WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 33639132

Resources for microtonal music

119 points| drumttocs8 | 3 years ago |sevish.com | reply

50 comments

order
[+] jabroni_salad|3 years ago|reply
If you have never seriously tried to listen to microtone music I would recommend this video as your point of entry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGZ0JlMwZpY

Be sure to enable the subtitles because he puts a lot of notes on the video. The descript also has a little essay about different common tuning arrangements.

[+] crazygringo|3 years ago|reply
That's utterly fascinating, I've never heard microtonal music before outside of older traditions like chanting. Some observations:

1) When microtones are used in the melody improvisation, it sounds totally natural because we're used to it with string bending in guitar. It's surprising yet satisfying to hear the same done on a piano

2) When microtones are occasionally used to make a chord "bluer", it's also very natural and satisfying as another flavor of dissonance, which totally fits with the kind of dissonant jazz we're already used to with piano

3) But when microtones are used for most/all the notes of the chord, such as the root... at least to my ears it sounds horrible, like the piano just went out of tune for that chord. Which makes me wonder if you could get used to it or not?

Thanks for the link!

[+] rhn_mk1|3 years ago|reply
How are the extra notes entered? The keyboard looks regular, is there some note modification going on, or are the extra notes actually added as dedicated keys?
[+] jcpst|3 years ago|reply
Cool to see Sevish on the front page of HN. He was inspiring to me on my microtonal journey. I started with Harry Partch and Ben Johnston’s compositions and writings.

Here’s a work of mine that focuses on 7-limit JI intervals: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/josephpost/daLO

[+] iainctduncan|3 years ago|reply
The best current resource is the Kyle Gann book, "The Arithmetic of Listening". It's fantastic, by a world authority on the topic. https://www.kylegann.com/Gannbooks.html

Also for anyone interested in just intonation based microtonality, I did a video demo of a tool I made using my open source Scheme for Max extension to Max here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L7edwef-5k&t=2s&ab_channel=...

[+] newobj|3 years ago|reply
KGATLW fans have entered the chat.
[+] kortex|3 years ago|reply
Also Altin Gun and Gaye Su Akyol, both Turkish artists that use a hybrid of standard guitars and baglamas, and operate mostly in 12TET but employ lots of embellishments from Turkish makams.

Flying microtonal banana, KG, and LW are fun (24TET with a few missing quarter tones), but I'm really hoping their next foray is 19TET or 31TET, which both approximate 12TET well enough but also have some neat intervals.

[+] IndySun|3 years ago|reply
A short but quality list. Missing the Aphex / Oddsound endeavour... https://oddsound.com/mtsespsuite.php
[+] flats|3 years ago|reply
This is just a list of Sevish’s tools (the Scale Workshop is really useful for things like building scales for use in Max, _way_ easier to work with than Scala). Thank you for sharing the MTS-ESP Suite, though! I love the idea of a single piece of software that can handle tuning across plugins and MIDI devices.
[+] dekhn|3 years ago|reply
Great album with microtones which are used commonly in classical Indian music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sounds_of_India The first track starts out: “Ragas are precise melody forms. A raga is not a mere scale nor is it a mode. Each Raga has it’s own ascending and descending movement. And those subtle touches and uses of micro tones and stresses on particular notes like this…”
[+] Jeff_Brown|3 years ago|reply
I make microtonal (usually 41 tones per octave) music using a Lumatone keyboard and the Pianoteq synth plugin. Microtonality in Pianoteq is surprisingly easy, given how difficult MIDI makes microtonality. If you divide the octave into 41 pieces, you only get about three octaves per MIDI channel. Pianoteq allows you to use a sweet hack whereby raising the channel value by one raises the octave by one.

Of course, editing those midi notes after they've been recorded is still quite a chore.

[+] srcreigh|3 years ago|reply
Another way to make microtonal music is to use non 12TET piano temperament.

For ex Mozart used meantone to create beautiful dissonance as well as nicer sounding harmonies. (Mozart didn’t use 12TET)

https://youtu.be/lzsEdK48CDY

[+] nlnn|3 years ago|reply
I once took a year of oud lessons, and the nuances in microtonality really blew me away.

There were all sorts of things in the aural traditions, like scale X having a fractionally sharper 3rd ascending than scale Y, but with both notated in the same way.

But a lot of the larger subdivisions (i.e. quarter tone sharp/flat notes) were surprisingly natural to learn, and no different to semitones (from a listening/playing perspective) after a while.

[+] beebmam|3 years ago|reply
For more examples of awesome microtonal music, check out all the artists that contribute to STAFFcirc compos on Soundcloud. Many of them feature tons of microtonal music, including Sevish too!

Here's an example of one in which every track has a different set of microtones: https://on.soundcloud.com/MpTau

[+] zmibes|3 years ago|reply
Sevish makes awesome music
[+] Jeff_Brown|3 years ago|reply
I've been a big fan for a couple years. Initially it was really weird to me. Now it's not! I've gotten more used to microtonality, for one thing, and for another I think he's toned down the really xenharmonic aspects of his music. When his latest album comes up on Spotify the harmonies don't sound particularly strange to me, just a little smoother than what you would get out of 12 Edo.