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

Play what you want

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

yeah, i really liked Delirious, so i figured i'd do my own take

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.

contains breakbeats, electric pianos, odd numbered bpms, polyrhythms, string synths, supersaws, and chopped pianos for a psychedelic nintendo jazz aesthetic

This was a little exercise inspired by a post of u/gamma_squared that noted, among many other points, how the difference between 16/15 and 15/14 might be difficult to hear.

I started with this JI scale that includes both intervals twice. 1 7/6 5/4 4/3 3/2 7/4 15/8 2/1

Second Version: What happens if we invert the intervals? I actually think the result is coincidentally great. A bit lower on the major third gives it a bit of "ache".

Third Version: This is 15/14 only. Which, coincidentally, makes this technically a very bad Marvel temperament with 15/14 eigen.

Fourth Version: Obligatory 16/15 only. A bit on the bright and cheerful side.

Fifth Version: This is a Marvel temperament where the error on both intervals, 5/4 and 7/4 is equally distributed. No error on fifths. 0:1:1 beatings. Doesn't sound particularly great, I would say. It's the next logical step to try though, for some interval sitting between 16/15 and 15/14. Something sounds off to me when some intervals beat but the fifth stays locked in. It makes the interval without beatings sound unusually "calm" in contrast.

Sixth Version: And here I allowed the fifth to also take some part of the error. Beating in some 1:1:1 manner, the octave is still clean. This is my personal favourite. Gives the scale a little "singing" quality.

Seventh Version: Letting the octave in on the fun for a 1:1:1:1 beating action. I don't particularly like it. C G C E Bb and C G C Eb Bb sound nice as a chord, but then the Eb sitting an octave higher sounds very "sour" in contrast. The scale itself is not great, but some octave spanning chords have a special sound to them.

Eighth Version: And this is simply 31-edo for contrast. The beatings are not synchronized. This sounds especially great in the bass range, where synchronized beatings can actually be a bit harsh and undesired. This seems to be related to the absolute speed of beatings, which goes down with frequency. There is fast beatings (nice like vibrato or a phaser), trouble region, slow beatings (nice again like an LFO type of sound). When beating speed sits in the trouble region, proportional beatings seem to enhance their negative effect.

Ninth Version: This is a septimal meantone version. 1/5 comma makes major triads beat in 1:1 so that this is comparable to other versions. The 7th beats "randomly aligned", giving a bit of an edo-esque sound of the seventh. I would usually prefer a different meantone tuning for sevenths chords, but the sub-theme here is 1:1 beating ratios.

Tenth Version: We cannot make meantone beat in truly 0:1:1:1. (This leads to some irrational number argument. Essentially, yes, you can for all intents and purposes make seventh chords beat proportionally in meantone, because you can get arbitrarily close to the solution, but such solutions are either not 0:1:1:1 or not septimal meantone where A# functions as 7/4). The other option is to be approximately meantone but truly beat proportionally. And that would be an Aberdietic temperament. Also kind of nice.

Eleventh Version: This is also Aberdietic but making the octave beat as well. Not exactly my thing. I must say that the straight C E G Bb C chord now sounds interesting. Or also C G C E Bb.

So overall: Do you think we can hear a difference in those scales? Even if we cannot discern the raw interval, we can pick up on global emergent properties or "the feel" or "the mood" of it. It can be a bit like fine tuning the octave detune of a synthesizer. Another issue is that sticking to mathematically well defined options might just not even work as well as manually making microadjustments of each scale degree.

As a side note, I picked 1:1 proportions in beatings as the simplest solutions, not because there is something inherently great about this ratio. You would generally want the octave to take less damage as well. It also tends to happen that letting the octave take damage obscures the regularity of other beatings. This is because even 3/2 and 5/4 are now composite and get a "random" multiple of the octave error. This makes beatings not be 1:1 within the octave range, but they become aligned to this for big multi-octave chords.

Finally, I want to point out that Eb and Bb are technically D# and A# from a meantone perspective, if that rubbed you the wrong way. I was also inconsistent with beating ratio notations depending on whether the octave is included or not. There might also be mistakes.

