apps that support microtonal tunings

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@Max23 said:

@Cib said:
I really wish iOS would be that innovative thing but not as long as synths don´t let me import .tun files and just load them, save them as part of a preset etc. which works since years with many VST.
C´mon. Time for iOS to grow up. I really want to give it another chance. My finger hovers over an iPad 12.9" to buy button.....maybe if i´m drunken later i will be surprised some days later.....or better said, next year

It took forever for logic to support this, just came last year or so iirc.

Logic still doesn´t support it really. You still have to use 12 notes per octave.
I don´t need a DAW to do it. I need synths, sampler to support it.
Apple even removed it from Alchemy.......

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Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

I'm unable to find the edit button for the OP. Does that time out after a while? If I could edit it, I'd add this one:

Bitklavier: Allows custom user tunings in cents offset from ET. (And many more options. See: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9FSJZm0KLy4&list=PLfxM062qDjMOQPQGbPQ829h6m24ZKDgmL&index=7)

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

@Cib said:
Microtonal dance music? Maybe not........but i might give it a chance when i think about it

Check out Aphex Twin.

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

One more:

PPG Phonem allows users to input microtonal melodies for playback.

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

Three new entries:

Audio Damage Quanta will support .tun tables
Audio Kit Synth One features microtuning capabilities
All Ice Gear synths now support tuning offsets per note from 12et.

OscarSouth

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

@Enkerli said:

Neat! You know Samvada? The site might be done but the app is still on the App Store. It directly supports a number of Raga presets and you can adjust each tone by cents. It works as an Audiobus audio effect, emphasizing the notes which fit a certain Raga. So you could route Model 15 audio through it and emphasize things that way.

I love Samvada, but I have never gotten it to work as an effect. Too bad the site is down. I had always intended to download his scala files but never got around to it.

This track uses a heavy dose of Samvada, further accentuated by a large amount of reverb and saturation:

OscarSouth

@palm said:
THUMBJAM!

I've been using it to retune other synths and it can do nonoctave scales! There's even a scale lock feature that allows you to use it as a midi port filter in audiobus to lock any midi to the scale, but it's been a bit finicky for me.

I've heard that Zeeon synth is going to add scala import similar to that of Sunrizer. I've contacted the creator of LayR and he seemed interested in adding microtonal support if there is enough interest. So if you're interested, please contact him and mention that you'd love scala or .tun support!!

there's also Droneo, bs-16i (it's hidden in the settings)
and don't forget that most of the korg synths can also be retuned.

It drives me crazy that most apps that offer the feature either have a handful of preset scales, ala FM4, which is far too limited, or only one user scale with 1 cent increments. Why 1 cent? It's far too coarse to even tune a 5 limit major scale perfectly. Even Scalegen uses 1 cent increments, which renders it utterly useless for me. Scalegen was so promising, but it leaves a lot to be desired and seems to have been more or less abandoned.

I've searched far and wide and Thumbjam is the winner for microtonal support. It has a midi filter, can do more than 12 notes per octave, can be mapped to white keys only, and has a finer resolution with scale import (the inbuilt scale maker is still by 1 cent divisions, but fingers crossed that it will get another decimal place or two in there some day).

I think I’m mostly on the level with you there but can you confirm (or deny) that I could play a Beatmaker3 chromatic sampler instrument (or other synth) in an alternate intonation by routing MIDI through ThumbJams scale lock and defining the custom scale in ThumbJam?

Phil999

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
All Ice Gear synths now support tuning offsets per note from 12et.

great. That was an old feature request of mine. Thank you IceWorks Inc.

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

@OscarSouth said:

I think I’m mostly on the level with you there but can you confirm (or deny) that I could play a Beatmaker3 chromatic sampler instrument (or other synth) in an alternate intonation by routing MIDI through ThumbJams scale lock and defining the custom scale in ThumbJam?

I've done it via MPE using Geoshred as the controller for Model 15. Posted a demo upstream in this thread. It should work exactly the same way for Thumbjam. I don't know how that would work with a non-MPE synth though--never tried it yet.

Enkerli

Been having some fun with AKS1’s support for Wilsonish microtuning. Just exploring, especially with perfect fourths and fifths. (Sure, those intervals aren’t too far out of whack in 12TET, but they do add up.) Glad it also supports some raga-related tunings.

