What does it mean to be out of tune? First we need to look at what it means to tune. To tune is to bring an instrument to the desired pitch. The desired pitch. Desired is subjective because it is unique to your own perspective.
Calling something out of tune reflects your expectations as much as the music itself.
Why is music commonly perceived as out of tune? It’s because the heard pitches don’t align with expectation. Pitch expectation comes from musical exposure. Every culture has its own standard way of intonating pitches. If you’re musically trained then this expectation effect is even stronger.
This is normal and you’re entitled to your own biases in pitch expectation.
It’s often the hearing of other cultures’ music that causes the experience of out-of-tuneness. The feeling may also come when listening to xenharmonic music (music that uses tuning systems which sound radically different to the 12-tone equally tempered system).
There may also be innate psychoacoustic factors for experiencing something as out of tune, but I’m writing only about the learned factors today.
Experiencing something as out of tune is usually a good thing because, in most cases as musicians, we’re playing in groups, with others of a shared musical heritage, therefore we rely on traditional pitch expectations to provide the structure for cooperation. By noticing out-of-tuneness and adjusting intonation accordingly, the ensemble produces a more harmonious result.
As a musician of the xenharmonic tradition, I often receive comment that my music sounds out of tune. Yes, these new pitch relationships do sound out of tune at first. If you’re intrigued, you might relisten until new pitch expectations form within you. Then the music starts to sound in tune. It’s a wonder how flexible the mind can be.
Scale Workshop is a web app to make musical scales and tunings. It tunes synthesisers to microtonal traditional scales, historical scales and xenharmonic scales. People who are new to custom tunings can learn a lot by loading up some preset scales in Scale Workshop then mashing the qwerty keys to hear what these things sound like!
As of writing, Scale Workshop is developed by Xenharmonic Developers, lead by Lumi Pakkanen. Many others have contributed new features and fixes over the years. The project was originally started by me (Sevish) and in this article I just wanted to share some of my personal thoughts about the early days of the app.
Scale Workshop current version – hosted on Plainsound with the latest features
Scale Workshop 2 – stable SW2 version hosted on sevish.com
Scale Workshop 1 – original old school version is still available here
At Freiburg in south west Germany a few musicians were gathered around a dinner table next to the venue where a concert was about to happen. EUROMicroFest 2017. Michael H Dixon and Donald Bousted were discussing how they were getting things tuned properly on their MacBooks. Of course, Scala came up. Now Scala is perhaps still the most feature-rich scale/tuning software out there. But one thing I noticed is that people had the exact same trouble getting Scala working on a Mac. It got me thinking that it could be possible to recreate some of Scala’s basic functions in a web app that runs on any browser. The idea wasn’t to replace Scala, but to just implement the absolute basics in a convenient web app.
A few realisations hit me in a row.
It seemed like JavaScript could do all the tuning calculations and could even assemble tuning files that would download straight from the app. (Tuning files are one method that software synths can be retuned).
I learned about the Web Audio API and it seemed possible that such a tuning app could let the user play the scale with a built-in synth.
When I became aware of the Linnstrument, I realised a qwerty keyboard could act like a similar thing, i.e. as an isomorphic keyboard for note input. It seemed only needed two parameters would be needed, vertical and horizontal, to get a variety of different isomorphic keyboard mappings.
I realised that scale data could be stored as URL parameters, so that a bookmarked link would bring you right back to the scale you had worked on earlier. I knew that the online tuning scene (the Xenharmonic Alliance Facebook group, Discord server, and Wiki in particular) would use these URLs to quickly share tunings with each other.
If such a project had a permissive software license, I realised that music tech developers could reuse some of the Scale Workshop code to improve the tuning functionality in their own synths. (As far as I know, this did happen at least once).
And by following an open source model, others may want to contribute bug fixes and improvements so that all users of this free app could benefit.
So at this early stage I had a forming image of Scale Workshop in my head, along with an idea of what tech challenges would need to be overcome. Though, it was something completely unrelated to music that actually got my to execute on my plans! I was seeing a lot of jQuery going around at my day job and I wanted to make sure I understood it better, so I decided to start a side project to practice my jQuery and JavaScript in general. I started to build the one thing that I already had in my head, Scale Workshop!
(Of course, jQuery is extremely old hat now and we don’t use it anymore in recent versions).
Getting Scale Workshop working, bit by bit, became my obsession for a while. Every little success and next challenge kept me interested. I remember boarding a bus for a long journey and thinking “by the time I arrive, I want to have the isomorphic keyboard working.” And I barely did, though it was quite broken, I had managed to get the difficult bits done.
Even when my code works, it’s ugly. I don’t go into personal projects with all the logical stuff worked out in advance. I just kinda guess whether things will work or not, then hack things together until they do. In the case of Scale Workshop, this lead to a lot of “sevishcode”, most of which had to be refactored over time!
