Wilsonic

Grateful For Erv Wilson

In 1995 I was a 3d artist at Walt Disney Feature Animation writing code to render animated features. By night I was creating electronic music with hardware synthesizers. I felt limited by hardware as the software is my creative process and so I bought the only programmable synthesizer at the time: the Capybara by Kyma. The folks at Kyma told me that there were two guys who had also bought Capybaras and that they lived only a few miles from me. “The guys” turned out to be Erv Wilson and Stephen James Taylor. They and their network Gary David, John Chalmers, Kraig Grady, Terumi Narushima, Chuck Jonkey, Jose Garcia would go on to deepen my understanding of not only music, scale design, and rhythm, but also the emotional context behind the excitement and joy of the experience of novel music. I first met Erv at Stephen’s studio. Turns out Erv never really used his Capybara as his creative process was expressed in pencil and paper, but as a professional film composer Stephen was pushing the sonic boundaries in both pitch and timbre with every instrument he could get his hands on. At this time Erv explained to me that they were trying to implement one of his scale designs “recurrence relation”. It was the first time Erv shared his drawings of his microtonal scale designs with me. Recurrence relations are generalized Fibonacci sequences, seeded with your personal musically-aesthetic harmonics. No matter how you seed them they will converge on a generator, but it’s those initial seedings that create an emotional space that artists desire to create their own unique sound. Even though at the time I didn’t understand Erv’s intent his math was straightforward and I was able to code it up on the Capybara on the spot. On that first day I even added interactive reseeding. Much like Disney artists used my software to interactively find “solutions” to the creative visual values of an animated feature we were interactively exploring the creative musical “solutions” to the musical values of his scale design in realtime. Erv laughed with joy like a child. He was always able to hear his designs in his mind, but let me tell you, when he heard his designs in real-life it had a huge emotional impact on him, and me. And so on that first day for the first time in my life I heard a microtonal scale by intent and design of a completely different geometry than the chain of 12 tone equal temperament and its stack of so-called “music theory”. At first I was excited but the more I processed this experience the more I become deeply disappointed that no one in my life was even aware that there was an entire universe of tunings. At Disney artists learned about color theories from day one…how could musicians not know there are pitch theories? This was a transformational experience for me which motivates me to this day to educate and create freely available microtonal instruments so that palettes of pitches are a fundamental artistic choice. Erv, Stephen and I met regularly at Stephen’s studio with Gary, Kraig, Terumi, John, Chuck, and Jose joining when possible. It soon became obvious to me that Erv was not a one-trick pony. John Chalmers describes Erv as one of the most intuitive mathematicians he has ever known. Erv realized scale designs with many mathematical objects such as Pascal’s triangle, generalized fibonacci series, binomial coefficients and all their resulting combinatorial geometry, the Co-Prime grid and other diamonds, Farey Series and Stern-Brocott trees and all of the resulting two-interval patterns, lattices, harmonic series—we can go on. With each design I came to see Erv as an explorer of many vast unknown landscapes leaving behind maps to get you there if you only could follow them. He freely shared his profound papers on you with little context and background, and it was up to you to find a path from your place to the peak of those mountains yourself. Erv was fascinated with ancient cultures and devised many designs to model historical scales and at the same time creating novel designs with abstract mathematical structures that grow from the seeds of your personal aesthetic. If a musician performing music is the act of eating a gourmet meal, and a composer creating a musical composition is the act of preparing that meal with exquisite ingredients, Erv was the farmer planting the seeds of every ingredient of every meal of every culture. This metaphor of a farmer planting seeds is fundamental to understanding the nature of Erv. In his early years Erv was a professional draftsman and you can see his clarity of thought and intent in every paper he ever made, even his scribbles. Almost all of these designs were digitized by Kraig Grady, Terumi Narushima, and Stephen Taylor and are hosted on anaphoria.com. There were many days where I would in the morning be working with the finest pencil drawings by the most talented Disney animators and then come home to dwell on Erv’s superb drawings. This was a man who was every bit as sensitive to subtle curves and fine shadings of hyper dimensional objects and drafting huge numerical tables as the professional artists at Disney. As technology progressed personal computers became more powerful I moved towards software synthesis expressed as plugins in sequencers such as ProTools, Cubase, and Ableton Live. From about 2000 to 2008 I explored many third party plugin developers such as Native Instruments Reaktor. A desktop computer with this software was say $4K. But I found that support for microtonality was non-existent or inconsistent. And you couldn’t develop code for these instruments which blocked me from not only my personal creative medium, but also from implementing the most important idea of Erv: interactively reseeding his designs with the ones of your own personal aesthetic. From that first day I met Erv he said that he always wanted new generations to grow up with these scales. Fast-forward to 2019: Hundreds of millions of people have mobile phones and tablets which are less than $1K. In many countries around the world these devices are subsidized. We now find ourselves in a situation where children who, unlike myself, can grow up with palettes of pitches as an expected creative choice in their music. An independent developer in his spare time can distribute free applications around the world. In 2014 I released “Wilsonic” which lets you interactively reseed some of Erv’s most musically-useful designs, and in 2018 the AudioKit open source software synthesizer Synth One founded by Aure Prochazka, Matthew Fecher and myself developed Synth One, a free open source additive synthesizer now with hundreds of thousands of downloads, and a method called “AudioKit Tuneup” which instantly shares tunings between Wilsonic, Synth One, and the paid app “AudioKit Digital D1”, a sampler-based synth. While Wilsonic is very technical and requires familiarity with the theory behind Erv’s work Synth One and D1 are not technical at all. The tuning support in these two apps treat scales as if they were simply presets or patches, and I bundled in Synth One a curated list of tunings by Erv, Kraig Grady, Stephen Taylor, Jose Garcia, Gary David, and myself. Musicians with no knowledge of microtonality can simply play these by ear and make novel music never before possible. After a couple decades of research and development where do we go from here? At this point we are at a tipping point where we have the platforms and global distribution we need. Synth One and Digital D1 are professional-sounding and immensely popular synths with an exceptional number of 5-star reviews on the Apple App Store. The next level is to increase the exposure of microtonality by evangelizing to commercial software synthesizer companies who have a greater reach with their products. They could leverage this R&D to minimize their financial risk while efficiently adding popular microtonality implementations to their portfolios of instruments and sounds. It’s important to support musicians who like me have never heard of microtonality but want to find their own unique sound. I would like to partner with teams of developers to implement all of Erv’s designs–I cannot finish them all myself. By working with software developers of all skill levels we can preserve all of Erv’s tunings and implement them in as many software synthesizers as possible. I would also like to partner with musicians and educators to educate the public by creating video content that demonstrates the use of these scale designs, and their practical use in these instruments, and the music created by these. That feeling I had when I first experienced a design by Erv…that’s the feeling I want audiences and musicians to feel when they hear novel music created with these designs. -May 3, 2019, Hermosa Beach, CA

1/5 Interview with Erv Wilson

Ervin Wilson (00:21): Blue budha to make their pies from over there, but that's all right. Don't hubs in. Marcus Hobbs (00:31): Hi. Ervin Wilson (00:32): That's a cute Marcus Hobbs (00:33): Hat. Thank you. Do you'd like it? Where Ervin Wilson (00:36): Did you get Marcus Hobbs (00:37): That? I got it at Hermosa Beach where all the cowboys roam. Ervin Wilson (00:42): Yeah. Do you want a hay straw? Marcus Hobbs (00:45): Yep. Put me to work, baby. Just tell me what you need. Want. Yep. I got shovels. I'm ready for anything. Hell even plant some marijuana Ervin Wilson (00:55): Crops here, right? Huh? Marcus Hobbs (00:56): That's right. Ervin Wilson (00:58): A little income supplementation Marcus Hobbs (01:00): Going and some bullshit. You got to plant some, put Ervin Wilson (01:03): Out all this stuff for these insurance people. Oh, for the fire abatement. The fire people? Yeah. Wow. Irv. Where is an outlet? An electrical Marcus Hobbs (01:19): Outlet. We don't mean like a creative outlet. No. Ervin Wilson (01:23): Well hair. Try the nostrils. Oh boy. I'm just sort water parts. Gary David (01:43): It's 1962. I just found it. I went to that event when I was living in San Francisco. Ervin Wilson (02:00): Where was this theater? 1962. That was before I actually met. Gary David (02:12): Well, let's Marcus Hobbs (02:12): Talk like this about Gary David (02:14): You. By meeting him, Ervin Wilson (02:19): You said it price. Hang on to it. Gary David (02:25): I like this picture of him surrounded by his instruments. Ervin Wilson (02:52): And then one point Roberts up past Seattle, this little point reason it's called Point Roberts is because there's quite a large inland lake there, ocean there. And to get there, you have to go into Canada and then cut down. And the way they cut the boundaries, the United States, Canada, they just cut a line straight across. It just so happened that right out on a point that just holds of a few thousand people that is sticking like little peninsula out into the lake there. And you have to go into Canada to get back onto the point. And then you have to exit Extens. Then you're back to the US again. I can get it to the porch here. I use the word loo here Speaker 4 (04:50): Sec. Lemme get Ervin Wilson (04:55): These tapes ready. We'll see one. We'll see two. I'm amazed I didn't, so they won the word plett. I usually try to put the word plethora somewhere and everything I ride. Ah. Sort of like a, and then of course call just innocently and they just a throwaway word. Speaker 4 (05:23): Throwaway word. Ervin Wilson (05:24): The throwaway word. Yeah. Just as Speaker 4 (05:38): Even got religious here you said, good heavens. Ervin Wilson (05:41): Where Speaker 4 (05:42): My heavens. My heavens. As opposed to your evidence. Ervin Wilson (05:47): Well, at least it's a plural. Yes. There's a whole click of it. I don't mind using the word gods. Gary David (05:59): Yeah, gods for the ceiling. Stephen James Taylor (06:05): In a small Jeep. Ervin Wilson (06:07): There are gods everywhere. Who knows that that stone down there doesn't have an intrinsic flicker of consciousness in Stephen James Taylor (06:16): It. You won't get an argument from me. Ervin Wilson (06:22): I haven't had Stephen James Taylor (06:26): My Ervin Wilson (06:26): Coffee yet. Stephen James Taylor (06:27): Oh, boil it up, bro. We're fired up. We're here all day. Gary David (06:32): The reason I showed you this up is it this way of thinking, which is very poetic, would be really good for much of what we're going to do today so that someone who knows nothing about you would get some kind of a theme. Ervin Wilson (06:49): Oh, Stephen James Taylor (06:53): If you insist, Ervin Wilson (06:55): I'll say everything in haiku. There Stephen James Taylor (06:57): You go. There you go. Remember, Ervin Wilson (07:05): Every day before I even get out, I write a haiku. I'm not joking. Stephen James Taylor (07:13): Do you really? Ervin Wilson (07:15): I've been doing that lately. Just taking things that pop out of my mouth. Stephen James Taylor (07:21): So you've got a pretty good collection of them Ervin Wilson (07:22): By now. And write them down and see, can I transform this into a haiku? And amazingly, once I get the ideas down on paper, I can juggle them just a little bit. Insert a couple of syllables here or reverb it. And I've got a very, very workable haiku using ordinarily ordinary, overworked English. Stephen James Taylor (07:55): That's what we wanted. Ordinary, overworked, English. Ervin Wilson (07:59): But if you are actor, you will sit and listen to what other people are saying and how they say it. Good actors do that all the time. Stephen James Taylor (08:15): Yeah, the cadence Ervin Wilson (08:17): That is just astonished. But you just listen to what they say and how they say it. What