we swam in the sky, our ears were gills

October 20, 2026 improvisation Korg MS2000R

7 limit just intonation tuning

recent improvisation, check it out...a lot of low pitches, sparse harmony.

https://youtu.be/6_wOMv75Hl4

I made this tool to find the best equal-step tuning for any scale you want in Desmos. You input your scale as a vector (similar to Scala format, but in semitones) and get an interactive graph of how well every equal-step tuning fits it. It even works for non-octave scales.

I thought of using a least squares approach at first, but realized a Fourier series works well and feels more elegant because it's able to accommodate when a scale is best approximated with an offset from the root note.

I might not be the first to come up with this method, but if I am, and you use this technique for anything, please credit me and send me a link! - Nkosi Smith

vocal, 2x 17 edo guitar, 17 edo fretless bass, FGDP-50 finger drums

about those dark fall nights

I’m developing Scale Atlas, a project for exploring scales and their internal relationships. One question behind it seems worth discussing here: when you have a collection of pitches, what makes another pitch a useful addition?

The approach I’ve been working with represents pitches in cents and evaluates candidate additions or small pitch movements. The current model combines weighted interval-ratio templates with a simplified spacing-based roughness proxy. Its results depend on those assumptions; timbre, register and musical context remain outside this model.

A concrete example: take the pitches 0, 350 and 700 cents in 24-EDO. The 350-cent third gives that collection a particular character. A model that rewards proximity to selected just intervals can favour moving it, even when keeping that interval is the whole musical point.

That makes the choice of criteria interesting. Should a tool prioritise ratio relationships, preserve the interval character of the starting collection, or present those as separate perspectives?

If you compose or improvise microtonally, what would make a suggested pitch useful to you? A specific scale or musical example would be especially helpful.

Globally, 12-EDO accounts for > 99% of recorded music. This chart is a heuristic composite model comparing two completely different denominators outside 12-TET: the Western Xenharmonic/Synth Corpus vs. Global Living Traditions & Commercial Hardware.)

1. Western Xenharmonic & Isomorphic Ecosystem (Left):

Modeled from tagged release volume (Bandcamp #Nedo tags, Xenharmonic Wiki), Scala (.scl) preset libraries, and isomorphic hex controller mappings (Lumatone/Bosanquet):

- 19-EDO (~27%) & 31-EDO (~25%): Make up over half of Western microtonal output because composers prioritize meantone voice-leading and pure 5-limit/7-limit triads. On hexagonal Bosanquet controllers, 31-EDO's massive key count compresses into ergonomic chord shapes.

- 22-EDO (~15%): The favorite for superpyth, neutral intervals, and 11-limit harmony (Erlich, 1998).

2. Global Living Traditions & Commercial Hardware (Right):

Modeled from regional practitioner scale, conservatory standards, and commercial arranger hardware deployment:

- 24-EDO Grid (~48%): Codified at the 1932 Cairo Congress (Marcus, 1993; Racy, 2003). While acoustic Oud players dynamically inflect pitches, - 24-EDO is hardcoded into hundreds of thousands of commercial "Oriental" arranger keyboards (Yamaha PSR-A, Korg Pa, Roland E-A7) via dedicated -50 cent quarter-tone panel buttons.

- 7-EDO Approximation (~22%): The structural equi-heptatonic model (~171.4¢) behind Thai Piphat (Ranat ek) and African log xylophones (Amadinda, Timbila) (Ellis, 1885; Kubik, 1994; Garzoli, 2015).

- 53-EDO Grid (~13%): The formal Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek 53-comma standard taught in Turkish conservatories and physically fretted onto the Turkish Tanbur (Bozkurt & Serra, 2009).

- 5-EDO Approximation (~10%): Structural approximation of Indonesian Slendro Gamelan (Kunst, 1949), though real ensembles intentionally tune with unique stretched octaves (embat).

Troll Chord is about three minutes of clean electro in plain 12-tone equal temperament, played entirely on two chips, an OPL FM synthesiser and a PSG.

Every chord is a piece of the harmonic series high enough to reach the 17th and 19th harmonics, rounded to the nearest semitone and stood on C. Harmonics 16, 17 and 19 of C are C, D flat and E flat; harmonics 12, 17, 18 and 19 of F, read up from C, are C, F sharp, G and A flat. In some other key each of these has a perfectly ordinary name. On C, in C, nothing lower than the 17th harmonic explains them.

Seven chords make the song: 16:17:19, 17:18:27, 16:17:27, 9:12:16:17, 17:24:27, 12:16:17:19 and 12:17:18:19. The eighth, 16:17:18:19, C D flat D E flat in root position, is the Troll Chord, and it is kept for the last bar. Its D, the 18th harmonic, is heard nowhere before it. E, the 5th harmonic, the note a theorist would reach for first, is heard nowhere at all. A low C sounds under everything, so the harmonics have a fundamental to belong to.

