Microtonal Midi Experiments

I am currently doing Jacob Adler’s ‘Microtonality Crash Course’, which is an 8 week course delving into just intonation tuning. I have been working with microtonal tuning for years now but this course covers areas I want to know more about including tuning latices and Indian music. The teacher and other participants are in the USA and Canada so we meet on Zoom each week for a lecture and get homework to do that is submitted through Google Classrooms. This week the assignment was to make a small piece or improvisation using a 3-limit tuning. This simply means that we were only allowed to make scales out of the naturally occurring fifth between the 2nd and 3rd harmonic in the harmonic series. You find this pure 5th by dividing a string into thirds and playing the harmonic by touching the node. These days with modern technology, microtonal intervals found in the harmonic series can be played using software and MIDI interfaces.

For my 3-limit piece I used a Pythagorean scale and made I short piece by improvising on my MIDI keyboard that was triggering the scale I had programmed in Ableton Live. The Pythagorean scale is a made from a sequence of twelve just intonation fifths (each fifth is notated as 3/2). The 3/2 just intonation 5th is larger than the 5th found on our modern day pianos. When you make a circle of 5ths with the 3/2 fifth, the circle doesn’t close. All of the 5ths except one are perfectly consonant, which is called the ‘wolf 5th’. I used the off sounding wolf fifth as the starting point for my little piano piece. I loved the sound of the dissonant wolf fifth compared to the other consonant fifths you find in the Pythagorean scale.