is going on out there in the real world? You have acting that surpasses any academy artist right down Stephen James Taylor (08:35): There. Yeah. Ervin Wilson (08:39): I've heard there was a kid from Argentina. No, no. Yeah. Lived down there for a while and his buddies would come up and visit him for his younger brother, so forth. I couldn't help hearing him. And I realized that aside from the words they were saying, the most extraordinary things like the younger brother was saying to the older brother, and I won't try to explain why I wrote it and don't try to understand it. You'll get the drift. Timothy McVay flawed. Goding resurrected quickly, accepted by United States Marines rose up through the ranks, battleships and armored tanks. He commanded them, awarded the silver star posthumously, pinned his bud, his blood spilled by friendly fire screaming in the wind. Stephen James Taylor (10:02): I have absolutely nothing to say. What can you add? Wow. Ervin Wilson (10:11): Not for children. Stephen James Taylor (10:12): I see that's a bedtime story, huh? A bedtime story. Ervin Wilson (10:19): Not for children. No, but I have some, let's see, I've got some lines I haven't used yet, but here I think I've got one. Oh, I finally came around to this and parts of it quite good, but parts of it are not quite continuous in my imagination. You are loving me. But in the real world it could have fit right there. Gary David (11:00): Yes, Ervin Wilson (11:03): But in the real world, you're loving your woman. She carries your child. His name is Green Corn Dancer from oca. His eyes are like the jaguar. His penis is green (11:35): Now, this was just, okay. There are rattlesnakes in Columbia Pacheco. They shake their rattles. They too have the right to live. We do not kill them. I shoot and shoot the penis and rattlesnake be to a bottle of so tall. Can I get a repeat performance of that one? Yeah, yeah. Once we got light looks good, I shoot and shoot the pins and shoot the penis and shoot the penis and rattlesnake meat to a bottle. So cold. That's 5, 5, 5 7. I've taken license with that. You're using fives and sevens, but over here, Ryan McCarney, you need a host of angels guarding over you and a second watchdog host for backup duty. (12:45): Hey, can I wire you? Wire me? This is a microphone already over there. Over there. Oh yeah. Fire going on right down there. Sometimes it's just the, when people were out from Ohio visiting Bruce Didi's father who lived over there, ballerina, and she's does and does some acting. And her father came out visit and there was a big bunch of helicopters over going around and around and he was quite upset. What's going on? I says, well, there's a police station right down there and there's university over there having a big ball game. And then there's a high school over there where they're probably having a political activities going on. (14:11): Bruce was getting more and more ated, ated, consternated with all of this air activity here out there in Iowa. You don't see helicopters overhead all the time. No, but I have seen some very, very strange things too, such as coming over the, I have a perfect view of the traffic patterns and when the traffic patterns change, I can't help noticing if all of a sudden there's an influx of transport planes that go out that right after another Air Force just take, I hate anybody, try them down. I take my duty to spread a little bit of sunshine somewhere. That's good. Whether they want it or not, it's infectious. I just go out and spend a little bit every sunshine there a well there now I've done that. I can go back to being grouchy. Okay, Gary, whenever you're ready. I can go back to suffering. Are we doing things now? Yeah, we're going to start, Gary David (16:14): Actually, we Ervin Wilson (16:15): Just go ahead and clap. Oh, I see. Are you recording, mark? Yep. Just clap it. Clap again. Wilson Gary David (16:23): One. Wilson one. Ervin Wilson (16:26): That was good. Isn't that cool? It's for people who can't play spoons but always wish they could. What is it supposed to be? A music instrument? Gary David (16:52): Yeah. Ervin Wilson (16:56): Spud Murphy died. Gary David (16:58): Yeah, he did. That's why I found that out yesterday. Ervin Wilson (17:03): Did you see the photograph in the newspaper? Had had all of his people and stuff standing around him. He was by a keyboard and he was talking animatedly about it and Chuck Johnie was there. I'd seen the same picture before in the LA Times where it was just about Spud Murphy, but Chuck Donkey was in the picture and I commented on it. I didn't call Chuck yesterday to tell him that I'd seen him in the obituary section. Gary David (17:41): Spud Murphy one. Remember I used to study with him a long time ago Ervin Wilson (17:46): And Chuck Janke did as well. That's why I Gary David (17:49): Know Spud had hopes that we could, that I guess Chuck and I could bring what you do and what he did together. I never could find a way. Ervin Wilson (18:00): The only way I could bring them together is if I started charging the same that he does. And what was it, seven 50 for two hours was it? And so I've decided from now on I'm going to charge eight 50 for two hours. No, I'm just joking. I would rather charge anything for two hours. Gary David (18:32): Tell us a little bit about when you were growing up, what your life was like. Ervin Wilson (18:39): I was born in 1928. Gary David (18:43): It's okay. Okay. Ervin Wilson (18:44): I was born in 1928, June the 11th, 1928 in the Colonial Pacheco Chihuahua, Mexico. And I was actually born in a covered wagon. Gary David (19:05): I didn't know that Ervin Wilson (19:07): The Mormon type covered wagon. My parents had come down from Salt Lake City in that wagon and they'd traveled circuitously until they could finally get across the Colorado River. They found a ferry and that would bring them across and we'd pretty well demark the trail. And they got down there. My father got up to that little valley, and it was just that time of the year when everything was green, green, green. And the poor man thought that he had died and gone to heaven. (19:49): But on top of that, so we settled on a little piece of ground there and that's where I was born. But the reason why we settled, first of all, the exodus, all of the people had left there because Pancho Vie had been wandering around creating a ruckus. And the early Mormons had to just leave. They didn't have among the very first return. So there was a wide open land and we took the spot, a spot that hadn't been settled by anybody. The beauty of it was that it had a ditch, a place where ditch could come out of the river and bring running water to us. And my father repaired the ditch and we had running water. We had a big water wheel. We could do all kinds of things with that water wheel. But shortly after, but my parents just camped out on the place still and they care a wagon until after I was born. And then Gary David (21:06): How many children were there? Ervin Wilson (21:08): I was the second child and my first child was named Lyman and he was there at the time. So my parents decided, well, it's time to build a house. We got another baby after Lyman. It was born. Nobody came very long for four years. And finally my mother went down to president to, I'm not sure if he was an a polygamist official, he was a polygamist. But he had held a high place in the church down in Corona Dubland. And he gave her a blessing. He blessed her and promised her that she would have a baby Gary David (21:56): And that was you. Ervin Wilson (22:00): And catch this a child of promise. And sure enough, she got pregnant and had me. Gary David (22:14): There's a five syllable beginning of a new haiku, a child of promise. There Ervin Wilson (22:20): You go. But that gives you the expectations there at the very beginning. Gary David (22:28): How many children did they have altogether? Ervin Wilson (22:30): 10. 10. 10. Right. At the last reading, the direct descendants of my father and my mother exceed 200 and going, oh God, Gary David (22:46): Direct sentence, Ervin Wilson (22:47): Direct de sentence, 200 and more being born every day, no attempt whatsoever ever on anybody's part to control the inevitable Fibonacci series. (23:09): But they just think it's ridiculous. Lord will provide, he takes care of the smallest sparrow, but the heck. Anyway, my earliest memories are of being actually in the house. I don't remember being in the camp wagon, that's just the two. But in the house, I remember the first thing I remember was actually, believe it or not, nursing for my mother, which means I can remember pretty far back less than 1-year-old when she'd had me laying on her arm like this. It was uncomfortable when I leave there, and I dunno, it was, I remember it somewhat uncomfortable lying on her arm. But then for some reason that memory is still embedded there. The first memory I recall of sounds was the sounds of the wind howling through the adobe cracks had been making this incredibly beautiful music when they, and the cracks are still there and the wind still house through them. And it still makes this beautiful music, this waves and whales and moves so organically and that sound more than any, it has haunted me all my life. (25:06): And then we would get the sounds of the Mexican singing late at night driving, riding their donkeys or their boos or just walking back and forth late at night, just drunk singing to the tops of their voices. These beautiful, beautiful Mexican melodies. I remember particular, they mark Escalante. He would ride down by the river there. We lived by a river. And next to the river is just, we were on an east side hill, no, overlooking some flats by where the water riverbed had gone and left. Nevertheless, rich Loy fields out there and down to somewhat a ways where limestone outcroppings, we call the ledges. And there were signs of hidden activities in the caves and the ledges, little sort of places where they could grind the acorns or whatever. They grinding the little holes, pestles and the rocks. And you can see where they built fires there. And then on top there was this story that the Indians used to gather there. But the top of that hill was important to us because the early morman prophets and mission and elders of the moment church had gone to that hill and right under a gigantic oak tree there. They had prophesied that someday the words of the Lord would spread from that point. (27:04): And I don't know if they ever specifically said that a temple would be built there. But we took that and I think it pretty well indicated that a very, very large temple built that the, with a full on view of where the temple would be. That's why, another reason why my father settled at that spot and all of our lives, we were allowed to believe that someday a temple would in fact be built there. But later on, still when I was very young, but I recall it happening, my father went down there, they built a ice monument at the spot and my father cast a bronze plaque. He got, went around and gathered all the bronze that anybody had, Mel it down, just old pieces of car or something, anywhere you could get blood melted down and had nothing to make a plaque stating exactly who prophesied what Len were in the days embedded the plaque in the monument. (28:29): And there you see the mission work starting to the imprints, the expectations. As a child, I was very much influenced by the early Mormon hymns, and I do have a copy of the hymn book we used when I was a very, very young child. And it has some beautiful old hymns, some of the hymns written by very, very gifted people. How did you hear them? We would just sing them. We were there in Sunday school on the town site was accompanying instrument of any kind. Sometimes there was a piano. We had a piano up there, but it was always out of tune. My brother Liman, just older than myself, was one of the tuners and he didn't know how to drink piano. Nobody ever had a tin of cattle. And it had the most marvelous out tune sound imaginable. And so I remember the Mormon hymns. (29:45): I remember a lot of the Mexican songs, particularly the Well, and I remember folk songs that the kids used to sing that they had learned. And I learned, remember songs that people had composed on the spot and these early hymns were an influence. The early Mexican music was an influence. The early Mexican music was particularly a rich influence because it had a mixture of Spanish influence and indigenous influence. Plus the Spanish influence may have been rich. And Moish influence. And gypsy influence in terms of intonation as well to Yes. The interesting thing is that there to this day, people, if they just sing or whistle without any accompaniment, will sing or whistle something that is off the keyboard, absolutely off the, it has almost nothing to do with the scale that we play on the piano or the guitar, or especially the digitally equalized piano or synthesizer where the piano is placed in. Well, even Stravinski objected to that tuning his stravinski, as you know, started using some doing compositions. He had a very helpful young man helping him. One day the guy decided not to change the subject, but an example of how even good musicians hate that tuning. One of his assistants decided to tune the piano and got out to ranch and Stravinski fairly screamed at him, put that down, don't you change a note? He wanted his sounds where they were supposed to be. Anyway, it was always out of tune than heavens. Gary David (32:12): I recall you telling me that you used to make flutes at that time when you were a kid.