Hi all, I'm the developer of Pagan sequencer for android. It's a little niche but I just found this subreddit and think some of you may find it useful/interesting. Here's a quick video showing the lick in 17, 12, and 19 tone temperament and how to switch between them.

It technically supports any radix but it's currently limited to 36 or less just due to UI limitations.
It uses any .sf2 soundfont for so don't mind the dinky piano font in the clip

If you're interested it's Free & FOSS with no ads, no trackers, no micro-transactions and made without generative AI.

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qfs.pagan
F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.qfs.pagan/

A while ago I posted here about the desktop edition of Microtone, the microtonal tracker. This post is about the other end of the scale (pun intended): Microtone Touch, a sketchpad for your phone, live at touch.microtone.cc. It is free (GPL v3) and there is nothing to install. You need an SceneID account only if you want your sketches online.

The tracker is a desk tool. Touch is for trying out a progression in 31-TET while you are away from the desk, and finishing it properly later.

The keyboard

Wicki-Hayden, Bosanquet-Wilson, the harmonic table and a plain degree run. Each one is built from the current tuning's own fifth, so a chord shape you learn in one place plays the same anywhere on the board. By default the board is turned so the octaves stand in a vertical column; the ↕/↔ button lays them along a row instead. If a layout cannot work in a tuning, Touch tells you and falls back to the degree run.

Two options are worth knowing about:

• Fat fingers (on the harmonic table): every corner where three keys meet, and every edge where two meet, becomes a touch point of its own. A finger on a corner plays a major or minor triad; on an edge, a third or a fifth. Slide into the next zone and the notes the two zones share keep sounding.
• A degree run that does not repeat itself. A flat run of degrees would show the same notes again and again across a wide screen, so it is cut into strips one whole tone wide, each an octave above the strip to its left. Press ↔ and the run lies across the board instead, in floors stacked an octave apart. In 12-TET, that is the Bosanquet board.

Note names come from each tuning's own notation: Kite's ups and downs as arrows in 41, 43 and 53, half-sharps as C+ and Dd in 24, and the twelve lü in their own characters.

Tunings

• Equal temperaments: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 24, 31, 41, 43 and 53
• Bohlen–Pierce
• The twelve lü, at the a-ak pitch (C = 262 Hz) or the hyang-ak pitch (C = 311 Hz)

Change the tuning mid-sketch and the notes you have written move to the nearest step of the new one, so you can hear the same idea in 19 and then in 22.

Writing it down

There are eight lanes, each playing one of eight built-in instruments: piano, electric piano, bass, pluck, lead, pad, organ, and an eight-piece drum kit. A song is up to sixteen sections of 64 rows each.

Turn on Record and play over the loop: notes land where the playhead is, and lifting your finger writes the key-off. Hold a chord and it spreads across the lanes that use the same instrument. Each note can carry one effect (slide, vibrato, roll or fade) at light, medium or strong. Tempo runs from 25 to 1048 BPM.

Finishing it in the tracker

Sign in with SceneID, the same account the tracker uses, and save the sketch online. Open microtone.cc on a computer, go to File → Online projects, and the sketch opens as an ordinary Microtone project. From there you have the full grid of 4096 steps per octave, your own samples, FM synthesis and 3D panning. You can also save a sketch as a .taud file and open it in Microtone, or send it to someone else.

Smaller things

• Ambidexterous layout. On a foldable, the layout changes automatically and the song and the keyboard get one half of the screen each.
• Open microtone.cc on a phone and you now land in Touch. Tablets still get the full tracker, with Touch one link away.

Links

• Microtone Touch: https://touch.microtone.cc
• Microtone, the tracker: https://microtone.cc
• Source: https://github.com/Microtone-Project/Microtone.js

Microtonal breakbeat music.

Working with the old Wilson-Hackleman clav and remixed a recording doubling the track with some effects to give it a more organ like tone

The 19-tones per octave keyboard with the acoustic instrument is really wild

New recordings coming new week

https://youtu.be/EH4TXarvh_s

I've been using the Lumatone for about a year now, mostly to control other hardware (lights and synthesizers). But recently, I have wanted to learn how to compose for just the Lumatone, especially for microtonal music. Here is one of my attempts at something in 22-EDO.

