Microtonality

March 3, 2021 7:41 AM

Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts With Its Software. "In 2004, Khyam Allami was ready to give up on electronic music. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t write melodies that sounded like the music in his head. “It felt like the software was leading me somewhere that wasn’t my intention, and I couldn’t understand why that was,” he recalls. Born in Syria to Iraqi parents, Allami had grown up in London playing guitar and drums in punk bands. He was exploring Arabic music for the first time—or at least trying to, but the music’s distinctive quarter-tones were proving difficult to emulate. The software simply wasn’t made for him." Now he has partnered with creative technology studio Counterpoint to create two free browser-based pieces of software - Leimma to create and explore microtonal tuning systems, and Apotome to create music with the tuning systems the artist selects in Leimma. Link to both. (Note that Apotome appears to work only in Chrome or Firefox, and the tutorials are rather long and maybe a bit heavy on the theory and music tech for the average non-musician.) Use of the software was premiered at this year's (mostly virtual) CTM Festival in Berlin.

For those more interested in just hearing the music being made with Leimma and Apotome, here's:

Apotome Live Part 1 (Faten Kanaan with Nene H, Tot Onyx, Enyang Ha, Tyler Friedman, Lucy Railton)

Apotome Live Part 2 (Khyam Allami with Nene H, Tot Onyx, Enyang Ha, Tyler Friedman, Lucy Railton)

Apotome Artist Takeover (Indonesian producer Wahono)

Apotome Artist Takeover 2 (Tunisian producer Deena Abdelwahed)

In addition, here's an interview with Khyam Allami from UK music mag The Wire.

The CTM Festival's SoundCloud

Nawa Recordings, the record label run by Allami.

posted by soundguy99 (39 comments total)

This is why I'm fanatical in my love of Shoom. Any tuning, any scale, in a way that other hardware and software did so clumsily before.

We're definitely on the edge of a revival of microtuning in electronic music (the first flush of it happening in the eighties and swiftly being forgotten thanks to the return of the retro-analog everything-must-have-a-knob-and-no-menu-diving approach). Just did a live set last weekend with my Novation Bass Station II tuned to pelog & slendro. Such a wonderful world, getting away from 12TET.
posted by sonascope at 8:02 AM on March 3, 2021 [16 favorites]

Nuts, I missed this one - an essay from Khyam Allami for CTM 2019 about some of his personal history and frustrations with music software and hardware: Microtonality and the Struggle for Fretlessness in the Digital Age. (Which includes some simple explanations of tuning and temperament and microtonality for those a bit at sea with the whole topic.)
posted by soundguy99 at 8:14 AM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

I used to play this type of music (tablah, riqq - percussion only) and the people I played with had special keyboards they brought to the US from the Middle East. They had the ability to do the quarter tones but I don’t remember the exact method. This was ~15 years ago maybe?
posted by freecellwizard at 8:43 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Quite a few synth plugins have support for “alternative” tunings these days. That usually means a remap of the standard MIDI notes, though - the interface isn’t exactly custom built for it.
posted by atoxyl at 8:57 AM on March 3, 2021

The Korg M1 synth I bought in the mid 80s allowed you to set the pitch in cents offset from equal temperament for each key in the octave. That doesn't, however, allow you to build a completely custom scale though, just vary the 12 notes in the octave within a range. I imagine there are other pro-quality keyboards also with that functionality. (I still have the damn thing too. Serial number 1138.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:05 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Interesting. A good friend of mine developed something very similar several years ago called Infinitone.
posted by Lutoslawski at 9:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is cool, thanks for these links!

The folks at Izotope have a good intro (with sound examples) on Microtonal music.

The Korg synths that support microtuning (mentioned in the Izotope article) are the Minilogue and the Monologue models.
posted by jeremias at 9:08 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is quite amazing, but the cries of cultural appropriation will start very soon.

Confused by this comment. It would seem that the entire point of the OP and these new software tools is the exact opposite of appropriation. It's about removing a 'cultural yoke' that commercially available software places on folks wanting to compose/perform music that doesn't conform to western modalities of scale and timing ('12TET', if I understand the lingo correctly and I am NOT a musician).

