5/5 Interview with Ervin Wilson
5/5 Transcript
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.
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.