Eventually some really cool things started happening. Music teachers started using Scale Workshop in the classroom to teach music theory concepts. Tuning heads were generating scales on the bus and pinging them into Discord for later deep dives. And while I’ve now completely stepped away from the project, other developers joined in the effort to build Scale Workshop, which is still under active development.
Big thanks to all the users and developers of this tool. Happy tuning!
Traditional intonation means tuning systems which are informed by culture and emerged over time due to technical, material and social reality. For example 12-equal, maqamat, ragas, slendro etc.
Notice how I put (for example) 12 and maqam in the same pot, despite one being considered microtonal and the other not. But indeed these systems are more comparable to each other than to non-traditional intonation.
Traditional intonation is powerful because there are large repertoires of traditional music to use it. Instrument designs are well known and produced in quantity. Music teachers have mastered traditional intonation and can readily teach it.
Some instrument makers simply tune newly-built instruments to recordings of similar instruments in the past. I have heard this is sometimes true of gamelan. That’s one way intonation can be passed down through a culture.
When you get into another culture’s traditional music, you can’t help but learn about their language, spirituality, food and other things. So people do find this a rewarding fun time.
When you listen to traditional music and realise that other people tune instruments differently, it may open a gateway to more broadly caring about intonation in music.
My own gateway into valuing intonation was by enjoying gamelan music. But actually the reason I’m still here is because I later discovered non-traditional intonation and I love it.
Non-traditional intonation is more about an individual musician’s needs for the music. Often the tuning is bespoke designed for a specific composition.
Intonation is just another musical parameter that us musicians use to more finely hone our expression. Intonation is the same kind of thing as tempo, dynamics, timbre. Learn one more thing and improve your craft.
You can’t walk into a guitar shop and buy a 17ed2 guitar off the shelf. That’s why musicians who work with non-traditional intonation are necessarily tinkerers and builders who face unique challenges. Or they pay big sums for bespoke instruments.
Performers who are faced with the task of playing music written in non-traditional tuning systems often must learn new techniques to get at those new pitches. No doubt this is a barrier to getting music performed in unconventional tunings.
Non-traditional intonation (e.g. triple Bohlen-Pierce, 22ed2, Carlos Alpha, 88cet, blackwood[10] etc.) is less explored, so there exists less repertoire, fewer instruments, fewer music teachers to guide you. Are these downsides, or opportunities?
(Random aside, but imagine if a currently non-traditional tuning system became traditional somewhere in the future, wouldn’t that be cool? An island of people jamming in dekany scales? A valley of the Bohlen-Pierce flutes?)
Building instruments is hard, but digital music tech is better at adopting new tuning functionality. This makes it easier to try out both traditional intonations of other cultures, and non-traditional tunings that will get everyone thinking in new ways.
The online tuning discussion space is broadly split between traditionalists (including historians) and non-traditionalists, with some overlap but not particularly much. We’re all here because we appreciate intonation, but we’re not always on the same page about the point of it all.
Is microtonality just about using small melodic runs? Is it about using non-12 tunings? Is it about using non-Western tunings? Is it about preservation of tuning customs? Is it a new frontier of previously unheard melodies? Ask and you shall get different answers.
My approach in the past was to see microtonality as music that uses tunings that are non-12. But after many years, the 12 vs non-12 dichotomy seems less pertinent than I was originally made to believe.
When you start thinking of microtonality as “any tuning system that isn’t 12-equal” then you have a combination of well-beloved traditional intonations with experimental non-traditional stuff. But these are unlikely partners.
When I release an album of 100% non-traditional intonation stuff, isn’t it just as fair to call it non-maqam as it is to call it non-12?
And yet, I promoted a lot of my old music as “not 12” because that was the thing to do in microtonal circles. Now I am starting to realise the traditional vs non-traditional dichotomy is more pertinent.
Paraphrasing something said to me recently IRL: “people from other cultures must understand your music more easily because their music is microtonal too.” On this face of it, this must have sounded reasonable, yet I don’t have any evidence for the claim. Could it be that the 12-vs-non-12 framing make this assumption sound more reasonable than it is?
The first time I heard Bohlen-Pierce music it sounded weird to me. When I played it to my friend who mastered santoor in North Indian classical music, it sounded weird to him too. It makes no difference that BP and ICM are both considered microtonal. BP sounds weird to all.
Paraphrasing from a recent Facebook microtonal group post: “I am used to ancient Greek modes so why don’t I get Balinese music?” Just because both are labelled microtonal, doesn’t mean there is no relearning for your ear to do.
Thought experiment: A Turkish person walks into a shop, buys a saz and records a hit tune with a melody in makam bayati, using all the techniques they learned from their music teacher. People enjoy the music, everyone is having a good time.