Here's a link to an article that goes into deeper detail on this by one of the performers featured in the OP article.

Microtonality and the Struggle for Fretlessness in the Digital Age
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:20 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

(oops! missed that soundguy99 already linked to the same article I did.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:21 AM on March 3, 2021

He occasionally gave lectures on and demonstrations of various tunings.

I read an interesting book about temperaments and tunings. According to it, even after everyone supposedly adopted equal temperament, musical practice, both from string players and piano tuners, diverged and retained characteristics of older systems .

String players had been distinguishing between say G# and A flat for a long time (A# is sharper in this system). One thing I had not known is that they used to make keyboards that had two keys in between G and A (and other notes).
posted by thelonius at 9:22 AM on March 3, 2021

This is only a tad related, but if youre the kind of person to think this post is cool, you'd probably also enjoy Music theory and white supremacy - (white guy) Adam Neely. very good video about the conflation of "music theory" with the harmonic style of 18th century European musicians. "Let me put it this way - what most people think of as music theory actually does a pretty bad job of describing musical practice in most styles of music. Instead this has been kind of a means of comparing all music from all people across the globe to the stylistic practice of a select few musicians."
0:00​ Introduction
2:53​ Part I - The White Racial Frame of Music Theory
8:28​ Part iim - North Indian Theory and Perspectives
16:52​ Part IIIm7b5 - Alternative Perspectives to Western Theory
22:04​ Part IVmaj7 - Music isn’t a Universal
28:24​ Part V7(b9,#9,b13) - Heinrich Schenker
36:16​ Part vim - Responses to Phil Ewell
40:19​ Part viio - Coda
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:30 AM on March 3, 2021 [22 favorites]

This software opens up using all sorts of scales for everyone. Anyone can create music using scales of other cultures. Yes, if someone wants to create music of their culture which existing software or hardware has not either supported or made difficult then this is good. But if I choose to use to use similar scales in my music, I am deemed wrong. These tools are not innocent.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:32 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Since we are dropping microtonal links, here's scala, a nice old freeware that can help you plan out microtonal scales and will do the same kind of midi remapping others have mentioned.
posted by anhedonic at 9:35 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

Since FirstMateKate already posted the Adam Neely video, I just want to amplify the post.

For people who aren't closely familiar with the topic (pretty much me, before seeing Adam's video), and who might want to know more about why the decolonization of music and music theory is even a thing, and further, why it's a critically important task, the video outlines the issue clearly, and makes a compelling case.
posted by tclark at 9:59 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

I use the French keyboard synthesis software Pianoteq every day with a midi keyboard. It's a great piece of software and it easily enables the player to use various temperaments including those provided by the free Scala software mentioned above. I can say of very few software projects that they have changed my life; Pianoteq and Linux are two that come to mind.
posted by Agave at 10:10 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yamaha manufactures the common Middle-East-style synths that you see in Syrian and Lebanese dance videos. I played one in a music store in Toronto. Fancy interface.
posted by ovvl at 10:41 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is quite amazing, but the cries of cultural appropriation will start very soon.

I'm sensitive to this, which is why I'm hugely fond of 5TET, 7TET, other equal temperament tunings, the Prime Pentatonic mode, and a lot of other mathematically derived tunings, which have no cultural association at all, neatly sidestepping the complaint. Sadly, I often relied on these while taking music classes as a side hustle back in college, when wild tunings allowed me to make an end run around my complete ignorance of how Western music theory is supposed to work. My professor, who professed to "perfect pitch," was game for my electronic shenanigans, though he did frequently complain that my intervals were breaking his brain.

