5 ms·
Resources for microtonal music
- IndySun 4y agoA short but quality list. Missing the Aphex / Oddsound endeavour... https://oddsound.com/mtsespsuite.php https://oddsound.com/mtsespsuite.php
- flats 4y agoThis is just a list of Sevish’s tools (the Scale Workshop is really useful for things like building scales for use in Max, _way_ easier to work with than Scala). Thank you for sharing the MTS-ESP Suite, though! I love the idea of a single piece of software that can handle tuning across plugins and MIDI devices.
- calvinmorrison 4y agoMicrojazz is a enjoyable album for microtonal bebop
- dmonitor 4y agoKing Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has some quality microtonal albums as well. Flying Microtonal Banana, KG, and LW.
- wyclif 4y agoBest band name ever!
- laluneodyssee 4y agoNot only the name, the band also is really good
- Jeff_Brown 4y agoAll of Brendan Byrnes's work is very microtonal and absolutely rocks my face off.
- mdp 4y agoFor those of us that didn't know the term Microtonal Music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1XOnIk2ai8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1XOnIk2ai8
- jabroni_salad 4y agoIf you have never seriously tried to listen to microtone music I would recommend this video as your point of entry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGZ0JlMwZpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGZ0JlMwZpY 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.
- crazygringo 4y agoThat's utterly fascinating, I've never heard microtonal music before outside of older traditions like chanting. Some observations: 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!
- giraffe_lady 4y agoFor your last point, if you just continued to adapt 12tet music into other systems I think it would continue to sound strange? Not totally sure, you'd get used to it to some extent but I think it would always sound noticeably off esp if you were familiar with the piece in 12tet like we are with this one. 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.
- jabroni_salad 4y agoFor #3, a lot of it IS jarring and often it is supposed to be... although in jazz there are no wrong notes, just bad resolutions (jacob collier). Oftentimes in microtone you will find a passage that sounds horrible at first but makes sense at the end, hopefully. 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.
- biorach 4y agoHow is Bitwig with alternate tunings? I've been a bit frustrated with the inability to work easily in Ableton 9 with non-Western or microntonal tunings.
- IndySun 4y agoWould this make it possible? I am unaffiliated. https://oddsound.com/mtsespsuite.php https://oddsound.com/mtsespsuite.php
- agentdrek 4y agoCubase should be no problem
- zmibes 4y agoVery good support for microtunings in bitwig
- sporkl 4y agoBitwig has a built in device that can do any 12-note tuning or equal division of the octave tuning (with tweakable octave I think). That said it cannot really do other tunings. But these two types of tuning are the most common, and I guess with the new Note Grid device it should in theory be possible to do pretty much any tuning. 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.
- bboylen 4y agoMicrotones can create absolutely gorgeous guitar music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XnhXg4XuqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XnhXg4XuqU
- standardly 4y agoThis is epic, thank you for sharing
- newobj 4y agoKGATLW fans have entered the chat.
- slothtrop 4y agoalso Secret Chiefs 3
- patrickscoleman 4y agowelcome to the gizzverse
- kortex 4y agoAlso Altin Gun and Gaye Su Akyol, both Turkish artists that use a hybrid of standard guitars and baglamas, and operate mostly in 12TET but employ lots of embellishments from Turkish makams. 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.
- zmibes 4y agoSevish makes awesome music
- Jeff_Brown 4y agoI've been a big fan for a couple years. Initially it was really weird to me. Now it's not! I've gotten more used to microtonality, for one thing, and for another I think he's toned down the really xenharmonic aspects of his music. When his latest album comes up on Spotify the harmonies don't sound particularly strange to me, just a little smoother than what you would get out of 12 Edo.
- Jeff_Brown 4y agoI take it back. Some of those tracks are pretty freaky.