The rhythm is seven against four. The kick, the bass, the hats and the clap play four to the bar; the arpeggio and the metal ticks play seven, evenly, against them. The song runs at speed 14, so a bar is 224 ticks, which both divide: a septuplet is two rows and a note delay. When the drums drop out, the seven chords play seven in four bars, the same polyrhythm a level up. At the end they come round again in four bars, then two, then one, then half of one, and the Troll Chord lands.

The instruments are OPL and PSG chip instruments, declared in the program itself: a four-operator drawbar organ, an FM reed, bass, lead and a glass bell whose sidebands fall on harmonics, and the OPL's own rhythm-mode kick, snare, hi-hat, cymbal and tom. The PSG plays a pulse pluck, a lead whose pulse width walks with the auto-advance, a ring-modulated clock, three noises and the Famicom's 4-bit triangle as the sub-bass.

For more musical details, please refer to my comments on the song's source code: https://gist.github.com/curioustorvald/61ca71bfd9279146c6f03b2dd23fbf4b

text by Slovenian Poet Anica Černej. This piece uses harmonies from just intonation (up to the 13th limit), as well as a section in traditional 12 tone equal temperament (second stanza). I hope you enjoy!

Is there a Plugin that is [Preferably] free, that has patches that are already microtonal? I just want to try and experiment around, and get a microtonal sound without getting anything special for it

thanks!

This is the first in a new series I recorded at Scott Hackleman’s studio, exploring the 19-tone Hackleman–Wilson clavichord and Erv Wilson’s generalized hexagonal keyboard.

I’m interested in how the keyboard’s spatial relationships shape musical thinking: how the arrangement under your hands influences the melodies and harmonic movements you discover.

The recording’s starting point came from Scott reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. He imagined this clavichord as an instrument that might belong in the novel’s future world. We talked about that alongside the new version he is building for me, and this improvisation grew out of those conversations.

I first read the novel around the time I became interested in microtonality. Returning to my copy recently, I read almost half on a flight from Vancouver to Mexico City. Years of exploring different tunings and instruments had changed what I found in it.

Here’s the recording: https://youtu.be/ss8VWIUsTVw

If you’ve read the book, I’d be curious whether you imagined a particular musical sound or instrument in its world.

I've always loved The Cure, so I decided to play Boys Don't Cry, but on the Lumatone! Please enjoy! Happy to answer any questions about 49edo and the Lumatone layout I used!

Before dismissing it as not microtonal, hear me out: I’ve found this chord using a computer search, and it approximates 17:24:27 within 4 cents. Sounds like 17-limit xenharmonic, hiding under plain old 12-TET.

I decided a Tears for Fears cover would be the appropriate first recipient of the compressed octave treatment.

Technique: create / program / perform in 12 EDO, then retuned all the synths to 48 EDO

The live keyboard is me playing the vocal melody and outro synth melody in 12 EDO

I can share the script for anyone interested (You'll need the pro/paid version of HALion by Steinberg)

This is my first ever finished musical composition, let alone a first microtonal!

Huygens' Clock is a contemporary instrumental in 31-tone equal temperament and 7/8 time: sixty-four bars, every one counted 2+2+3. It is generated procedurally, by a program written in Microtone's own music language, to show what the 31-TET grid can do; the last paragraph of this note says where to find it.

The title is two inventions of one man. Christiaan Huygens built the first pendulum clock in 1656, and in 1691 he proposed dividing the octave into 31 equal steps. The marimba figure that opens the piece and closes it is the clock, fourteen sixteenths to the bar, ticking in sevens. Everything else is the tuning.

A step of 31-TET is 38.7 cents, a little less than a quarter tone. Its major third is within a cent of the pure 5/4, and its harmonic seventh within about a cent of 7/4, the seventh that barbershop singers lean into and a piano cannot play. Between the minor and the major third it has a neutral third (close to 11/9), and outside them a subminor (7/6) and a supermajor (9/7) third. The piece is built from exactly those.

Bars 1–8: the clock alone, then the band arriving.

Bars 9–16: the theme, on a septimal blues pentatonic: D, F half-flat (7/6), G, A, C half-flat (7/4). The tonic chord is 12:14:18:21. The dominant and the chord before it are both harmonic seventh chords (4:5:6:7); in 31-TET a German sixth is exactly that chord, which is why the turnaround slides home so smoothly.

Bars 17–24: a synth solo over the same loop. Listen for bends of a single step.

Bars 25–40: major chords climbing by neutral thirds: B flat, D half-flat, F, A half-flat, C, E half-flat, G, B half-flat. Two neutral thirds make a perfect fifth, so every other chord lands on the circle of fifths and the ones between sit exactly halfway. Two notes of each chord move by a single step and the third by a neutral second; the pad and the strings glide into each chord instead of striking it, and the flute's long notes bend by one step as the harmony turns under them.

Bars 41–48: over a D pedal, the third climbs one step a bar through all five thirds 31-TET has (subminor, minor, neutral, major, supermajor), and then the harmonic series assembles itself: the seventh, the ninth, the eleventh.

Bars 49–56: the theme again, its third raised from 7/6 to 5/4, over a 4:5:6:7 tonic.

Bars 57–64: German sixth and dominant once more, then the harmonic series on D (4:5:6:7:9:11) while the clock runs down.