2/5 Interview with Erv Wilson

Ervin Wilson (00:02): What make flutes. We could make little flutes. Yes, we could make flutes from, and we can still make flutes. We use sambuca, elderberry bushes, we have bushes, elderberry bushes going along the ditch banks, and they could be cut double joint, cleaned it down, and you can make very nice flutes out of elderberry. In fact, the Indians of California here, and you have several species of elder berry growing here in California. We're making flutes of that. And the elder berry makes a beautifully lovely breathy tone. And Jim French has been making elderberry flutes and he says that Sambuca nigra, which actually came from Europe and was brought over, has a slightly thicker wall and is somehow better for making elderberry flutes. And so I am going to get some, because I got three bushes from Park Seed Company, I believe it's, and they'll deliver them, cruise off them up there. Gary David (01:32): What do you remember as your first attempts to create a scale of your own? I mean, Ervin Wilson (01:43): When I was very young, but old enough to take piano lessons, my parents decided not to give me piano lessons because it'd sent my older brother over to study piano with sister re mark now. And he had learned how to play the games and stuff, and I enjoy very much what he did playing. And it sounded particularly well on that ho that we had installed up there. And when I went, I'd go to sleep on the porch and I would hear what he was playing. It was so beautiful going out to see, isn't this read harmonium? But we just called it a pop organ playing these little melodies. And I realized that the kind of ecs, creative Swift music was the same kind of ecstasy that I felt when masturbating. I mean, they were just one and the same thing. It was just I was having an ecstatic experience at that point. The difference between the two hadn't, they hadn't to segregate into the different paths and, oh, I'm sorry. Stephen James Taylor (03:21): Here, let's cut for a second. Gary David (03:22): Yeah, let's cut for a second. Ervin Wilson (03:24): Reset. Stephen James Taylor (03:25): You want to put that, Gary David (03:47): Okay. Okay. Stephen James Taylor (03:50): You're rolling. Right. Mark Wilson two. Gary David (03:53): Wilson two. Ervin Wilson (03:56): And my brother Lyman had, Stephen James Taylor (03:58): Oh, sorry, one more time. You got to do it. I need to get actually doing it on film. What's that? I need to see it on film. Yeah, that's good. Ervin Wilson (04:08): My parents had sent my brother Lyman over to study piano with Sister Rene Martin, and he had learned all the, could play them quite well I thought. But my parents decided he had been a complete failure at music, and so they decided not to give him music lessons. He said, why wasting money on Irvin? The Lord moves in strange ways. So I was not forced to take piano lessons. My music psyche was allowed to develop in a very, very natural Gary David (04:54): Way. Yeah, what path did that take? Ervin Wilson (04:58): But later on I learned how to play chords. Some of my friends taught me how to play the guitar chords on the piano, just this, this, this, and this. Play. The melody with the other hand that was just, if you knew two or three chords, you could play any melody you wanted. So I would just play things that way on the read organ. And one day over there at Sunday school, a couple of nice young and good singers, young ladies, Monte Wetton and Hazel Roberta Anderson, one of the Anderson girls got up and sang, there's an unknown grave in a lonely spot, et and so forth, the hymn that I'd never heard. And it had quite a, it was a real tear jerky, but it had a little melody. So I went right home and started playing it on the organ using the same technique, the melody, the chords, et cetera. And my mother looked at me kind of strange. He says, was that the first time you ever heard that song? (06:26): And the Poor Dare was diluted into believing she had a child prodigy on her hands. She says, well, maybe I'd better learn, teach him how to read notation. So she just started with the simplest hand or whatever, little. So once she taught me the notations, she figured I would to read notation. Then she figured I could learn, just learn the hymns by myself. That would be alright. And I thought, well, now if I can read notation, then I can reverse the process and write notation, can't I? And I says, well, let's give it a try urban and see if it works. So I would imagine a picture in my mind's ears and find the note for it and write it down and find it embedded. Little childish, little melody, but not all that background that considering what Mozart could do with melodies like that. And it went C, D and E, CD, E, DE, not F sharp. (08:21): The F was wrong. It was just wrong. I knew what I awarded was somewhere in between F and f sharp. So my initial attempt at composition was thwarted just awarded years and years later, I learned where I was getting that note. I was passing through El Paso when I got to the train station in El Paso. They were having a great big wedding party in there. A girl from down around the colonies was getting married to a fairly wealthy young man up there in El pa. When they owe the people in there at the train station were just dressed to the tees. And they had mariachis. And I went out at the station waiting for Sonia to come pick me up. I was waiting there. And it was late at night. He came as late as we do. A couple of the mariachis came out and one of 'em was showing you the other one how to make the riff. (09:43): But he was like in a sea major scale, so to say. And playing a melody that went from C to B2C, B, a, G, and then F to produce that subdominant chord on FAC, B. The B was the 11th harmonic of the F somehow or other. I haven't checked the ing in that, and it wouldn't have been in that key, but I realized that the trumpet was playing that same from the key of F was playing the same note that I wanted and couldn't get. It was from the early trumpet music that was instilled in the culture where you would play this harmonic F anytime you wanted to. You didn't censor it out. That's where I was. It was throughout all Mexican music there. These are very nice skill. I like that. Does that, now that I know where it came from, it's not so mysterious to me, and it's very clearly I can just take and put it in there and a lot of Mexican melodies. (11:04): And it just worked. And it's an 11th. The 11th Harmonic is embedded right in the folks music down there coming right off the 11th harmonic on the trumpet, which they can't be bothered sensing out because that's what they want to hear anyway. It's that neutral sound that you get on the bagpipes. And a lot of bagpipes made it over, came over to Mexico and a lot of the early religious chants had early pipes that went with them that were not anywhere near equal. The early church chants had a lot of equal type scales in them because they came from Spain and you had the Jewish songs, the Mormon songs, the songs from India all coming through Spain and all using the neutral tones. Gary David (12:07): So you growing up in a less, well, you said in a more natural way, meaning you didn't have a lot of TV or radios Ervin Wilson (12:17): Or no tv, no radio. I wasn't born in a hospital with the mood. With the mood music you get in the hospital play incessant God awful music, and the child is indoctrinated before it. The first sound it hears is these unnatural music. Gary David (12:47): So you were aware that there was something you wanted to hear, it wasn't there. Ervin Wilson (12:52): Well, I knew that neither F nor F Sharp was the right note. I knew exactly where that note should be. Gary David (13:00): Right. Well see. But millions of kids grow up thinking that's where the F and the F Sharp should be. You having grown up in a, where you hadn't heard a lot of 12 equal music suddenly heard, were conscious of what you Ervin Wilson (13:15): Weren't hearing. The hymns were sort of 12. They certainly, the piano was never tuned to the 11th Harmonic. But still, I could hear the 11th harmonic. And that's because if my friend Eduardo Monte, son of Es and her husband Chapel, or Alvin Alvin, he at one point several years ago was hopelessly in love with the girl that was just wrong for him. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And he started writing with a love song to her. He just had them in his ear. And I asked him to sing them for me on the truck going up there. And he sang a couple of them and he sang in a scale that I'd never heard before, but went up there. When he would pass the house, sometimes he would be whistling a tune. And I listened to what he was whistling, and I have a 31 tone set and put it in 31. It would fit fairly good in 31 and F was right. You can do these neutral intervals in 31. And they sound pretty good. So I was able to pick his melodies out of 31, but not out of 12. Gary David (15:01): So what did Eric, can Stephen James Taylor (15:02): We just clap thing again? Accidentally? We're out of syn. Gary David (15:07): You want Stephen James Taylor (15:08): Your question and then we should put our camera on. Go ahead. Gary David (15:17): Okay. You got that, huh? Wilson? Three. So you grew up, left your own devices. When did you start to, what was your first exposure, direct exposure to 12 equal in an educational situation? In other words, when did you, Ervin Wilson (15:48): Okay. When I was about 15, we moved to Oregon and I didn't get any music lessons there, but I was unhappy in Oregon would in the mint fields and so forth. And dad bought a panel for $50, a nice little upright panel piano. And so I bought little books to learn how to play the piano. And I was just buying all of the popular songs of the day. Don't Fence Me in all these songs that back in those days were just Gary David (16:47): About 1943, somewhere Ervin Wilson (16:49): Around there going across the river into Kelso and Longview, Washington and picking up sheet music and learning how to, and a lot of them just had chords. You just played the chords and then it gave the melody line there and I learned all this. And so that was my first exposure to equal training in equal piano music. But it was very shortly, well, I became unhappy there. Gary David (17:29): Yeah, I wanted to know what was the unhappiness about? Ervin Wilson (17:34): Well, I know you want to know. Let us say, I became unhappy. Gary David (17:42): Okay. Ervin Wilson (17:44): I had always been unhappy, and that wasn't the first time I'd tried to run away from home. But this time I realized I could in fact successfully do that and went down to Oakland, Oakland, Oakland, where I heard I could work in the ship guards got there and it turned out it wasn't old enough to work in the shipyards. Well, one thing led to another. I was waiting on the bus for a trip somewhere else, maybe I think I was going to Los Angeles and police came around and wanted to know where I was going and wanted to see my ticket. And his dad asked me how old I was and I told him they thought maybe I was a draft dodge or something. He says, well, you're a true aunt child and you're a runaway child and we're going to have to put you in jail until you cooperate with us and tell us where you're from. (18:52): So they talked me in jail there, and you just left me stuck in jail there. And after several days they called me and they said, we decided to ship you back to Mexico because that's a mage from Mexico. And that I was, he says, oh, I'm from Oregon and by folks are so and so and so and so. My mother got on the line and called one of my aunts who lived right there near Bai and told her to come and get me. And she came and got me and took care of me for a while. And then she sent me back to Rainier, Oregon and my mother seeing that I was going to be a real problem, decided to send me to Utah where my aunt Emily lived on the McDonald's side of the family, aunt Emily McDonald because Aunt Emily McDonald was good with disciplining children and keeping them under control. Mother just felt that she didn't have me under control, which obviously she didn't. No fault of hers. I had a little problem with my father, it just couldn't be how poor man. It was just unsuccessful no matter how hard he had worked. (20:35): Anyway, I went back with to study with Aunt Emily, my cousin Isabelle, Emily Carla, my cousin Isabelle was there and she was just an intelligent and charming and beautiful redhead. And she was studying music with Mrs. Perkins piano music. And it was decided that I would go study music with Mrs. Perkins. You were old at this time. 16, 15, 16. I was still in high school. I had taken one year of high school in Mexico, gone up and taken about a year of high school in Oregon, which was very nice. And then, which I enjoyed because I had some good teachers in Oregon, they taught me English. And that's where I first heard the albatros and a good mathematics teacher. And she taught me some real good algebra, algebra, and I was getting good grades, really good grades in algebra. And I respected her and she respected me. And we got along this way, but then my mother decided, oh, maybe Aunt Emily. (22:23): So I went over and was studying with, I stated Anne, Emily's Isabelle told me, she says, well, changing keys as easily, all you'd do is go around this cycle of fifths. I couldn't know there was such a thing as this cycle of fifths. I really didn't. Once I heard that there was a cycle of fifths, it just opened a whole doorway. I mean, just the whole universe opened before me. But I would go over and study with Mrs. Perkins and I played a few little things using that chord technique. And Mrs. Perkins was just ball. And so she gave me some little etudes to study, just some little things that I could learn how to play and go home and play something when I went to Sunday school that would satisfy the requirements of doing something for Sunday school. And Aunt Emily would go out back, we had a chicken. She, instead of paying, we didn't have money, kill the chicken and pull up some carrots and cabbages and things that would take a package of food over them with his Perkins and made him on. And so I got to study some quite nice things with Mrs. Perkins, and she was amazed how fast I learned. She says several times over, she was amazed at how rapidly I learned. Well, she didn't realize that I had all of this fear training. I could hear things (24:16): Well, but all I had up to that point really a theoretical information was that Oh yeah. And Isabel was playing all the great classics, all of the great masters reading Bach books to Hoodie and the father. And she belonged to the Doll Speaker 5 (24:50): Club, Ervin Wilson (24:54): Believe it or not. So at that point I was getting on, I went back, by that time I was getting close to 18. I went back home for the summer. The second I was 18, I went up to Portland to enlist. I was going to enlist in the Navy. The Navy place was closed. So I went across the street to the Air Force place and they were open and I joined the Air Force and they gave me a physical on the spot and gave me my tests and things. And I noticed as we were about, (25:50): After I finished the test, I was just sitting out there in the room and one of the officers was pointing at me and the other officer was looking at me doing several. I didn't find out until later that on the one test, which required the rotation of images and saying, this image is the, like this image, you take this image and do strange things inverted. And it took me just a few minutes to figure out a routine where I could trace 'em down. And what I did was intellectually cheated. But I answered the question correctly. The guy was telling his matting officer that I got a perfect score on that test. And evidently I was the first person ever to go through that to get a first perfect score on spatial visualization. That's important. Which I didn't realize at the time that everybody else didn't have the ability to visualize spatially the way I did. (27:13): And anyway, I went on into the service, just happy as could be, and got over to Japan. But a fluke we got, we went, what we did is I was over in Rainier, Oregon, I enrolled and we went up to by Seattle to airbase up there. And they put us through some initial, gave us uniforms and duffel bags and things like that and put us on a train. And we went on the train all the, down through Los Angeles all the way, if you El Paso all the way to San Antonio, Texas. And there was a Air Force training place down there and went over there and I was in the Air Force there. (28:11): But we would go into San Antonio and down by the banks, there's a little place there where they would play jazz. And not only did they play jazz, it was just good jazz. I heard good jazz in San Antonio too. Did you? Now I crossed the alley from Anita oday. Yeah. Key Largo Strange Cargo. I wandered. At any rate. So then we were all set up there and I ended up, but in the barracks, I was a bunch of kids from North Carolina and they would always tune up North Carolina bluegrass. It wasn't country, it was hillbilly music. They would always tune it in. And we were getting some very, very good hill building music coming through. (29:24): And I would go to the radio, pick something out, they say, oh, that's, that's not the right thing to listen to. It's been acidified. We went over to Tokyo finally by the fluke that I had in school up in Rainier, Oregon. I had played the tuba and the drums and so forth. And we had gone on to an encamp near Tokyo there where they had all of these little huts with heater in them. And two guys slept inside of a little P tent that it was called. And they were getting his had all out and ready to ship us to Korea. And somebody.