- lelandfe 4y agoTheir most well known track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9wINwlgxRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9wINwlgxRU 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEO56WG0p48
- sporkl 4y agoIf anyone’s interested, I’ve been working on a plugin for automatic adaptive pure intonation, which can make things like microtonal modulations relatively easy to do! Hoping to release publicly before the end of the year. https://www.dmitrivolkov.com/projects/pivotuner/ 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) https://youtu.be/N5QaUjhXPUE?t=115 https://youtu.be/N5QaUjhXPUE?t=115
- jcpst 4y agoCool to see Sevish on the front page of HN. He was inspiring to me on my microtonal journey. I started with Harry Partch and Ben Johnston’s compositions and writings. Here’s a work of mine that focuses on 7-limit JI intervals: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/josephpost/daLO https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/josephpost/daLO
- Jeff_Brown 4y agoI make microtonal (usually 41 tones per octave) music using a Lumatone keyboard and the Pianoteq synth plugin. Microtonality in Pianoteq is surprisingly easy, given how difficult MIDI makes microtonality. If you divide the octave into 41 pieces, you only get about three octaves per MIDI channel. Pianoteq allows you to use a sweet hack whereby raising the channel value by one raises the octave by one. Of course, editing those midi notes after they've been recorded is still quite a chore.
- jlarcombe 4y agoSaw Horse Lords again last night, absolutely incredible band with microtonal guitar and bass, highly recommended. https://horselords.bandcamp.com/album/comradely-objects-2 https://horselords.bandcamp.com/album/comradely-objects-2
- rfreytag 4y agoMike Battaglia gives a great microtonal example on the 31-EDO Lumatone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z40RWIN-0cc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z40RWIN-0cc
- beebmam 4y agoFor more examples of awesome microtonal music, check out all the artists that contribute to STAFFcirc compos on Soundcloud. Many of them feature tons of microtonal music, including Sevish too! Here's an example of one in which every track has a different set of microtones: https://on.soundcloud.com/MpTau https://on.soundcloud.com/MpTau
- iainctduncan 4y agoThe best current resource is the Kyle Gann book, "The Arithmetic of Listening". It's fantastic, by a world authority on the topic. https://www.kylegann.com/Gannbooks.html https://www.kylegann.com/Gannbooks.html 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=MusicwithLisp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L7edwef-5k&t=2s&ab_channel=...
- daydream 4y agoKyle Gann’s albums are excellent too. Hyperchrimatica is a highlight: https://www.otherminds.org/recording/hyperchromatica/ https://www.otherminds.org/recording/hyperchromatica/
- kortex 4y agoMicrotonal and xenharmonic mega-playlist with over 1200 tracks and growing: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1OcPPq0ohnUarvDCERaxaR?si=vSZbRczbQWmDfHnBsN7kng https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1OcPPq0ohnUarvDCERaxaR?si=...
- Nabi 4y agoAleksi Perälä makes great microtonal electronic music. https://aleksiperala.bandcamp.com/ https://aleksiperala.bandcamp.com/ https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/colundi-aleksi-perala-interview https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/colundi-aleksi-perala-inter...
- zaplin 4y agocame here to mention Perala
- strogonoff 4y agoThose who find the typical sound of microtonal music too much of a dissonance right off the bat: give a listen to Neurogenesis[0] by Robert Rich and you might appreciate the subtle enthralling patterns. [0] https://robertrich.bandcamp.com/album/neurogenesis https://robertrich.bandcamp.com/album/neurogenesis
- dekhn 4y agoGreat album with microtones which are used commonly in classical Indian music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sounds_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sounds_of_India The first track starts out: “Ragas are precise melody forms. A raga is not a mere scale nor is it a mode. Each Raga has it’s own ascending and descending movement. And those subtle touches and uses of micro tones and stresses on particular notes like this…”
- nlnn 4y agoI once took a year of oud lessons, and the nuances in microtonality really blew me away. 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.
- dcsommer 4y agoAnother microtonal master was Ben Johnston. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhZd4Tea2cM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhZd4Tea2cM is his string quartet arrangement of Amazing Grace. It starts with just intonation and then... goes...
- wvlia5 4y agomy favorite is Zhea Erose
- sxiin 4y agoJoel Kivelä's manaCompiler is one intriguing looking software, based on his previous Dhalang Microtonal Groovebox. This just got a major update a couple of days ago. https://hypertonal.net/manacompiler/ https://hypertonal.net/manacompiler/ https://youtu.be/dYUFkXmcSF0 https://youtu.be/dYUFkXmcSF0
- srcreigh 4y agoAnother way to make microtonal music is to use non 12TET piano temperament. For ex Mozart used meantone to create beautiful dissonance as well as nicer sounding harmonies. (Mozart didn’t use 12TET) https://youtu.be/lzsEdK48CDY https://youtu.be/lzsEdK48CDY