Checked the iceGear synths. Wish it just accepted some tuning format but it can open some intriguing possibilities, after a bit of tweaking.

Also wish Rozeta Scaler could help us with these things. Sounds like synths need to respond in a special way and, as per @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr experiments, MPE may have some affordances for microtuning (when pitchbend range is properly setup). The dream of full tuning support in MIDI is unlikely to come true soon, but there are some interesting workarounds in the meantime.

Sounds like the Crudebyte apps are the only ones supporting Hermode. Wonder if there are other systems for dynamic tuning which are somehow more popular. Can be a very clever way to use technology to accomplish something which has rarely been possible with keyboard instruments (and electronic music is exceedingly keyboard-centric).

Something which is worth reiterating: we may talk about microtonal music as the exception but if you listen to the whole range of the world’s musics through history, 12TET has only become dominant rather recently and only in certain genres (which tend to drown out other genres). Orchestras and choirs may adapt to 12TET to an extent, especially when a keyboard is involved, but choir singers and orchestral players still know how to make a major chord sound like a major chord.

Enkerli

@OscarSouth said:

@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:

@Enkerli said:

Neat! You know Samvada? The site might be done but the app is still on the App Store. It directly supports a number of Raga presets and you can adjust each tone by cents. It works as an Audiobus audio effect, emphasizing the notes which fit a certain Raga. So you could route Model 15 audio through it and emphasize things that way.

I love Samvada, but I have never gotten it to work as an effect. Too bad the site is down. I had always intended to download his scala files but never got around to it.

This track uses a heavy dose of Samvada, further accentuated by a large amount of reverb and saturation:

When you put it this way…

Really nice example of what can be done when a wonderful singer’s voice (and jawharp) are processed in an appropriate fashion.
What settings did you use?

Enkerli

@palm said:

Enkerli, spending a lot of time tuning reed organs and making music with JI intervals that are held out for long durations - sometimes many hours per chord, changed things for me.
I don't have perfect pitch, but I have decent relative pitch. and a fair amount of time spent with a harmonic tuning allows a microscopic dive into the relationships between tones. (not so different than the study of polyrhythms. In fact I would argue that it's the exact same thing, just sped up a bit)
An accidental discovery of just intonation took which happened while I was trying to save money by tuning an electric organ myself instead of taking it to a pro took me from aspiring to be a shredder at the organ, to approaching music extremely slowly and with an entirely new sense of awe and wonder. It was like I'd been using greyscale my whole musical life and suddenly discovered the color spectrum.

I wish I was near my studio, I'd make some audio examples of very slight cent differences that are clearly audible to the average listener but if you're interested, you can try an experiment for yourself. Try importing a scale from the scala page into Thumbjam with an interval above the 5 limit and then try tuning the same scale with the tuner available within the app. It will not be the same. The import allows finer resolution than the sliders with 1 cent steps. Consider what a cent is - It's a completely arbitrary increment. 100 parts of a half step? A half step of what? Of an irrational system where steps are based on the 12th root of 2. So to imagine that one hundredth of a "step" should be a good starting place for creating scales that are not equally tempered would be like building a watch spring based on the measurement of the average length of 1000 virgins' eyelashes.

Clearly, for tuning something like a western unequal temperament, or an equal temperament with 33 tones or something that doesn't focus on small frequency ratios, the cent division is most likely acceptable.
Try tuning Partch's 43 tone scale with cent divisions and you will find difficulty in tuning even something like a pure 7/8 (seventh harmonic), Or perhaps even simpler, using a saw or square wave tune a perfect 3/2 and just listen to it for a while. Listen closely.. There will be a slow, discernable beating because it's out of tune. And of course to the average person tuning in 5 limit 12 tone scales this doesn't matter at all, especially if the music is bustling along. But try tuning a scale with hundreds of divisions, as with the systems used by ben johnston or lamonte young. Listen to the stunning, micro-resolutions In Ben Johnston's string quartet above (starting in the 2nd movement) and you start to hear how divisions smaller than a cent are necessary for some applications) Suddenly a fraction of a cent matters a whole lot.

So while I realize I'm in an extreme minority, tuning resolution is very important for the music I'm working toward.

