I’m interested in tuning one of my acoustic pianos to a microtonal scale.

I was wondering if any of you have experience with this, and if so, what scale you chose.

22 edo (since there are 88 keys) and 24 edo (for the 12 note chromatic scale) seem to make sense with the layout, but I was hoping to get some advice before going down this rabbit hole.

Thanks!

The sounds in this video are completely synthetic. I've been working on creating sound libraries for musical instruments recently. Yes, I'm creating them from scratch (no samples, no AI) and making them publicly available. It's kind of a hobby. I'd love to hear your feedback.

This is a problem I am discussing this moment with Gemini. I want to notate pitch with numbers on the stave rather than use clefs, pitch letters, five lines and four spaces, key sigs and accidentals. We started with a printable pdf of four lines marked S. A. T. B. so I can notate my numbers directly on the paper and utilize standard time notations. Trouble is that I cannot communicate with Gemini but by scanning the sheets.

Is anyone else dealing with this problem? The best notation I have now is general. I recorded the numbers I want and I notate them in the field at the top of the track. I want to get some more precise notation and performance as I experiment with JI.

Last week we heard each day of the week as musical notes. I did it the same way ancient Greeks studied harmony, by bridging a string at the corresponding month:day(ex 7:13).
I used all of the ratios/notes from last week to make this music! *I did allow octave transposition What in the world does it sound like?

7/13 20/7 20/13 13/7
7/14 21/7 21/14 14/7
7/15 22/7 22/15 15/7
7/16 23/7 23/16 16/7
7/17 24/7 24/17 17/7
7/18 25/7 25/18 18/7
7/19 26/7 26/19 19/7

I've just tagged the first stable version of my software Justly for composing in Just intonation. Docs here and binaries here. Features:

- Support for Windows, Linux, and MacOS (both on Intel and Silicon)

- Importing and exporting songs in musicxml

- Live playback with all the instruments included in the musescore soundfont

Please try it out and let me know what you think!

For the past few months I've been experimenting with composing directly in frequency (Hz) rather than thinking in terms of notes in a defined tuning system. Instead of writing within those sorts of frameworks, I build harmonies from numerical frequency relationships and just intonation, which lets the tuning stay flexible as the music develops. 

In my previous attempts this has resulted in some pretty “weird” music, so I wanted to try to keep it accessible while still exploring the idea of “what can I do with this?” 

To do so, I took a more spectral approach and analyzed recordings of several different Mourning Dove calls and used the strongest frequency near the ends of their coos as the harmonic foundations of the piece. A given coo, among several sampled in the piece, may function as the root of one chord, as a fifth within another, a microtonal harmonic, or appear as any other chord extension elsewhere, allowing the same dove material to assume different identities as the harmony remains just and “wraps” itself around the given call- no iteration of the harmony surrounding the call is the same throughout the piece.  

But of course, every dove is different. I noticed that while the overall shape of their calls is very consistent, the pitch of some calls is higher or lower than others. For instance, one dove's ending coos may land at 480 Hz, while another may land at 525 Hz. This typically would be quite problematic when trying to harmonize to the coos themselves because, while 525 Hz is very close to the note C5, 480 Hz falls somewhere between B♭4 and B4. To boot, the interval between those frequencies doesn't correspond to any standard musical interval-it falls somewhere between a minor second and a major second.

In a system where everything is defined and harmonized as numbers, however, this is no problem (Such as the modulation heard at 4:48) . The frequencies can simply adhere to and harmonize with any value. That is where the ability to truly harmonize with any dove call lies- the harmony can fit the doves, rather than the doves trying to fit “standard harmony.” This is of course just one “cool” thing you can do writing this way- you can also, say, have all voices in a given piece converge into a perfect harmonic series, which I do somewhere around 7:00 in the piece.

Rhythmically, I just used the cadence of the Mourning Dove's call. That pattern ended up becoming the main rhythmic idea while the harmony is constantly changing underneath it.

Hi! I'm the developer of Amanita Calculator, and I recently added two tools for exploring tuning and harmonic relationships.

The Temperament page lets you divide the octave into any number of equal steps, audition every step, and compare its cents position against the familiar 12-TET piano grid.

There is also an Overtones page for exploring the harmonic series, auditioning individual partials, and seeing how far each harmonic drifts from equal-tempered notes.