3/5 Interview with Erv Wilson

Ervin Wilson (00:00): Understand perfectly well here with what he was saying, because the woman who I was with was, would translate, he didn't say a word of English, but then he'd give me sound samples. And on and on the sound samples, they were done on flute, the division of the minor third into hole step, and a semitone on that particular fruit delivered in an eight seven and a 28 27 if you, a large hole tone, the eight seven. And then the semi difference between that and the minor third, when I heard the eight seven played in a musical context that I could not ignore or could not dismiss as being my whole brain absolutely re rewarded itself. I, I started laughing just, and I, I uncontrollably at the psychic shock of, of, of hearing something and, and suddenly recognizing it's true musical meaning. Mm mm Yeah. And so I tried to conceal that. (01:26): I was laughing by looking away. And if he noticed that I was laughing, he did not allow me to notice that. And because he didn't want me to lose face, nor did I want, but what, however it worked out. But I found out later also in other contexts, in other Japanese films that had I'd seen filmed, they, the same pentatonic scale would divide that minor third into equal parts, not the Pythagorean parts. So that there, on the shaku Hachi there was quite a bit of freedom on how you played Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the different pentatonic mosquitoes. (02:17): Uh, and so that was where I, and I didn't know I was hearing the eight, seven. I just knew that that was working. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I went to the service club over at Tokyo one day and they did have a piano there. And just sitting there playing some of my own compositions with my own strange harmonies that I would, you know, I would just transpose minor courts by a minor third and do, do things that are really forbidden, parallel, <laugh>, all of this stuff that, that if you go to music theory classes, you can't do that. Well, of course you can. Don't be silly, but <laugh>, you can do whatever you want to do. And I was still, but I was sitting there playing some more stuff and there's this poor young, um, whack or waving, homesick and sad and standing by the piano there less than just sobbing. (03:36): So just, I heard it. He really beautiful, abusive <laugh>. Not to laugh at him <laugh>. But then this fellow came along and was listen to me. And he said, I play on the harmonics. He says, I play the harmonics. And so he, the harmonics, what are the harmonics? And he explained what the harmonics series was to me. And that was the first time in my whole life that anybody had ever told me that there was such a thing as a harmonic series. So I had clued every two. I knew what the chain of fifths was, that I knew what the Harmonic series was at that point. When I realized what the, I would still find the, try to find the closest thing to the seventh and the 11th. I couldn't pretty do it all, but I did the best I could. But, but when I got to, when I finally got out of the Air Force after three years, then it was the reason I enlisted. (05:07): 'cause ordinarily it would've been a five year enlistment, but they, this greedy gave a special for people would go in there and just join up quickly. You can get out. And, uh, and so I got out when I, when it was time for me to get out, I left. And then my immediately commanding officer, I was back there, my New York City again. And, and I wrote up my own discharge and took it in and, and, and he suddenly realized that he was going to lose his secretary. And I was doing good work for him. I was, would correct his English, correct his spelling and, uh, produce a professional looking document. And that poor fellow realized suddenly that he was losing me. And he called me into office and he almost begged me to stay or fell outta. I says, I've gotten to get to school and get an education. And, uh, and I said, I'm not, I'm not gonna get anywhere here. Actually, I would've got somewhere. I, I stayed there. I would, I just, I would've just, if I, that I wanted to go into the, the wine. I wanted to become a pilot (06:30): And some, some pilot school. I'll stay under that condition and then I would become <inaudible> anyway. But anyway, he realized that I should get him education, I realized. So I went straight home to Rainier, Oregon, and I had my GED scores and general education development. He said, he says, Irv, well, he says, you are in fact the equivalent of a high school graduate. And so my mother got on the lie and called up Uncle Howard, my uncle Howard McDonald, who was then running Brigham Young University. And he says, Howard, could you get Irv into school there this year? And, uh, he says, well, send me his, send me his transfers records. And he wrote back what went on the letters. And he wrote back and says, have him take a short course in this class. This, he needs one more time to take it. Have him take, he said, by mail, took the class. When she fixed me up to go school, I got BYU. The very first thing I did is ask him, are there any microtonal books here? It so happened, there was one fellow doing his doctoral desk Dissertate. Wait, you Gary David (08:02): Knew that, that, um, label by that time, I mean, after you were in Japan, you knew what Microtonal meant. Ervin Wilson (08:12): I knew what Microtonal was because before I even got went to Oregon at 15, I had read about the Indian scale of 22 tones. Okay. Somehow or rather way out there and isolated Pacheco, I got wind of the fact that the Indians had a 22 tone scale. And so I said, must find out about 22 tone scale. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But, um, so I knew there was a 22 point scale, so Gary David (08:51): You asked if they had any microtonal. Ervin Wilson (08:53): So, so as soon as soon as soon as I got to Portland, as soon as I got to Rainier, Oregon, I found that I could borrow books from the University of, or of, from the state university at, at Salem. And so I wrote in and said, do you have any books on music? And they sent me two, uh, two or three references on Indian music, but none of them, Fox strangle ways and that set, but none of them gave the discrete descriptions of the ratios. They just, it was just kind of almost bizarre gibberish, you know, using strange formulas and so forth. But I realized that there was at least a chain of fifths at that time that went out beyond 12. And, uh, by that time, I'd also learned that there was a harmonic series. But anyway, getting to BYU knowing that there was a 22 tone scale, perfectly viable 22 tone scale. Also in, in Mexico, I knew somewhere, I knew that there was a slightly flatted fifth. I could hear it just a quarter tone flat. And I didn't know where that fifth came from, but I knew that somewhere some far away Indians were singing that people from American Indians were singing that lowered fifth. Gary David (10:40): Were there any key people at Brigham Young that enhanced that curiosity of yours? Ervin Wilson (10:49): The guy who had done his doctoral thesis that went and talked to him, he said, yes, there's a book by Harry P up there, there's a book by Joseph Yasser. And, um, there's Sensations of Tone by Helm Hols. So I went up there one after the, and got each one and, uh, began working with them. And I would, I was, I was also taking piano lessons at the same time. And I got, had the privilege, unique privileges, studying with Leon down, very, very gifted composer. He finally took over Long Beach, the University of Long Beach. And, um, but I had enough information then that I could, that I could figure out scales. But, uh, the calculation of the ratios was exceedingly difficult. And I knew in my mind's eye that I had to have a ratio. I had to have a way of making the octas all equal in size and a way of measur so that they would all be equal in size. (12:16): That gave the arc to as the unit. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And my friends say, oh, you want it? And, and I had some notion how to, I, I had had some notion of how to do it. I, I had actually somehow other heard of the golden section by that time. I don't know how it was, but they says, there's this math student over there and go tell him what you, what you're doing. And he, he, what you're trying to do, and you, I couldn't quite get it mathematically. And he sat down and I explained to him what I was trying to do. He says, what you're doing is called logs to the base two, and this is how you solve them. There is a great big book, this thick up here, all of log rhythms to the base 10 all written in, handwritten in with, with so many of them that you can interpolate them to get anything you want in there. What you do then is you take logs to Base 10 and you run this quick little routine on them, and they turn into logs to base two. So by hand, I began calculating by hand, calculating and, and changing logs base 10 over to logs base two up through 64. And those have been published, but I did them back at BYU. Oh, interesting. They were published much later than that. (14:00): And that gave me such a, having logs based two made some computation so easy to do. And just the more I worked with them, the more I realized what they, I could do with them. Just, I think about it a little while a sudden I just realized that this was open obsess, and it put me literally light years ahead of all of my peers and all, and has kept me there ever. The simple fact that I can work logs based two lightning put calculations and, uh, you, you know, how valuable they're, of course you do. And so then I began taking these logs based to try and decided I was going to calculate, but that by that time I could go through the divisions one by one by one by one, and find out quickly which divisions were going to have the best approximations to the, to the Harmonic series. (15:08): And I went up there and, you know, and it says, got up to 7 0 17. Hey, there's another, there's some interesting things going on up there. I got up to 22, I said, oh my gosh, this is, this is a, a miracle. And, but I kept on going and I got up to 29 and it really looked good. <laugh>, and then some inner voices keep on going here. <laugh> went two more steps forward and got to 31 and completely rediscovered the 31 Tone equal division, which a August to Novarro had, was perfectly literate about and published a year before I was born in Pacheco. But I rediscovered 31 and began figuring out ways to use 31. But incidentally, before I stopped, I had actually calculated 41 2 on top, and I thought, I, I better find, I got up to 41. I realized that's just not as bad. Um, so then, um, Gary David (16:26): I have a question. Ervin Wilson (16:27): Yeah. Gary David (16:28): I noticed that there was a shift in this period of time from making music, you know, melodies and playing chords and playing in bands, and suddenly the shift toward the scale itself suddenly took place during this time. Is that, am I seeing that right? Ervin Wilson (16:47): I would always, when I would go up there, I would, uh, I was always taking formal piano and, uh, lessons. I was taking piano lessons from first of, I take with a, a certain eccentric piano teacher that taught me how to play a, something pleasant enough, but I wasn't happy with them. One day I was driving along and, uh, I had the radio. I bought a little cross, the little Green Cross hadn't split. I picked it up down there because it wasn't very, it didn't, didn't cost me very much at all. And I wanted, you don't, I don't know if you ever even saw the Little Cross. Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh, you have it. Oh, alright. But, but I was driving it around one day with the radio on, and I heard this music, I could not believe my Bella Bar talk a name that I couldn't forget. And so I dashed out and somehow, or they got hold of his microcosms and started playing the Microcosmos on my own. And when I started, but later on I started studying piano music with, with Leon Dell and himself. And I told him about, and I had written a few things for Leon that studied music with him. And he was, uh, (18:35): Well, he, and he was, but so I said, she says, where did you hear about? Where did you hear about talk? I heard on the radio. And, but by that time I had somehow hurt this finger right here. I caught it in steel door. I had to work at this, found not work at a hospital. And, and a relative patient refused to go back into his cell. And so I pushed the door shut and the door shut my fingers well, so I could use this. So I started working one hand and started working the other, and we continued on through the Microcosmos Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But by that time, I was starting to make serious plans about writing music in 31, and figured out ways and keyboards and things and that forth. And I'd put, I'd, I'd figured out a generalized keyboard, I, and put it on a little piece of paper and told Leon down I was going to write 31. And he said, he says, uh, he was sort of, she said, I'd like to hear you do some good things in 12 first <laugh>. And I was just, I was just raring and ready to go. How Gary David (20:05): Old were you about this thing? Ervin Wilson (20:08): I'd been three, three years in the Air Force. And, and after the Air Force, I went straight to BYU. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Gary David (20:15): So you're about 21, 22. Ervin Wilson (20:18): Okay. 18 plus three is 21. So I was getting in, moving into my 22nd year. Okay. And, uh, so, uh, but I, I stayed. So he Gary David (20:36): Said, you should start learning, doing some stuff in 12 before Ervin Wilson (20:40): You did 31. He, he felt like I should really try to write, and I had no way of realizing 31. But, uh, I decided to, there was somebody at at USC who was very, very skilled in Microtones, and I forget his name, but I decided I was gonna come out to California and studied with him. Got out here, and I didn't have any money. I needed money and, uh, and didn't have a job, and I needed a job. And, uh, one thing led to another and I didn't get over to USC. It turned out I found out later that the man was a hypocrite. Anyway, he, he wasn't serious about Michael to, he was, he just wrote that article because he was a good writer and he was being paid to write it. And, but, but, but at that point, I had 31 down and I began designing keyboards and I found out about John Brock out in Compton. (21:53): And so I set up the pitches and went right out to John Brock and said, can you make me set of, of Song Bells to 31? And I had organized one. The, the song Bells are still in there in Amil Richard's warehouse. I, I haven't been able to get them away from 'em. He retiring into Hawaii, but I had a set of song belts to 31 made, and that was the, the probably the first instrument in 31. And I was living down in Santa Monica that before I actually got the song. Yeah. I had the song built by that time. But then I began thinking, it says Erwin, I said, I said to myself, I says, Erwin, um, you know, probably somebody else. You don't just suppose that somewhere else on the planet. Someone else is doing 31. (23:01): It's, it couldn't be. But I wrote to James Murray Barber and it says, dear, dear Murray Barber, I'm, this isn't what I'm doing with 31. Can you tell me there's somebody else, anywhere that, you know, I was making music in 31. And he shot a letter back and he said, it is just amazing how two people in such different parts of the world can be doing the same thing. And got me in touch with Doctor, with Adrian Fa. And I set up communication with him right away. Of course, he had his pipe organ in, in there, in, in Tyler's museum. And they were getting together and ha getting concerts. And uh, and we finally got the Faulker. And so I was corresponding with Dr. Faulker, and he was a, a a bit impatient with my keyboard. And I asked him what his keyboard was like, and he wouldn't divulge what his keyboard was like. (24:16): But I had a dream one night. I just told myself I was, all right, I'm going to, I'm gonna dream what his keyboard is like. So I went, I went to sleep and I dreamt, and I dreamt they were just straight horizontal rows. And the woman was showing me the keyboard, and it was just horizontal rows. And one was expected to go by, by and hold tos up this way and semi tos up this way. And I said, that's ridiculous. And I says, that's the first idea I had. I would just reject completely because you, you go off the edge of the keyboard besides Boong, he is so much better. (25:08): And, but anyway, it went out to John Brock and he built a set of song goats and I could listen to anything I wanted to in 31. The tuning wasn't perfect because he had to tune from vibration. He caught the master pitch, but then he had to tune from beats and to figuring out with a, with a ball on his piece of string, how fast the beat should be and so forth. And he finally got his set of 31. That was fairly good. But when we really got it right down to Measurings, we, well, after the, after he built me the Song Bells, I had those, and that would lend them to Amal Richards. And he would use them in films. (26:04): This is much late, like, like flute Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and stuff. And then I had, but then I also had a 22 to instrument built from square branch tubing and had one of those built up. And those were used to make that celestial sound. And, and that guy, that Chinese fellow, what was his name, looking for his father, um, uh, it was a whole series about a boy, Kung fu Kung fu, yes. David, um, IDE, David Ide, uh, that, that was a, for, for transfiguration things they would use that as transf. But at any rate, I got out here and I had the 31 tone sets and met Harvard Derrick, and he had, and so, uh, I, Derrick began, introduced me around, and there were other people who were doing 31, but me and John Chalmers got together and I, knowing the rules, knowing what I had to do to do a search for 30 ones, just an extensive search for good harmonics, cooperating with John Chalmers. (27:26): And we did the equal DI divisions, and we, and checked to see how well they did the harmonics up fairly high up in the harmonics series. And we went up to around 2000 divisions and to have the tables printed up there, I still have them. And we worked from that. Right. But from that, from that point on, we started, well, it, it took, by that time I started patenting, putting down on paper and patenting, patenting, pardon me, different keyboards for 31. And, uh, then a, an actual generalized keyboard for 22, which is the, which is your keyboard. Got a patent on that. And then we began, uh, exploring different ways to tune it and so forth and so on.

4/5 Interview with Erv Wilson

Gary David (00:00): Did did at some point, what I'm hearing is that your interest shifted into scale formation instead of composition, or did you Ervin Wilson (00:11): Propose the music in 31? No, I, in my mind, and, and that scale formation and composition are not two different things, that you compose the scale as you're composing and you use the scale that is Right. But I got, but I got this from, uh, uh, there were two gentlemen, way back in the tuley back there in Iowa. Earl <inaudible> got a grant to figure out whether we, whether we were actually tuning scales in J or in et Gary David (01:04): Mm-Hmm. Ervin Wilson (01:04): <affirmative>. And they started, that's boom's letter in three boom's. There you go. Thank you. And they, and they had the monies and they set up sets of equipment to measure very, very careful on a sliding string what people were doing. What they found out that people were not playing in either equal or just, they were just playing impossibly out of tune. Impossibly added two. And they, but they began looking at things and they said, but it looks like they're playing in one with one tuning when they're in one key. But if they moved in another key, they go to a different tuning. If the, like if you're in the key of C and you play a D chord, then the A will go upward by a comma. Uh, then if you're playing in, in C major, and in fact, two things will happen if you mod modulate from, if you just modulate from C Major to G major, you have to raise the F and you have to by a semitone, a chromatic semitone, and you have to raise the A by a comma. And I realized that, and they called that extended reference, and they wrote a number of articles published in the Yale Journal of Music Theory, which I devoured voraciously, and I swear I must have been the only person on earth who had the remotest idea of what they were talking about, because Yale was buying it up. They were publishing their articles right down the line, not realizing that what booms lit and krill were saying was pulling all of the prompts out from under et <laugh> <laugh>. (03:24): Well, finally Blooms living in Creole for no particular reason whatsoever, ran out of funds. They couldn't, they couldn't get their funds renewed. And so the research dwindled, I mean, pe people out there where they were doing the university sponsor had no idea what they just do. You know, just a couple of nice young men who were, you know, doing some weird student studies and, and they, they were calling, um, they had their equipment and, um, they had to sort of close up shop and weren't able to continue their, they weren't just, weren't getting their salaries. And so this was brought prematurely to an unfortunate hall that they could only have been allowed to continue the research as they would've gone on. And because they, they believed that probably the same kind of extended reference patterns existed in other cultures as well. (04:37): Well, of course they do. For the first example, that is Japanese and ese music, where they'll change the pitches depending on what key they're Right. And, um, but at any rate that I, somewhere around there, I got to meet I de Tillman Schafer and, and number of the people they had built 19 to in and, and de had built a quarter tone Viccor. They're just beautiful. But he didn't, he didn't have any idea about other divisions between, besides quarter tones. I had to teach him that there were other tunings. And then I found a little guitar shop, Conde's guitar shop that would re guitars for me. And I, and, and Glory b hallelujah. I got the first guitar built. It was a little 17 tone guitar, but I could get good 17 ET and pe There's still people out there that love 17 et What I like about it is when you make a 34 to scale out of it. And, but I had a number of guitars made to different tunings, and if I couldn't get the tuning, I could ship the bridge a little way. Gary David (06:04): Yeah. Uh, you had me make a, I I had a 22 and a 41 made. Ervin Wilson (06:10): Yes. Gary David (06:10): Yeah. I still have it. Ervin Wilson (06:12): Well, well, they, they were in here. Gary David (06:14): Yeah. Ervin Wilson (06:16): I You, do you have, do you have some too? Yeah. Oh, you do? Yeah. I thought I had your, okay. Alright. But I, I actually have your 22 and I Gary David (06:26): Think I have your 22. I still have the 41. Yeah, he has my 22, but I have the 41. I think I have yours. Your can. Ervin Wilson (06:34): Okay. That one, I'm not sure who that belonged to. Now it may have, uh, but anyway, somebody somehow, or the one of my guitars, oh, it was a Harmonic series guitar. Anyway, um, by that time I had, I had met Perry Parch. Gary David (06:59): What year Ervin Wilson (07:00): And are we talking about? Gary David (07:01): Huh? What years are we talking about? Ervin Wilson (07:04): He had been up north in that little town, Gary David (07:11): Petaluma. Ervin Wilson (07:12): Petaluma. And he had come down here and he lived out there in the valley. Uh, um, I don't remember some of the little town out in the valley there, just going across that little, taking the, the road up over the hill there, and you drop down into, um, a little area there. And I Gary David (07:44): Can't remember, it doesn't matter. But this was in the sixties, early sixties was it? Or late middle sixties. Ervin Wilson (07:50): Yeah. And, uh, early, very early sixties. Yeah. Uh, it was just after 1963 that I'd first met Harry Park. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Gary David (08:09): What was that meeting like? Ervin Wilson (08:13): Uh, it was nice. It was nice. How I got in touch with Harry Parch was interesting. And I was down on the beach one day, and this young man who was, happened to be there, he'd just come down from Petaluma. I just learned that he'd just come down from killed a and I asked him a few few questions and he knew Harry Park as it turned out. And I said, oh, do you have his address? And the guy was innocent because his author, his writing a book, and he, and he, and he appreciated the way I used words once in a while. I'd used words in a way that absolutely shocked him or just amazed him. So he, he, he pulled out of his wallet. He pulled out Harry Park, his address and gave it to me, and I wrote to Harry Park and, and enrolled him some of the things that I had been doing. (09:16): And the, then Harry Parks moved down to the Valley, and I got in touch with him there and helped him, started helping him, put them the reverse him together and would slip him, schlep him around. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> over to UCLA where they had a workshop and we'd, we'd go over there and work free and he'd buy up all the redwood. I had helped him put the whole thing together, and it was really a privileged in place helping him put the diamond, reverse them together. And so he had to do a little bit of art work, but, but I always, and she says, well, he said, well, I'm gonna mention, I'm gonna mention my book for, you know, I, you didn't quite exactly understand the geometric relationship between the Diamond and the Diamond reverse. And I says, well, if you get down under the thing and turn upside down and look at it from underneath that in a just particular way, you get the diamond reverse him. And so he actually wrote that and down in his, in the volume of his book. And he told me, he says, and I says, oh, I'm going to be famous <laugh>. And he says, and he says, oh, stop it, <laugh>. (10:41): But I began to show him by, by that time, I had come across these, rather by the sheriff's promptings of that silent voice that told me to keep on looking. I'm just, it's, it's written down there, but it, something told me to keep on looking. And I discovered that, uh, well, first of all, Paul Bieber explained to me what Pascal's Triangle was. I went over to Paul Beaver's place, and he had a group of very, very talented people who'd show up there about once a week or at least twice a month. And we would get together and discuss and show and, and, and tell and film composers that work with electronic music that did the music for Forbidden Planet. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that did a, if Speaker 3 (12:02): You can Ervin Wilson (12:04): John and Baron, I forget. Anyway, they, they were doing, they did some very, very impressive electronic music for Forbidden Planet, which I thought I wasn't all that impressed by, but it was good music. Was it John and Baby Baron Couples? It was a couple married couple. Anyway, we wouldn't meet over there. And there was also a very, very accomplished vocalist who did vocal techniques over there and people like that. And, and I would go over there and show my things off, and Paul Beaver agreed to do some tuning for me. And he says, but don't tell anybody, but I've charged you. And he did the metal for the 22 tone metal for which Craig Grady now has in his ensemble. And then we started tuning up the transplant, which Mike created play, and they would beat it out of 10. And I had, I found out that I could use 22 E two, the ET that I wasn't happy with it. I, by that time, I learned how to make a interesting 22 just with seven amendment in the seminar. And you and I do a lot of theoretical experimentation on 22, we had a whole stack of 22 tunings. Yeah. Speaker 3 (13:54): I still have. Ervin Wilson (13:56): And, uh, so I had set it up in adjust tuning and was much happier in the just tuning and (14:13): Well, but at any rate, I, um, when the hair parts came down here, I finally had the courage to actually live, well, actually at an earlier point, I had ordered all, all his, all of his at you. When I was at, at um, uh, BYU. I thought, oh, I shouldn't listen to any of Harry parts. I'll read his theories, but I don't want to be unduly influenced by his style. So I better not listen to him. But by the time I got his address from this very famous writer, by the way, who wrote a very, very successful book, and he would read me chapters of the book, and I'd say, well, that's good. That's quite good that that, and, uh, I could see why he was going to be successful, but I never dreamed that he would be such an outrageous success. He teaches now at Down at there at USC, he's on the teaching staff at USC. What's his name? Huh? What's his name? Teacher. I have to leave the name unspoken because it's too, it discloses a little bit too much more than I want the kitties to know. Okay. <laugh> off, off film. I'll tell you. Okay. <laugh>. (15:46): I mean, some children do, at least in the Mormon church, have to have things sanitized. Not so much these days as they used to <laugh>. But, but by that time I was getting together with Harry p and I was doing Lattice works for him, and I did a lattice work for him, showing him, this is the way I would lattice your scale. And he looked at it non comprehending. But the next time I saw him, he called me this side. He says, I've been looking at your lattice. And he says, you know something, I understand <laugh>. (16:33): I, he said, I understand. He was, he was so pleased with himself to see that somebody would be doing, and it, it wasn't until he saw that I was able to put his keyboard on the boon cake keyboard with only one redundancy and its mirror image that he began to see in his later years. He began to regret having burnt so many bridges behind him. He thought, oh, I sh I sh I I burnt too many bridges. Here I am isolated in the universe with no connection to any past whatsoever. When he saw that everything that he did could be placed right on the Boong case with uncanny mapping, I mean, it was what, the way it fits on there is absolutely uncanny. I, the mans that we intuition, he say he was not a good theorist. His theoretical nature was working over time and over. (17:50): And these things says, um, he was a good therapist. And he says, oh, I'm not a prophet. I'm just a, I'm just a good, you know, I just, uh, like to make my own instruments and these scales are not, don't really mean anything. I was switching all over the place. He was a prophet. He literally was prophetic because he was doing things that he didn't have the words for. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And now we we're learning what those words are. He didn't know what the feeble series was. He didn't, <inaudible> Triangle was. He didn't, he didn't, uh, at any rate, um, parch is very, very central Yes. To the things that are going on. And it's, uh, pleasing. It pleas me that I can add and contribute to the understanding of what parch actually means. Right. No end. But <inaudible> Novarro was doing things quite parallel to the parch at the same time. (18:59): In some ways, not up to, in other ways, somewhat beyond parts, but it's usually, it turns out that people who work with string lengths and strings get a very, very firm grasp of the ratio. Or if you, if they're just tuning things up with no strings there, their grasp of the ratio is not as tactile, they're not as visible. If you can see where the string is divided in this many parts. And then all you need is a string division to tell you, which, well, the Greeks do, that they, the Indians, the Greeks knew things that the people of India didn't know. The people of Indian knew things that they couldn't quite describe. They would call 'em by strange names and give the most awkward, well, they did awfully well with what they did, but they didn't have any concept for the Harmonic series. Mm-Hmm. (20:10): <affirmative> when, and the, when they were using the Fifth Harmonic or the seventh Harmonic, they didn't know how to tell you the racial, the Greeks did. And it wasn't until around the 13th century when Indian music was profoundly influenced by Persian music, that the people in India finally came to begin to grasp this subtle idea of ratios <laugh> in the earnest of days. The, the, their verbiage is they understood how to tune the chain of fifths, and they could carry it out quite a few places. <laugh>, in fact, they could not only tune it out to 17 places, Hyron, they could add a few more tones and get their 22 shooty. And they worked miraculously, somehow they worked. And it is a miracle, but it's based, the miracle is based on the sch an interval that is so small that it can be hardly heard. And if you tune it up on your tuneable instruments, it's not likely that you'll not lose there. You'll lose it in your slippage. You'll, uh, nothing will hold. (21:51): But anyway, by that time I was in touch with her and I was very, very aggressively moving. I had on the keyboard front. And even if I don't, and even when I didn't have any instrument at all, I could, I figured out ways, get fitting guitars and just had Larry's scale tron for a while where I could tune things up. I remember. And, uh, you still have that in there? What's that? Isn't that what you have inside? You have that inside still? It's still inside. Uh, the, the, the motor of it, the cooling motors not working. And I haven't actually used it. Some of the switches may have rested into the place that will need to be fixed up, but it is sitting in there. Uh, there is a, there are other scaler ones around somewhere in town. There's another one, um, that I, I don't, I have no idea where it is, but the, um, the reason I don't want, don't want to spend a lot of money returning the Tron. It does have one feature that I like. There are areas of the Tron where I can get into absolute mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and Absolute is a beautiful territory to be. And there's no absolutely no digital can duplicate. Absolute. If, Gary David (23:44): If someone was not musical, how would you describe to them what absolute means if someone didn't know what you're talking about? Ervin Wilson (23:56): I would say it's like, not just look daisy into paradise. It's going into paradise. It's a paradise of experience. And, uh, digital has, yet, I have yet to hear digital that can do absolute and be truly convincing. And on the, on the rapid, on the fly, you get people doing rapid trails and rapid, rapid moons. Hubs play so fast that sometimes the digital nature of what he's doing shows through. Anyway, Uhhuh <affirmative>. And people are saying, well, how accurate do you have to get, uh, as, as accurate he can get <laugh> and David, even David Rades has there, you know, there is sometimes, you know, he supposedly he was doing absolute for, um, yet young. But he says, sometimes there's, there's aberrations that slip in there. This little stuff. <inaudible>, Gary David (25:20): Can I, can I interrupt for a moment? Yeah. Let's summarize kind of at this point. 'cause we have some musical questions we want to ask later after we take a break. Oh, sure. But there's something I wanted to ask you. If, let's assuming there was a generating tone to your life as, and how all of this developed, could, could you verbalize anything about that? What was the underlying motivation that kept taking you into all these various areas of interest that most people didn't follow? Ervin Wilson (25:56): Because my, I could, I could hear them. Gary David (26:02): What made you have a passion for what you heard? What, what, what, well, Ervin Wilson (26:08): What makes me have a passion for growing corn? Yeah. Question. I was born in, I was born in a corn field. I was born into music, uh, <laugh>. The reason I have a passion for music is because I know that in some ways I'm very good at it. Not always, I, I don't have discrete control in my fingers. Uh, but in, in some aspect, aspects of music, I'm very, very good Gary David (26:46): At it. I also sense a, some kind of ideological passion behind it too. Ervin Wilson (26:52): Ideological. What does that word Gary David (26:54): Mean? That means something you believe in, but you can't actually proof. Ervin Wilson (27:01): No, no. It's not that. It's the music itself that lives in me. It's that a part of my brain thinks in music I wake up in, in the mornings and when I'm out in the quiet, I will wake up in a certain key. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I've been there <laugh>. I don't, uh, a good part of my brain is actually a musical brain. And that's, that's a way of, it's difficult to say anything rational about the musical brain, but it's a language that we have, a very valid language that we have for dealing with effer bowls. Gary David (27:53): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> for things Ervin Wilson (27:55): That, that cannot otherwise be spoken. Right. Why do people write poetry? Why do people dance? Why do people do anything that they have a passion for? Gary David (28:04): But I'm interested in what you did it for. Huh? I'm interested in what I know other, we've all done it in some way or another. But you in particular. Ervin Wilson (28:13): Oh, because I couldn't help it <laugh>. That's about that. It just, if, if I don't, if I don't do music, I say, well, what are you gonna do? Feed the pigeons. <laugh>, Gary David (28:37): Are we on tape? What's that? Are we, are you out of that? Uh, yeah. Have three minutes left. You have three minutes left? Yeah. Do you want a break take? Um, I don't care.