I'm unashamed about my love of pelog & slendro tunings, though, which comes from my love of gamelan, though I am fully open about that I'm using them all wrong on a wrong instrument.
posted by sonascope at 10:44 AM on March 3, 2021 [9 favorites]

That Adam Neely video is really, really fantastic. Thank you so much!
posted by Kwine at 10:44 AM on March 3, 2021

To add to anhedonic's mention of Scala, the library of Scala files available below are supported by a variety of hardware, software, and iOS instruments, so one can spend ages rooting through them and trying things out:

http://huygens-fokker.org/docs/scales.zip

Loving the work laid out in the original post, though—watching people break out of the Western tuning straitjacket to reclaim cultural tools and to claim their authentic voice makes me so glad to be a person in this moment.
posted by sonascope at 10:52 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Incidentally, my dad is a retired university piano tuner and restorer. He occasionally gave lectures on and demonstrations of various tunings. Many a piano student's mind was blown when they learned that the Great Classical Works were often composed for and performed with entirely different tunings than used today.

Would fund a kickstarter to watch that on youtube.
posted by bfranklin at 11:06 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

Weird, I was just watching Khyam Allami's performance on FACTmagazine's Against The Clock feature.

The video does a great job demonstrating how Apotome is used while producing a track.
posted by a complicated history at 11:09 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

We talked about the Adam Neely video awhile back here.
posted by gwint at 11:21 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

String players had been distinguishing between say G# and A flat for a long time (A# is sharper in this system).

G# is sharper, I mean, sharper than A flat
posted by thelonius at 11:25 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

the first flush of it happening in the eighties and swiftly being forgotten thanks to the return of the retro-analog everything-must-have-a-knob-and-no-menu-diving approach

I suspect that didn't really have much to do with it. Analog sequencers with no quantization whatsoever will allow you to dial in tuning you like, by ear -- which is how I usually roll when making music with my modular synth.

(Meanwhile my non-modular hardware synths, hybrid analog/digital things with some menus, are kind of stuck in 12TET -- the Dreadbox/Polyend Medusa lets you program any parameter at any sequencer step so you can freely tune oscillators if you like.)

I also like to play with 5TET though, which is fairly simple to quantize to with Monome Teletype. Custom tunings are also doable with Bitwig Grid, albeit more awkward to dial in.

(Usually I start from drones, and maybe add manually played and/or sequenced parts over that. I don't really think much about music theory when I do it.)
posted by Foosnark at 11:39 AM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

I am not a fan of the term microtonality in the context of non-western music since it feels like it is still centering western musical practice/theory. A microtone is by definition an interval smaller than a semitone which is only really useful if you are thinking about this from a 12TET perspective. Same with cents, they only make sense as measurement system if you assume 12TET to be the standard. If we need to have a universal way of describing intervals then I think frequency ratios are a lot more useful (though EDO stuff will often end up with some gnarly ratios).
If you are doing some sort of (N)TET or completely unique tuning system or something then I think microtonal is a fine description, but If you are using just intonation (or Pythagorean or some version of Slendro or Pelog or taking pitches from a maqam etc...) then just treat it as its own separate tuning system, not some modified version of 12TET.
posted by Television Name at 12:53 PM on March 3, 2021 [8 favorites]

Finally arriving ... Fantastic! (In the past, even if your gear supported microtones, it was almost always a clumsy PITA... altho mod wheels and portamento were GReat)

Looking forward to the day when we can choose *all the overtones* ... even *how they evolve over time*.
posted by Twang at 12:55 PM on March 3, 2021

Like air, water, food and love ... music is trans-cultural! A pox on limits.
posted by Twang at 1:03 PM on March 3, 2021

I am not a fan of the term microtonality in the context of non-western music since it feels like it is still centering western musical practice/theory.

I think lately "xenharmonic" is becoming de rigeur—in my case, I just fall back to "microtonal" out of a lazy habit because it was the nomenclature of the time when I was venturing out of 12TET, and it was the shorthand for alternative tunings in academic writing on the subject, where most of that discussion and research was happening.
posted by sonascope at 1:16 PM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

One of the things that's been limiting music to 12TET is that it's been built into the MIDI specification for ages. The new MIDI 2.0 standard lets you customize scales, which should allow for a lot more experimental instruments.
posted by MrVisible at 1:48 PM on March 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

For those who like electronic dance music, there's some wonderful xenharmonic stuff here: split-notes.com.