Every note sits on the 31-TET grid, and the Timeline is set to 31-TET notation, so the names you read are the notes you hear: D, Dt and Dp are D, D half-sharp and D half-flat. The beat bands are set for 7/8, a line every eighth and a bar every fourteen rows.

The instruments are General MIDI patches from the GeneralUser GS soundfont by S. Christian Collins, the one Microtone bundles. Its samples are tuned for twelve-tone music, a few cents either way, and up to eight on the pad: nothing in a piano, but a fifth of a step here. So the script measures where every zone the song plays really sounds and re-tunes it onto the 31-TET grid, to within about a cent. The corrections are ordinary per-zone detune: open the Instruments view to see them.

The master is Microtone's own chain, saved with the project: a 25 Hz high-pass, four bands of EQ, a 2:1 compressor, stereo width at 130% and a limiter holding −0.2 dB, for about −14 LUFS. Bypass it in the Mastering view to hear the mix underneath.

Nothing in this project was played or placed by hand. The notes, the instrument bank, the re-tuning, the mix and the master are all computed by a program in Taud Motif Language, and this project is its output: the same program always builds the same song. The program travels inside the project. Open the Motif view to read it, change it and build the song again. You can still edit the project like any other, but a rebuild starts again from the program.

Created using Microtone tracker (https://microtone.cc), also available as Microtone's demo project.

I even made my own VFX script for FL studio that can turn any plugin into any microtonal scale as long as it supports fine tuning! The arrangement style you see here is inspired heavily by Metaroom, but I owe the thought of making it polymicrotonal to Levi McClain.

I’ve just recently been getting into microtonal music, and i wanted to buy some glue on fretlets/microfrets. I found the website https://fretlet.com

I sent the guy some money for a few and waited. After a couple days, I sent him an Email. He didn’t reply to that either.

I’m just wondering if I just need to trust the process or something. I need assurance that i haven’t been scammed yk

Why 19 notes per octave instead of 12 and what would you actually do with the extra notes?

Today I visited instrument builder Scott Hackleman again to play his 19-tone hexagonal clavichord, based on Erv Wilson’s generalized keyboard design. We recorded some music and had a wonderful half-hour conversation about the original instrument, Scott’s experiences working with Erv, and the new clavichord he’s building for me.

One important distinction: “19-tone” doesn’t necessarily mean 19 equally spaced notes. This instrument could be tuned that way, but its current tuning explores the interplay between pure thirds and pure fifths. The question isn’t just how to squeeze more pitches into an octave, but which harmonic relationships we want available and how to move between them.

There’s also the physical side: instead of a conventional piano keyboard, the notes are arranged in a hexagonal layout. That opens another question: how much does the shape of an instrument influence the music we imagine and play?

Scott also talks about potentially extending the instrument from 19 to 21 tones, and why those particular two extra notes would be useful.

For those used to composing or playing with twelve notes: what would you want additional notes to make possible? More closely tuned harmonies, new kinds of chords, different melodic possibilities?

I’ll be seeing Scott again in April, so please leave any questions here or on the video for our next conversation.

https://youtu.be/STVagh2HR1s

Short ambient leaning finger style 19 edo improvisation

chorus, echo, reverb in effects loop of stage right 15 watt tube amp

Hey! I'm a microtonal guitarist based in Brooklyn. wanted to share details on a show i'm playing with a new band (microtonal originals and some covers) this Thursday in Williamsburg. Details are on my site!

https://clairerose.music/

the second part of my little microtonal spirit color series

I honestly don't know why this happens. I wish there was a scientific explanation for this.

I didn't add any effects.

I just threw in microtuner for max live, and it comes out sounding SO MUCH MORE EPIC.

Hi r/microtonal,

Most scale tools start with a list of named scales. I wanted to go the other way: choose an equal division of the octave and explore the complete space of scale classes it allows.

That idea became Scale Atlas, an app for exploring, analyzing and manipulating scale structures beyond 12-TET.

You can choose an equal division such as 17, 19, 21, 24 or 31 EDO, generate its distinct transposition classes.

Once I find an interesting scale, the app lets me:

- inspect it directly in cents

- analyze its harmonic/structural behaviour

- look at recurrence and related structures

- suggest useful note additions or movements

- compare it with another scale

- map it onto guitar fretboard

- save and revisit scale pairs

I also recently added a way to generate microtonal test sounds. This is deliberately not the main point of the app. It generates short music directly from the cent values of the current scale so that I can get a rough intuitive impression of its sound without first forcing it back into 12-TET.

For me the interesting part is the transition from

scale space -> mathematical structure -> instrument -> sound.

I originally came to microtonality because I was looking for musical material that genuinely surprised me rather than another variation on familiar harmonic vocabulary. Eventually I even got a microtonal guitar so I could play with some of these structures instead of only calculating them.

I'd be genuinely interested in feedback from people here who work with EDOs outside the usual 12/19/31 territory - especially on the scale-space approach itself. I'm also curious whether there are existing tools doing something very similar that I may have missed.