5/5 Interview with Erv Wilson

Gary David (00:00): <silence> Ervin Wilson (00:02): Uh, ill trying to breathe Marcus Hobbs (00:06): Civilization. Gary David (00:07): Yeah. Is that what they call it? Remember that old song? Bongo? Bongo? Bongo? I Dongo? No, no, no, no. Ervin Wilson (00:17): My, my friend from Douglas, no, that was Gary David (00:19): In the forties. Forties. Mm-Hmm. Ervin Wilson (00:21): Right. Gary David (00:22): Bingle. Bangle. Bungle. I don't want to leave the jungle. I refuse to go Ervin Wilson (00:26): <laugh>. Oh, why don't I live in Douglas, Arizona where the air Gary David (00:31): Is clean? Danny Kay. Did Ervin Wilson (00:33): I think about it again? Louis Gary David (00:34): Prima Louis. Ervin Wilson (00:36): But would I do, Marcus Hobbs (00:39): What would you do? When couldn't you do this there? Ervin Wilson (00:43): I could do my gardening there, but I couldn't, I would not have, I wouldn't have places where I'd get, I could go to restaurants I couldn't go to Gary David (00:55): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Ervin Wilson (00:57): Good, really good Mexican restaurant. Maybe a good Mexican restaurant there. I couldn't, well, this, this is where, it's this face, this is where it's happening. Yeah. Gary David (01:11): Yeah. Ervin Wilson (01:12): Somewhere between here and Brisbane, Australia. Gary David (01:16): <laugh> more Burke. Ervin Wilson (01:17): Warren Burke is doing lots of active stuff. He sent me a, a packet of stuff that thick. I, I, well, he's really Gary David (01:27): Prolific, as he says. I'll sleep with any scale for a night. <laugh>. Yeah. Ervin Wilson (01:32): I sent him to preliminary sketches of what I was doing and made sure that he got that CIO Society papers. As soon as he saw the FCI paper, he, he began extrapolating and said, well, if you can do that, you can do these other, you can do the pay log. He did all of those property just sent me back. He said, dad, did I do these correctly? And so I've sent him a paper. I says, see, see, it's ju it's justified to the left, and you take the things off to the right. Well, when you are on the Lucas Triangle, you had better take a look at the left too Gary David (02:20): <laugh>, Ervin Wilson (02:23): Because the things that are happening on the left side are just not a flip of the things that happen on the right side. Hm. In fact, there's a, a lot of intriguing stuff happening on the Lucas Triangle just going along. Any of the diagonals were parallel. It just like we were going through the, through the whole thing, point by point. And comparing it to Sloan, Marcus Hobbs (02:49): Are you, uh, adding up entries on bag and are you adding up entries, or are you just looking at the actual numbers themselves? On the, on the scale. Ervin Wilson (02:59): I, I don't have sound samples. I just, I didn't quite hear your question. Marcus Hobbs (03:06): When you're looking at the Lucas, uh, triangle, are you looking at the entries themselves? Are you adding up entries along Ervin Wilson (03:13): Oh, yeah. Way like you do? Well, I'll do some hand work using my little calculator and do the difference. A few different sls. Usually I just pull out the central slant, which will give you the Fibonacci series, either right or left, but it will be achieved by adding different numbers up. Completely different sets of numbers you would get on the, uh, <laugh>. I, I, I can, I have only passed that out to two people, to Warren Burton to Jim French. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because they had to have an, it wasn't really quite ready for publication. Uh, and Craig made it was over. I showed that to him. But I'm just so pleased that somebody that this came out of the few ways. I, it saves me all that explanation, you know? And it also saves me the embarrassment of saying, I don't see these references anywhere now. (04:18): Like I see, write down his article as a reference, and it'll give you reference to five other, well, at least a total of five references that are there to the Lucas Triangle, which has been known since, since Hogo first wrote about it. And he was one of the form, one of the original founders of the UBA Society. A bunch of college kids got together around the cafeteria. They say, would it be a nice idea to make a society for the Fib Sierra? You know? He said, oh, sure. Why, why don't we do that <laugh>? And we managed to escape, you know, $500 to get something. Somehow they managed to, to get that little bit of money together and started putting it out. And if you go to Caltech Library right across the ditch here, they're all lined up one after another as far as they go. (05:29): It's pretty long shelf now. But I all of Fibonacci, all of the Fibonacci Society quarter, um, uh, uh, public, uh, uh, journal, um, uh, uh, magazines of what, what do you call it? It's published quarterly. Quarterly, yeah. And, and a lot of stuff. I really don't understand it. I look at it and I read it and I say, oh, I wish I could understand this, because I would probably see something musically in it. But they, they're mathematics is getting so sophisticated that I can't understand most of what I see. But once in a while, I see one that I understand enough of the numbers and enough of the diagrams, it doesn't matter what else they say. I, one reason I like to stay simple is because first of all, I have to talk to children. Second of all, I talk on an international basis. And if somebody doesn't speak English, what does it help them? If I go ranting on in English for, if I give them just a good diagram with some good numbers, we looked at it for a while. So this Gary David (07:06): <laugh> like an iq. Let me ask you a series of questions. Ervin Wilson (07:12): Oh. Gary David (07:13): And you answer in 25 words or less, Ervin Wilson (07:16): <laugh>. Gary David (07:18): That's right. I won't hold you to that, but for succinct answers too, as if you're talking to a non-musician. Ervin Wilson (07:27): Yep. Gary David (07:27): Okay. What is the scale tree? Ervin Wilson (07:36): Oh, that's a good question. That, um, is, that really requires a diagrams. Gary David (07:49): We'll have the diagrams, huh? We'll have the diagrams. Ervin Wilson (07:54): A scale tree is where you take zero and infinity, zero being the ratio zero over one, and infinity being the ratio one over zero. And you add the top two numerals, and you'll have a one on the top, and you add the bottom two numerals, and you'll have a one on the bottom. And then you continue that sequence, that now, now you have a one one, and you fix the one, one between zero and infinity. And you continue to fill in those two gaps using the same technique. On the left hand side, you add the one on the zero on the top, and then one of the one on the bottom, which gives you one over two. And on the right hand side, two over one. Now you have to, now you've got filled in analogous, you filled in that gap. You continue to fill in the gaps forever. Gary David (09:21): Gotcha. Ervin Wilson (09:21): And every single ratio will appear in that series in their reduced form and sorted from left to right according to magnitude. Did you hear what I said? Yes. Gary David (09:42): <laugh>. There'll be a test. Ervin Wilson (09:44): Did you believe what I said, <laugh>? It's some, it's difficult for some people to grasp, but, but, but the people who define this as endlessly, they don't say infinity because infinity is a noun. And they don't want you to stop on a noun when it's actually an incompleted thing that will never be completed. One theorist has the, he's proposing the theory of incompleteness, and she's got a fairly good argument. Mathematically it is complete, but if you're trying to, to discuss the real universe, where does it end? Uh, it's incomplete <laugh>. That's at least that's the way she treats it. Gary David (10:49): Second question. Um, what are the horo grams? Ervin Wilson (11:02): They arrange the scout tree around a spiral. What you, uh, you take the, the logarithms of the intervals and, uh, multiply them by 360 degrees and get the angles. And you just place either in, in centrals concentric circles, or if you can do it nicely, you arrange them in spirals. When you do that, you start getting opposing spirals visually showing up in your picture, and you get a way of representing octos (11:53): And adding those to your pic to the picture. And it's a, with, with the octaves being implicit that once you go around, you've gone around an octave and you're starting the next octave up. Usually the octave rule is the s are the vertical axis, although in some cases they would be the axis gonna drive. If you're using a, a, the, uh, accepted set of Cartesian coordinates, X, Y, and Z, the X were both the right and the white, the center and the Z up toward you. Third angle orthographic projection is what it's called in the drafting room. And that's the one thing that I got from working so many years as a draftsman, is how to understand the Cartesian projections and how to understand why zero over zero is simply the point right here where you take the directions from it. Gary David (13:10): Uh, what are the musical uses for Pascal strangle? Ervin Wilson (13:17): The musical uses are, the first one is that it gives the combinations straight across. The interesting about the combinations is that you may also use Mendel Mendel's ratios are still, are found along the same la as the combinations. Combinations were the first ones I learned how use musically, but I learned to use manela ratios very, very young, not realizing that I was just breeding corn and, and apples and stuff. But that I also had the, the basic setup for Pascal's triangle. And it took me quite some time to realize that these people doing men Doug and ratios were talking about Pascal's triangle. And the same set of numbers will give you significant things. You just, uh, the significant breakdowns. And did that begin to answer your question? Gary David (14:35): Yes. Alright. Um, and to what sub subcategories would you break down the study of tuning systems? Uh, their acoustic scales, logarithmic, equal tempered non, what else would you add to that Ervin Wilson (14:54): Continuum, which includes them all. Everything is one seamless continuum. Any way you can do anything that you want to, I've told people that and they become angry and slammed the telephone down in my ears. See, I've been, oh, so, so the field is wide open, huh? No discipline whatsoever. But, but I, even if you're in the continuum, there are certain kinds of useful disciplines that will get you a long way. And even, I'm, I'm even toying with white sound now in three. That's not your answer. I'm not answering, but, but, uh, that's pretty well what the answer to your questions at the moment. Gary David (15:59): Okay. Um, you've invented scales in all the above categories as we've talked about. Could you characterize some of the advantages of each giving an example of resources that can be found in one system and not in another? Ervin Wilson (16:18): The sizes of the generating intervals will vary from one to another. And generating that, you have the octave as one a axis and the generators the other axis, the, the generator can move from zero to infinity. And as it moves it, your, your, your moments of symmetry are the natural occurring stopping points in your scales change. And, uh, the advantages to that is that you have an endless continuum of, of changing scales. That includes everything that can be expressed as in terms of an octave in its generator. You don't have three dimensions. Get subtle approximations and using devices that are artificial and extreme. That's all right. With me. I have nothing problems with the word artificial. Gary David (17:34): Right. Ervin Wilson (17:35): What do you mean by three dimensional skills? Arrays that occur, uh, dimension scales that have threes and fives and sevens, threes going along one axis, fives going along another axis and seven along another. That would be a three dimensional scale, but because it would be coming from single point, it would be a four point scale in four point space two. Now you look at it, Stephen James Taylor (18:03): Does that take you into combination product sets? That exactly what happens? Ervin Wilson (18:10): Uh, I didn't, I didn't quite understand your question. Isn't that Stephen James Taylor (18:16): Exactly what happens with combination product sets is you have different, different dimensions under which the threes go to sevens go whatever your starting Ervin Wilson (18:26): Cell is. No. Um, uh, moments of symmetry don't automatically occur in combination product sense, unless you consider that the combination product set is no longer a two interval thing, um, interval. And its generator, if you say the combination product set has got a third dimension, and that if you're going start going into three dimensional combination products sets, you enter into difficult, very, very challenging territory that I have not been able to spend very much time on yet because it is so demanding and the, and I have yet to exhaust the resources two dimensions. And besides the keyboard sits here, when we get into three dimensional playable keyboards in the virtual world, then of course I'm going to go into three dimensional stuff. And it's some very interesting new technology coming out that will allow that. In fact. Well, let's go into the next question. Okay. Gary David (19:44): Uh, what do you feel are your most significant innovations in the field of tuning theory? Ervin Wilson (20:13): I'm, um, that's, that's a difficult question, is it's, it, there there're many different ways to look at the scale and getting them together and getting them to hold together. And, uh, but one of them, one of the just more details, his recurrent sequences. I mean that a fascinating little set of objects here that will, which I haven't began to exhaust, but I I've fairly well scratched the surface of recurrence Gary David (20:58): And that no one else has really gone that route. Is that what you're saying? Ervin Wilson (21:04): Well, other people have known what recurrent sequences, but I was among the, certainly among the first to start using them as scales, musical scales. And on a broad basis, you've had people who've used the golden section to make a scale and make a sec a golden scale. And you've had