Resources for microtonal music
sevish.com
sevish.com
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.
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!
But there are entire music traditions using other tuning systems and they sound "normal" to the people who grew up with them. Notably the 24tet used in arabic music but there are literally dozens of others around the world.
I think that you can definitely get used to it. It is a little weird to hear non-typical notes, especially if you have done any kind of pitch training, but at the end of the day it isn't the notes themselves that matter but their positions relative to each other in a chord or passage.
The youtuber I linked also has a bunch of Lumatone performances which is an instrument with a hex grid layout where you can change the pitch of a chord by shifting your hands up or down on the grid while maintaining the same hand shape. That approach makes some really good microtone music whereas a lot of straight piano layout players end up getting stuck in "ambient space noise" modes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWM6xRGoGcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWxV7u8Zm4I&ab_channel=Berkl...
(he typically plays a double neck guitar, one with standard tuning/frets, the other fretless)
Probably the best example, especially the middle: https://youtu.be/mPZn4x3uOac
Here’s a work of mine that focuses on 7-limit JI intervals: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/josephpost/daLO
https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/
I use the plugin at 1:56 in this thing in order to modulate up about a quarter tone for the end (it's otherwise in 12edo)
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=...
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.
Of course, editing those midi notes after they've been recorded is still quite a chore.
For ex Mozart used meantone to create beautiful dissonance as well as nicer sounding harmonies. (Mozart didn’t use 12TET)
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.
Here's an example of one in which every track has a different set of microtones: https://on.soundcloud.com/MpTau
I think most of their stuff sounds pretty silly, usually – like someone's mucking around with knobs in Ableton over a decent drum loop: https://sevish.bandcamp.com/track/tritavium
I thought Aphex Twin's work on Syro was some of the most "listenable" microtonal electronic music around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEO56WG0p48
I've been a bit frustrated with the inability to work easily in Ableton 9 with non-Western or microntonal tunings.
Edit: it looks like sevish has multiple notes tuned the same in order to get less than 12 notes per octave, so that's also possible.