. As a result, C would be labeled 0, D flat would be labeled 8, D would be labeled 16, E flat would be labeled 24, E would be labeled 32, etc., for sixteenths of a tone.

When notating music, Carrillo used a staff. However, instead of using lines to signify different notes, he used the lines to distinguish between octaves so that each line on the staff represents a different octave. For example, if 0 on the second line of the staff denoted what conventional music terms middle C, 0 on the third line would refer to C an octave higher, and 0 on the first line would refer to C an octave lower.

Musical instruments

Although this system created additional notes, one of the major drawbacks of this system was that new adaptations of current instruments had to be made to support the small intervals, and for this reason the instruments were reduced in the number of octaves they contained. For example, a standard piano has 88 keys that cover more than 7 octaves, and a piano with 88 keys made for sixteenths of a tone would not constitute a full octave. To have the same number of octaves as a conventional piano, a piano for sixteenths of a tone would need 704 keys. Similarly, every instrument had to be modified to adapt to the new rules of the Sonido 13 system, which meant that many octaves were being discarded for this purpose.

Julián Carrillo

When Carrillo died in 1965, very few people continued his work, and to this day Carrillo’s work is unknown to many people, especially outside of Mexico and even within Mexico. Although Sonido 13 had the potential to revolutionize music forever, it appears that the disadvantages of the system outweighed the advantages. As a result, Sonido 13 did not change the world or become popular, as the sole nature of the system would require for everything in music to be changed. In essence, if Sonido 13 had become the music standard, all the existing instruments would become obsolete, scores would have to be rewritten, and every musician would have to learn to use the system. These impracticalities made it almost impossible to change the Western world of music, especially considering that the current standards have been working without major problems in meeting the demands of listeners and composers for many years.

References

*
*
*
*
*
*