people who use different tones and some tones, but to hold it together in a solid, solid stiffness that you can actually shape the scales how you want them and, and choose what you're going to do with them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and where the options are there and under your control is another thing. And, uh, anyway, recurrent sequences. Gary David (22:02): Have you done much actual composing with some of the scales you've created? Ervin Wilson (22:08): I do some brief com compositions in my mind's eye and make brief little notes. Sometimes I don't do the actual composing. I'll just set up the scales, which I can hear and set up possibly the sequences and ask somebody who likes to and can in fact do skillful composition. I, I could do skillful composition if I wanted to do that, but, um, I like to set the stage. And also there are people out there who really can't impose and really can't perform far better than I can. And, um, so I like to do what I, I I like to do what I do very well. Not that I wouldn't like to do everything, everything, but as long as I'm irresistibly drawn into exploration, when I, when I realized that I'm seeing farther, and the farther I see the easier it is to see farther mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Once you can see the Kathleen, you, you clear away and then you see, oh, well, if I go up a little here, I can see farther out. And pretty soon you can see all the way to New Zealand at <inaudible>, uh, sort of that way. Gary David (23:41): Okay. Um, what connection do you see between your work in music and that of someone like Emily Conrad in Dance and Movement Ervin Wilson (23:54): Time? They're both have their existence in actual time, and they can't be done on a timeless state. A picture can hang on the wall, it's timeless, but dancing, singing, drawing, drums in time, music and time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, theater in time, memory in time, feeling, Gary David (24:28): And time Ervin Wilson (24:29): Life is caught up in that di in that dimension. Einstein calls the fourth dimension time and we live it. But there you ask people to find time does end up giving you five or six different definitions of what kind of time you were talking about at the time of the day. A good time. Gary David (24:57): <laugh> a good time. Um, you made a statement in the sixties that says, and see how you feel about the statement. Now, while undoubtedly it is valid and admirable to study the scales of other people and their, and other times we are concerned primarily with the creative processes and the development and expression of our own arts. Ervin Wilson (25:33): I I still think that that hole is, oh, I do temper it, but I, even if I'm writing say Japanese music, I know that I'm not Japanese. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. If I'm, even if I'm writing African music, I know that I'm not African and I'm best to be Irv Wilson. That's about <laugh>. Gary David (26:01): Um, do you see a common thread that runs through the tunings of all cultures past and present? Ervin Wilson (26:15): Well, maybe not. I've, I've heard beautiful music (26:25): Where you have just pure rhythm, for example. Well, that runs through, that runs through the present too. But I have no people to go out in the middle of the desert, the campfire. And one of them would start singing. Others would pick up their, the nearest wrongs they could have and start banging the wrongs to get it. And that doesn't have an awful lot to do with skill making except for the singer. But when you just start banging on anything you can bang on and take, there are people who no matter what they hear, they just pick up all these sounds out here and say, that's music. Well, maybe so, but on the other hand, maybe music has ritual music has a smaller stage and likes to do markets boundaries. They say, this is my stage here, and on this stage I will permit things to happen that cannot happen out there in the open world. I will do things and say things and, and, uh, and take you to URA land. It's, it is the ritual stage. I mean, what, what else can I say? Gary David (28:08): The last question I have here, what connection do you see between musical scale design and botany? Ervin Wilson (28:16): Uh, a a lot of connections. The, the combination is the genetic combinations used by Gregor Menlo to describe his sweet pea experiments could have been pulled right off Pascal's Triangle. Now I've talked, and even those used by the great Pauling Manel store, one of the greatest teachers of genetics, especially for genetics we've ever had, talks about combinations, genetic combinations. They come right off Pascal's Triangle. And I've asked several botany people, I said, didn't Greg Mendel actually use the Pascal's Triangle? He knew what combinations was and he lived after Pascal Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, uh, but no one up there has given me any kind of answer yet. Whether they, it seems to me that Pascal might have mentioned that he was using pa, I mean, Mendo might have mentioned that he was using Pa Pascal's, but I did come across Gregor Mendel very young when I was, before I went to high school in about the, when I was in about the sixth or seventh grade, my brother Lyman was down at, at, um, orange State Academy taking high school. And there was, they taught him a little school and Botney, I think it was. And they just, they had in those early days, they were, had the presence of mind to teach him the exact Mendelian ratio and how he came about it. And I looked at that and read it, and I understood. And I said, Irvin, I I can do that. And I spent hours and hours out there herding goats and figuring out what I could do with the combinations. It turns out the combinations, those are the genetic combinations. (30:40): He, he was, Mendel was the father of genetics. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and forget Darwin. Forget this whole, did I descend from a monkey argument. He's of no consequence. I hope that they never get hit Mendel and start <laugh> those people who, who are still fighting the Monkey Wars <laugh>. And, but the book on Mendel, a very good, was written by Robin Marantz Hennig, the Monk in the Garden. And it's a beautiful book to read. And, uh, and I would recommend that any, anybody get it as far as so little is Stone about recommend, and yet if it weren't for him, he was the first one to de to describe what we know as a gene. (31:39): Now look what we're doing with Genes. Just a couple of days ago, they finished doing the complete genome of rice. Rice, right, of rice. It's, it's mentioned in the LA Times, but Nature Magazine, I, and the results are public. They will not be they wide open. You can be logged on, you can log onto them, but it means that people will not, there are many, many species of rice, but only two of them have, ika and indica have been used on a broad scale for feeding the human side. And rice feeds a very, very large percent of the people on the planet, probably the most important of the three grains, rice, wheat, and corn. And, uh, the genome is complete. Stephen James Taylor (32:45): Now what exactly are the Mendelian numbers? You talked about the Mendelian combinations. What, what are those? Ervin Wilson (32:51): Would you, would you repeat Stephen James Taylor (32:52): That? What, what exactly are the Mendelian combinations of the numbers? Ervin Wilson (32:57): Oh, if you take Pascal's triangle straight across, you get the combinations, uh oh. That's Stephen James Taylor (33:05): All the possibilities of two out of eight. Yeah. Those kind of things. Ervin Wilson (33:08): Well, well, if, if you go down to the fourth line, you have four objects. You take the combinations of one out of four, two out of four, three out of four, and four out of four. And two out of four will give you the hine. By the way, if you take the whole set of, you will get what will amount to the oiler general. Is that clearly spoken? Stephen James Taylor (33:38): Yeah. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. So you're pulling combination product sets and the oiler material right off of Pascal strangle. Ervin Wilson (33:45): Yes, indeed. You Stephen James Taylor (33:47): Also, it also takes you to the scale tree because it produces generators based on the diagonals. Right? Ervin Wilson (33:54): Yeah. You, it, there's, it just does, uh, all of that stuff and more, I don't know where Pascal triangle stops. Yeah. I have seen, no, I seen no end to the Pascal triangle. It is a universe. It's, it's just another way of counting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> where you just count that way instead of this way. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if you go into number theory, number theorists are still trying to prove things or prove that they can't be proved or proving that they, they can be proved, but that we will not have ever the time for the computer power to do it. Or right now they're figuring way out ways to unlock cryptographic privacy. <laugh>. So what job, Marcus, do you have any questions you wanted to ask? Marcus Hobbs (35:12): Uh, how did you discover that recurrence relations, uh, are in Pascal's triangles? Ervin Wilson (35:33): I just saw them sitting there <laugh>. (35:41): You stare at something long enough, and pretty soon you'll say, I've been staring at this thing all these years, and all this sudden, there it is in front of my eyes, the obvious. And you kick yourself. So why could I have, why did it take me so long to see that? But, but sooner or later, if, if you've done your homework and are familiar with your territory and have been around the track, you start picking up on the details and subtleties along the way, and then you start noticing that the, these flowers smell this way and these flowers that look just like these flowers smell completely different. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. Gary David (36:41): Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. I have one more question unless you do. Marcus Hobbs (36:46): Um, I, I was wondering, um, you, you started, uh, your search long before, uh, computers, uh, now you've, you've had a taste of what they can do for you. Are you, are you disappointed? Or did, did you see you seeing enough? Was there enough going on? Ervin Wilson (37:02): It, it was very young. People were talking about computers and the very earliest computers built would take up a whole building. But I knew that sooner or later computers would be able to, to do what I wanted them to do. What I didn't know that was going to come so quickly when I was a kid, people would say, the teacher would say, someti, someday we'll be able to send pictures through the air Marcus Hobbs (37:38): <laugh>. Ervin Wilson (37:39): Or someday we will go to the moon in my own lifetime yet Yeah. But, uh, I've only always done my theoretical work with the dollars that the computer will be there, and I've just set myself up, don't hold in or, and just work for that computer. And, uh, and now the computers are here and I'm still, I'm still making demands on the computer. I lemme just show you the cover of the little Marcus Hobbs (38:21): Magnet. You have a microphone. Oh, Ervin Wilson (38:24): Are, Gary David (38:25): Uh, what do you want to go? What Ervin Wilson (38:26): Do you want to get? I, I want even get, Gary David (38:30): Do you have enough? I Ervin Wilson (38:31): Got enough. Do you wanna just clap Marcus Hobbs (38:32): It? Okay. Gary David (38:38): Uh, have you ever heard of a Delbert Ames? Ervin Wilson (38:43): No. Gary David (38:44): Okay. He was the one that did a lot of experiments and created the, um, illusions of the, uh, trapezoidal window and the, um, in the room, the distorted room where the child looks Ervin Wilson (39:00): Bigger. You seen those? I've I've been in those kind of rooms. Gary David (39:03): Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, he stated a concept called the emerging unexpected. And the emerging unexpected is not like lightning's gonna strike you in, in an unexpected way. He didn't mean that. What he said was expecting the emerging unexpected is a sense that what you are doing may benefit others in an unforeseen future in unforeseen ways. Do you have a sense of that, that you share with anybody? Ervin Wilson (39:35): I have the sense that if what I'm doing is, if I discover that everything that I ever believed is wrong, I'm willing to correct myself and upgrade myself. And sometimes I get unexpected insights that allow me, well, the first thing was combination products and the realization that I had a working tool there, and I just, what I thought I had, my whole composers kicked together. I realized that I was just starting Gary David (40:10): <laugh>. Ervin Wilson (40:12): But, um, whether or not anything I do will affect others in unexpected ways. Gary David (40:19): Do you have a sense of that? Whether you know what that is or not? Ervin Wilson (40:24): Uh, if, if I, I don't preoccupy myself with that's all. I just, uh, um, I know that every once in a while something I've said and somebody just happened over here has changed. They caused them to change their major and going to music instead of something else. Mm-Hmm. Gary David (40:49): <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. Ervin Wilson (40:50): <affirmative> where I hear back from somebody years later, they said when you said something and uh, and they just modified their whole music reaction. Gary David (40:59): Yeah, yeah. Ervin Wilson (41:01): But unexpected ways like the, like the keyboard, there would be any number of unexpected ways you could use a keyboard. Like many of the axes that I, in which I place music can be placed in, in other terms as well. Like agriculture or just Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Just space. The properties of space. The what I'm learning in music could certainly influence what Penrose is and possibly even Haws are thinking about. But I don't dwell on it and I don't certainly don't slap them in the face with that because there are younger people. Look, anything anyone else wants to ask before we stop? Uh, I think we covered Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> quite a bit of territory. Yeah. Welcome the garden. This is not a bad of a book. I'm.