Well Temperaments (Part 5)

In the Western music scale there are mathematical reasons why there has to be some temperament, in other words some way of prioritizing some harmonies over others.

Ideally we'd use just intonation for digital music, but 12-tone equal temperament is so deeply ingrained in everything that you practically have to start over from scratch if you want something with more than 12 notes in the octave.

MPE is a pretty good first step, but you also need good support in composition software and DAWs.

I know some people who compose in 41-TET using Musescore. I think it requires some plugins.

One of the nice things about modular synthesis is that it uses control voltage for pitch, which is continuously variable. There's no built-in tuning system assumptions at all, even though individual modules may bring some 12-TET baggage with them. On the other hand, getting analog oscillators to track the volt-per-octave standard accurately enough that these subtle distinctions in pitch don't get lost in unintelligibility is easier said than done. 3340-based VCOs seem to do a decent job but they have to be calibrated carefully.

You can absolutely compose in just intonation (JI). It's not terribly difficult, especially digitally as you say. This style of composition is often called "N-limit just intonation" (for some value of N) or "freestyle JI".

However, temperaments allow some composition tricks that are impossible in JI. Tempered systems basically merge annoyingly small intervals that appear in JI, so you can create progressions that would be otherwise impossible.

Either way I fully agree that more musicians should be exploring JI and alternative temperaments, and I'd like to believe that it's the future. A lot of people who go down this path fall to the nerd-sniping you mention, and they end up only exploring technique while losing track of musicality. It's hard to find balance.

Instead of thinking in terms of how can we use technology to get just intonation, what if we start with things which already have just intonation (the human voice, string instruments) and then adapt technology to them. Of course this raises the barrier of entry significantly as you'd have to learn singing or an instrument. But I think composing music is inherently tied to the ability of producing music in real time. You can't be good writer if you have to pick and choose words on a computer. You need to be able to think and say what you want to write.