I've included links to the Bach clavichord pieces, because weirdly, people seem to forget that this is microtonal music ((also, I just want more people to hear these incredible interpretations using the instrument of the day rather than a fucking piano, which might be something like listening to a Skrillex cover of the Beatles and thinking you're hearing what was intended to be heard)) Pianos didn't exist yet and clavichords, organs, harpsichords etc sound awful in equal temperament. Equal temperament was well known, but wasn't used because people didn't care for the sound of it. Unless you're modulating through all 12 keys -as became the fad by the early 20th century, then why detune all the scales equally when you could have some that are really nicely in tune? A lot of detail is lost when translating microtonal music to ET without considering what that means. Try playing along in ET (or use pitch to midi) on a raga or a string quartet, or gamelan or balofon music. It bugs the hell out of me how every app has a list of japanese and raga scales. This is simply false advertising. It is not the scale it claims to be if it's in equal temperament! There is no raga scale that is equally tempered.

I would go as far as to argue that all music before the invention of the electric tuner is microtonal. The best piano tuners in the world tune by ear for a reason. Justly tuned scales can be easily tuned by ear, whereas equal temperament is nearly impossible to do so, as the ear doesn't do well with irrational frequency relationships. So a nicely tuned acoustic instrument is almost never truly equally tuned because the human ear gravitates toward consonance (thus small frequency ratios).

(Had missed this post, for some reason.)

We’re almost completely agreed. The fake “pelog” scales in most apps rub me off the wrong way to such an extent that they’ll probably make their way in my work on appropriation, on the “egregiously inappropriate” side of the equation. Also agreed that 12TET has caused all sorts of issues. And there’s a whole lot to be said about the spectral aspects of tuning. Not to mention polyrhythm and “swing”.
In fact, the very notion that everything needs to comply to a strict scale is a bit strange in terms of humanity’s musical diversity. Sure, some instruments (like harps and zithers, including the piano) keep more or less constant pitch for each note. But it doesn’t sound like the human voice has this kind of “quantization”. Nor is it so obvious in bowed and blown instruments that “hitting a note” will be exactly the same each time. We think of pitchbend and glide as ornaments added to notes. But many musical traditions (including the original ways to perform Blues) have a lot more to do with ways to “approach” a note. There’s also a lot in there about pitch as a function of timbre.

The one point which is still not completely obvious to me is about resolution. Yes, Bell’s choice of the cent as a unit of measure was completely arbitrary and there’s nothing intrinsic about 1/1200 of an octave which might relate to perceptual difference. Something similar could be said about image density in “pixels per inch”. Thing is, though, there’s probably a limit to our perception. It may well be smaller than a cent but documentation to this effect would really help me wrap my head around the principles at stake.

Belated thanks for the elaborate and thoughtful message. Sounds like we’re on the same page and it feels good to hear from people who don’t dismiss these phenomena as exotic exceptions to “the one normal way to do things”.

Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

@Enkerli said:

Sounds like the Crudebyte apps are the only ones supporting Hermode. Wonder if there are other systems for dynamic tuning which are somehow more popular.

Bitklavier supports dynamic tuning, I believe. I haven't bought it because it lacked connectivity last time I checked. Extremely cool app though, if you can work around that little problem.

EDIT: Just checked, and apparently it does feature IAA. Now I can't remember why I didn't buy it....

sonosaurus

@palm said:
THUMBJAM!
I've searched far and wide and Thumbjam is the winner for microtonal support. It has a midi filter, can do more than 12 notes per octave, can be mapped to white keys only, and has a finer resolution with scale import (the inbuilt scale maker is still by 1 cent divisions, but fingers crossed that it will get another decimal place or two in there some day).

Great! I just did a test and when using the TJ touch interface for sending out microtonal MIDI it does work properly, in that each note is preceded by the appropriate pitch bend message in order for the destination to sound the note correctly. Just be aware that if you don't use the Channel Per Touch output option (eg, it sends only on one midi channel), only the most recent note will be in tune due to the channel pitch bend affecting all notes. If your target synth supports MPE or is multi-timbral (where you can use the same preset on each channel) you can enable Channel Per Touch and then get truly polyphonic microtonal output.

HOWEVER, I also noticed that this does not work properly when using the MIDI Thru (or midi filter) features with scale lock... the output MIDI does not have the appropriate pitch bend messages to impart the microtonality of the scale when driven by input MIDI. I will try to fix this in future versions.

And with regard to the decimal place issue, ideally the custom scale editor would let you enter any number of tones within the scale and specify them with ratios as well as cents. But you are correct in that the imported Scala files do retain the full precision they are specified with.