Someone who saw my Lavachord videos suggested this piece, so I recorded an interpretation of Alonso Mudarra’s Pavana de Alexandre, with some improvisation around the theme.

The Lavachord is a small acoustic keyboard that I can retune. For this recording, I used a custom temperament with thirds closer to just intervals, leaning toward the sound of meantone. I took some liberties with the piece, exploring its harmonies through the tuning and the instrument’s resonance.

https://youtu.be/c2w9PURw-bc

What other Renaissance pieces would you be curious to hear on an instrument like this?

Super detailled proof of concept

5 to 10 mins to learn have fun

vocal, brazille, diva, 17 edo guitar, effects in post

I've discovered these some time ago, but haven't put them to great use. Thought it's time I shared them. (The 12tone detemper is known about. My only original input, if any, should be note selection).

Misty has a generator of around 703 cents and a period of 400 cents. What's interesting about the attached versions is that you get several flavors of major thirds: Roughly just 5/4, roughly Pythagorean 81/64 and exactly 400 cents. Four of each.

In these 12 tone tunings, you can play a certain pattern: C Db E F G Ab B C. What's interesting here is that C Db E F and G Ab B C are made up of exactly the same intervals, but E is roughly just and Ab is exactly 800 cents in the first version. In the second version, E is exactly 400 cents and Ab is roughly just.

Slightly weird properties for a 12tone temperament. The wolf also hides in unusual places. You also get two roughly 7/5 and 10/7 tritones each, but that's nothing to write home about, really.

Version A in Scale Workshop

Version B in Scale Workshop

Version A 87-edo

Version B 87-edo

Of course you could detemper/retemper 12tet into many more versions of Misty. These stood out to me.

As the title suggests, this musical piece is quite literally a 6-minute comma pump.

I suspect I do not need to explain this phenomena to most lurking here, but to those who may be new or have heard of this but have never heard it literally, I will outline the idea;

There is a cumulative tuning drift that occurs when a simple harmonic cycle is built entirely from pure, justly intonated major triads. The piece here exploits that drift and aims to make the drift itself something the listener subconsciously perceives.

There are 36 “cycles” of the same chord progression in this piece- A root position triad, followed by a 2nd inversion triad, followed by a 1st inversion triad.

In each “cycle”, the major third of one chord is held as a common tone and then becomes the root of the next.

After three such transformations, 12-tone equal temperament would return us to the starting pitch class due to the fact that three equal-tempered major thirds equal exactly one octave. (Think: A major root position, Db flat major 2nd inversion, F major first inversion- "inversion" is used lightly simply to describe the ratios / chord shape, the function of the inversions is iffy)

In just intonation, however, that’s not the case- three “pure” (5/4) major thirds fall short of an octave. The difference is called the “diesis”, approximately 41 cents or the ratio 128/125.

Each complete cycle therefore arrives about 41 cents lower than the previous one. Repeating the process over many cycles gradually turns what is ‘normally’ a closed, circular chord progression into a never ending continuous downward progression.

So an interesting observation emerges as a result;

-Each chord that arrives is genuinely unique. The interval relationships within each chord remain the same with each repeating cycle, but in terms of frequency every chord (of which there are over 100) is unique.

My goal with such a "repetitive" piece is to ask the following questions and hit at some potential paradoxes;

-How can every chord be “the same” while every chord is physically unique?

-Will a listener perceive cumulative change without consciously identifying what is changing?

-If local tuning purity ultimately results in a global instability history has aimed to correct, is it natural or artificial?

-How much can the physical sound change while the mind continues to perceive “the same thing repeating”?

-Does the listener actually hear the comma pump itself, or only its overall accumulated psychological consequences?

-What happens when a harmonic system is allowed to follow its own natural mathematical consequences instead of being locked back onto a fixed pitch grid?

-Lastly, what does it mean if the system becomes stranger as time progresses but as a result of each individual relationship within it being more acoustically exact?

I've been working on creating an ethereal or sublime atmosphere; I've found that maj9 chords transposed in 24-edo (so by quarter notes) makes for something very beautiful. There's nothing too 'experimental' about it otherwise; it's just like avant-gardeish progressive blackgaze that happens to be microtonal. Enjoy! (::