It runs directly in the browser, works offline, and is completely free:

https://calculator.amanita.music/app/

The full app also includes tempo, Euclidean rhythm, reverb/delay, pitch and harmony tools, but I’m particularly interested in feedback on the tuning side.

What comparisons, visualizations or export options would make this genuinely useful for microtonal musicians?

A very murky piece with night time forest vibes about living out entire sub-lives in a time dilated dream state.

Chords were fetched @ https://www.31edo.com/chords

https://www.handsearseyes.fun/Ears/Chords/Main.php

飲水思源 (yǐn shuǐ sī yuán) drinking the water, remember its source.
https://dxinteractive.github.io/xenpaper/#%0A%7Br261.63Hz%7D%0A25%2F7---%0A25%2F18---%0A18%2F7---%0A7%2F18---%0A%0A%0A%0A%0A%0A%0A

I wrote an algorithm that classifies SCL files on whether they are EDO, JI, or irregular and does it's best to name them (if they are 12EDO). This way you can import a random scala file and getting a better intuition of what it is.

>>> sc scl `/Users/nescroft/Library/Application Support/Soniare/Auwen/Scales/1-1.188-1.333-1.5-1.786-2/1-1.188-1.333-1.5-1.786-2.scl`
Just intonation or an irregular scale detected. Estimated resolution: 16.
6 ratios imported, run `sc pri` to print the scale
>>> scale print
5:    2.000000  2/1         480Hz
4:    1.785714  25/14       428.5714Hz
3:    1.500000  3/2         360Hz
2:    1.333333  4/3         320Hz
1:    1.187500  19/16       285Hz
0:    1.000000  1/1         240Hz
Scale Type: Just Intonation
Divisions: 12
Harmonic Resolution: 16
Scale Names:
blues_pentatonic_minor
dhanyasi__asc
Click a line to edit the scale with binary, intervals, or pitch classes
scale j 12 16 100101010010
scale j 12 16 3:2:2:3:2
scale j 12 16 0,3,5,7,10

This is inside my app auwen.app the CLI music app for live improvisation. It is microtonal music program for improvising dance music with a growing community of users in San Francisco & around the world.

Let me know if this is useful and what other features you want for microtonal music. Maybe Auwen already has it or maybe I can implement it for you!

I wanted the cheapest possible way to experiment with microtones in real time, without buying an expensive specialist keyboard, adding extra frets to a guitar, or ordering a custom instrument. So I made an iPhone and iPad app for myself.

It was designed first and foremost as a MIDI controller. I’ve tested it with GarageBand on both iPhone and iPad, so you can use it with the much wider range of sounds and instruments already available in music software. I deliberately didn’t try to turn it into a full synth, but I added three simple built-in sounds so it can also be played on its own.

The other part of the experiment is the keyboard itself. I’m trying different piano-based layouts for fitting 24 notes per octave onto a touchscreen. The challenge is to keep the keys large enough to play comfortably, cover several octaves, and still make the layout understandable to someone seeing a quarter-tone keyboard for the first time.

There are several layouts in the app at the moment, and animated transitions show how each one grows out of a familiar piano keyboard. I’m still not sure which approach works best, so feedback on the current layouts or ideas for other ones would be very useful.

The app was just approved for the App Store and it’s completely free, since this is mainly an experiment: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6789963675

「Staying the course」 might mean 「leaving the path」.

An abstract art style (??) depiction of just intonation triads. Created for myself in search of tonalities, or pure amusement :P

There are two flavors of it, one includes all ordinary triads with complexity abc<N, the other also includes all "utonality triads" whose complexity is defined as lcm(abc)^3/(abc)<N. Obviously the second one is more complete but they mostly contain pairs of mirrored triads which causes more clutters.

You can see for every triad there is a solid marker and a hollow marker. If the solid marker is much larger than the hollow marker it is strongly otonal while if the inverse is true it is strongly utonal.

When complexity limit increases one can observe some interesting structures to emerge. There are larger still plots (N>8000000) but are too large to upload :)

Source code (also svg and larger N versions)

C_ystal Permutation was created in VCV Rack using the Poly Scala Quantizer module, setting the root note frequency to 255.68 Hz and loading the .scl file for the Bohlen47 scale. There are three sound sources playing different notes from the scale. The whole track was processed in Ableton.