I've got a touch of audio-visual synesthesia and the COLORS some of this music produces in my mind's eye are just mind-blowing and vibrant in ways I didn't know were possible.
posted by treepour at 2:22 PM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]

This is so cool. One of my favorite things about learning to play a fretless instrument was the realization of how limiting 12TET actually is.

(Around the same time I had the breakthrough that the piano is an incredibly versatile instrument, but on some level you're basically typing).
posted by aspersioncast at 6:45 PM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

(Around the same time I had the breakthrough that the piano is an incredibly versatile instrument, but on some level you're basically typing).

Personally, I blame the piano for the current lack of melody in music. While the piano keyboard can do melody to a limited degree, it lacks the expressiveness of a violin or an oboe. And it's absurd that electronic music is being controlled by a keyboard that allows so little expression, while the very nature of electronic music makes so many different types of expression control available.

That's why I invented a new type of instrument that allows for better expression, while using the typing and texting reflexes people have perfected over the years.

Electronic music makes so many different types of interface possible, it's appalling to me that it's still stuck behind a keyboard design that's hundreds of years old. When we re-think these interfaces with accessibility and ergonomics in mind, we'll create a world where pretty much anyone can play any type of music they like.
posted by MrVisible at 7:54 PM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]

The Yamaha V50 could do all manner of exotic scales. Main reason I know about this topic.
posted by readyfreddy at 9:27 PM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

thoroughburro: Incidentally, my dad is a retired university piano tuner and restorer. He occasionally gave lectures on and demonstrations of various tunings. Many a piano student's mind was blown when they learned that the Great Classical Works were often composed for and performed with entirely different tunings than used today.

The example that made the effect of different tunings really jump out for me was Chopin's Funeral March:
Piano Tuner Shows Classical Repertoire Performed in Historical Tunings
italian pianist interview and performance Chopin Funeral March
Classical vs Modern Tunings - Funeral March, Frédéric Chopin
posted by clawsoon at 2:14 AM on March 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

It felt like the software was leading me somewhere that wasn’t my intention, and I couldn’t understand why that was.

This is a specific example of a phenomenon I've been thinking about and trying to study for a while:

The idea that our tools shape our art. The medium used when creating something has like a grain or a leading direction that subtly influences decisions made when using it. Like a path of least resistance. This leads to the products of that medium to all feel similar in a certain (and sometimes subtle or unconscious) way.

Does this ring a bell with anyone that could point me in the direction of existing or related theory?
posted by Flaffigan at 6:05 AM on March 4, 2021 [3 favorites]

glad to see this get posted here. This particular paragraph really stood out for me (emphasis mine):

Most electronic music tools (along with the guitar, piano, and wind instruments) are set by default to a tuning system called equal temperament, which is the foundation of most Western classical music from the past two centuries. This does not allow for microtonality—the notes between a standard piano’s keys—which is commonly used in musical traditions outside of Europe. Through his research, Allami discovered that it had been possible to explore microtonality using MIDI, the language of electronic music tools, since 1992, but software developers had not implemented functions to make microtonal tunings intuitive to use. As one product manager of a popular music notation program told him, they simply didn’t believe that there was a market for such features.
posted by philip-random at 10:16 AM on March 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Korg has sold quarter tone electronic keyboards suitable for maqam-based music for 40 years.
posted by spitbull at 11:20 AM on March 4, 2021

Also on the decolonization front, (often but not only white male university-based) composers have been experimenting with microtonal tunings since at least Harry Partch. Many have drawn on non-semitonal Non-western scales (such as gamelan tunings, ragas, maqamat, and radif). Synthesizers have been capable of microtonal tunings since the 1960s, a capability often deployed. I just think the analogy here between tunings, cultures, and power are overstated, as fascinating and cool as this is.
posted by spitbull at 11:24 AM on March 4, 2021

Only the words of those oppressed matter in regards to matters of the oppressed.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:48 AM on March 4, 2021