Next steps: Polynesian music theory

I realise that people aren't saying Polynesian in parlance anymore, but it's still useful as an academic descriptor. Pasifika is the new word, but there are regional differences between Polynesian, Micronesian and Melanesian people. My reckon is that the next people to ask are the instrument makers: Why is the drum tuned to that tone? How do you know that the tone is right? How do you know where the holes go? Do these enharmonics fit? Combine that with some rigorous measurements, and that'll open more doors. - Turning cosmological tapa into enharmonic scales is one thing, but I had a brainwave. The next bit to unlocking the harmony is knowing the precise words of the chants, and hence the affect. That Niuean hiapo suggests there could be onomatopoeic tones that might sound like those triangles, and so does the theory of Hawaiian music as embodied ahupuaʻa (nature) from the essay. Or the lines might point to stars, which are encoded with tones. I'd say that they used a certain star as the anchor tone and sang to the heavens from that perspective.

Comparing the maramataka cycle with the cycles from Samoa and Niue, decoded from the siapo and hiapo star charts.

It's interesting culturally or historically, but it proves the crux of my thesis very precisely.

These three voices are starting and ending on essentially the same frequency as each other, but the subtle microtonal differences between each step create the oscillatory harmony that I described in terms of Farhat steps in the essay. My view is that Polynesian songs don't have limited ranges of thirds, fourths or fifths; they have conventional vernacular vocal ranges of around an octave to a 12th. All the anthropologists and musicologists from the 19th and 20th centuries just weren't hearing those things because their underlying scale is set to different frequencies.

Certain songs were narrow in range, but that's equally true of lullabies and nursery rhymes in European cultures. For example, consider the 425 cent "thirds" which I was describing in the Siapo and Samoan music. They are thirds in that musical logic, but they're slightly larger than a perfect fourth in equal temperament.

The steps are larger in Samoan music or Niuean music than in Māori music, which shades much more closely to a tempered scale, hence Māori harmonies are within a third or fourth in both European and Māori cycles/scales/modal frames/metaphysics, but the microtones are precise steps in Māori music.

Pasifika split the octave into similar steps to Europeans, but had a very different way of getting there, while the maramataka cycle suggests a more refined ear for chromatics, which is also something that one hears in Māori music.