A French person walks into a shop, buys a guitar and records a hit tune with a melody in the minor scale, using all the techniques they learned from their music teacher. People enjoy the music, everyone is having a good time.
In both the hypothetical examples above, the musicians walked a well trodden path, and fair play to them; they shared the love of music. The Turkish example is awarded the (perhaps desirable) label “microtonal”, whereas the French example is not. And yet I consider both of them to have followed traditional intonation and both of value.
And then I’m over here recording tunes in glacial[7], CPS scales, machine[6], 88cet, 4L3s, which are all microtonal, so people consider my music to be closer to the Turkish example than the French, when I’m actually unconventional towards both. Don’t you find that perspective to be nonsensical?
Another thing is – I do love 12-equal! I mostly listen to video game soundtracks and dig up 80s and 90s dance music. I’ve had all kinds of feelings and experiences to music in 12. I will always enjoy music in a range of different intonations, including 12.
What I want to convey is that there is a positive case for intonation as a way to further hone your musical expression. I also want to convey that when we define microtonality negatively as being in opposition to one particular tuning system then we cause confusion about how those other varied tuning systems fit in together. I did my best to share this perspective on microtonality, and while I’m not a very good writer I still hope it made you think a couple thoughts.
Version 1.8.0 of Decent Sampler offers microtuning support via the Tuning menu. You need to supply it with an scl and kbm file, which can be easily generated with Scale Workshop, Scala, or other tuning creation tool.
Surge XT is a software synth plugin. Version 1.2 is now released. This version improves upon its tuning functionality, accessibility and other things. An excerpt from the changelog reads:
Major Feature: Tuning Upgrades
- Surge can act as an OddSound MTS provider (‘master’) allowing the Surge tuning editor to provide tuning to an entire session.
- Remediate yet more edge cases in our internal tuning, including keyboard mapping larger than a scale.
The short explanation is, if you are using synths that support tuning via MTS-ESP, Surge XT can now act as the MTS-ESP master, which means that you specify your tuning within Surge XT and then the other synths will follow the same tuning. This is intended to be more convenient than loading the same tuning data into multiple instances of various synths.
Surge XT is free and available on Linux, Windows and macOS.
With the recent release of Scale Workshop 2, lead developer Lumi Pakkanen has started producing video tutorials to demonstrate what this tuning application can do. Learning some Scale Workshop basics will aid you in your study of musical tunings. The first two videos are below. For the rest, you’ll have to follow Lumi’s youtube channel.
This tutorial demonstrates the on screen keyboards where you can play microtonal scales in your browser.
This tutorial will answer a lot of questions about how you can enter your own scales from numerical values.
Since Bitwig Studio is a pretty good DAW for making microtonal music, you might find yourself working with a musical scale that contains more or less than 12 notes. Particularly if you’re working with a large scale, you will want the piano roll to visually reflect what you’re hearing. You might have thought this was not currently possible in Bitwig Studio but I have found the quick workaround for you. All you need is to watch the tutorial video below and then spend a few minutes setting up your custom piano roll.
The tutorial music is Yeah Groove from my very recent album Morphable, in 26 tone equal temperament.
I just added some more of my fractal artwork to the gallery page. Go check them out!
My new album Morphable will be available on 5th August 2022. Nine new electronic microtonal beats from the harmony hacker.
If you want to hear one of the tracks today then you can! Yeah Groove can be played on youtube:
Scale Workshop has been updated this weekend. Let’s take a look at what this useful microtonal web tool is capable of.
Launch Scale Workshop in a new tab
With a web MIDI compatible browser, you can use Scale Workshop to enable microtonality on your hardware synths and sound modules. This is achieved by 16 channel note output with pitch bend on each channel.
Rotate your scale so that a different interval becomes the new 1/1.
When using the mouse cursor, you can now play the virtual keyboard stylophone style, i.e. click and drag across the keyboard to hit a sequence of notes.
REAPER supports custom piano roll layouts. You can now export a txt file from Scale Workshop to import directly into REAPER.
Export your tuning to Korg Librarian format. This can be imported into the Korg Librarian software so you can write it to your synth.
Scale Workshop now has better handling of large numbers and ratios.
Issues with the synth audio dropout are resolved. Various new waveforms are added. The default waveform is changed to semisine which is more ideal for auditioning tunings than the previous triangle.
As this version is a major milestone for the app, we have made sure to update the documentation to cover all the new features.
Early development work has started for Scale Workshop 2. This involves a complete rewrite from scratch and a new UI. The project will remain on the permissive MIT License so that synth developers can re-use parts of Scale Workshop’s code to add microtonal functionality to their own projects. Scale Workshop 2 is intended to be released when it reaches feature parity with Scale Workshop 1.5. Scale URLs will remain backwards-compatible. Scale Workshop 1.x will receive no new features except for bug fixes.