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Comment by sporkl | Hacker News Reader

Pivotuner[0]: automatic real-time pure intonation and microtonal modulation

This is an audio plugin which I've been working on over the past couple years, I've gotten input from some pretty high-profile artists like Jacob Collier! Finally released it publicly late last year.

Pivotuner is a plugin which tunes MIDI data in pure intonation in real time. Besides enabling beautiful purely-tuned chords on keyboards, this also enables many other cool things such as microtonal modulation, and unusual chord sonorities! (more info on the website, this is copy-pasted)

Besides the demos on the website, there's some stuff on YouTube[1].

I'm good to answer any questions!

[0]: https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/ [1]: https://youtu.be/iyxaIP5VAkw?list=PLWgV6cfPuuQVsNRsXxNOicKQo...

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Wow - the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon must be real.

I just created my first song using automatic real-time pure intonation and uploaded it yesterday[0]. I used a plugin called Scale Breaker[1] that connects to MPE instruments in Ableton (used Wavetable for all the synths in the song since it's MPE enabled) and set the tuning to automatic Just Intonation (12T) with 5-limit symmetric aug 5th tuning. I edited all the bass notes to trigger the correct tuning for each chord so each note is automatically microtuned to be perfectly resonant.

I make House music and noticed that not many people have been experimenting using real-time just intonation in the genre so I gave it a go to see what it sounds like - it was pretty fun to make. I believe perfectly resonant music is going to be really big in the next few years now that these automatic tuning plugins are available.

Question: does your plugin work through modulating the notes using MPE? My understanding is that this method allows for more versatility.

[0]: https://open.spotify.com/track/73r7izAfNtiG20vzoN8mCz?si=104... [1]: https://isotonikstudios.com/product/scale-breaker/

Yep, the plugin works with MPE, though I'm also planning to add support for MTS-ESP, and MIDI 2 when it has wider support.

I haven't used it, but Scale Breaker is definitely a cool plugin, I do plan on stealing some features from it. Pivotuner has a step up in that it supports microtonal modulation resulting naturally from pure intonation (which is a bit of a niche case), but Scale Breaker's ability to sync across tracks is super useful and something I am planning to add.

Thanks for sharing your track, it's always nice to hear things using pure intonation!

I listened to the Bach demo and it’s interesting that I can actually hear the “bends”. I find the sound pleasant after I the sound has stabilized and I forget about the bend, but for those few milliseconds when the bend happens, it sounds like it introduces a very small dissonance.

Not sure if it’s just because I’m so used to hearing Just Intonation all the time, I’m curious if other have the same experience.

Great product anyway! I’ll have to find a way to try it with my Romanian Kaval improvisations since my instrument is already in pure intonation from what I noticed.

Yeah, the bending itself being audible can be a bit jarring, I'm planning to add the option to interpolate the bends slowly, so hopefully that will help. Thank you for the interest!

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