Out of curiosity, how do you go about auditioning these systems in your own practice? Are you a performer playing an instrument by ear? Are you sequencing sounds in a DAW? Or are you tuning your sounds in a programming environment similar to the linked article?
I ask because I'm an electronic musician working in a DAW (Ableton mostly) and am trying to find the best workflow to start exploring these concepts. Ideally, there would be an interface for switching between tuning systems that's as easy as drawing in a time-signature change, but micro-tuning seems to be a low priority for most DAWs. The only one I know to even begin integrating alternate tuning systems is Logic, and those settings are tucked away deep in the preferences.
Does anyone here have a resource for starting to familiarize oneself with how to integrate alternate tunings into their composition? The simpler the better, I suppose. As soon as one sets their foot into the world of alternate tunings you're usually flooded with 40+ tunings. As someone who's worked in Equal Temperament their whole life I would like to pick ONE system and really drill down on it until I get a grip on how to integrate these tunings into programs that are built for ET.
I won't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I think it's more a synth problem than a DAW problem. VST, for example, deals in 12TET, so the best a DAW could do to support alternate tuning systems would be to translate each pitch into a 12TET pitch + offset. Which is feasible, but like, not a feature I would expect to find. (I would be curious to know if any DAW actually can do this.)
Personally I have experimented with alternate tuning using SuperCollider. It definitely doesn't qualify as simple, but the upside of code-as-music is that if you can imagine it and express it, you can do it. I recently made a track that switches tuning systems periodically by responding to a particular MIDI CC. I have to imagine that those sorts of shenanigans would be pretty hard without some code.
To live a bit more in Ableton-land, you might be able to find a Max device that does something similar-- maybe a MIDI insert that converts MIDI notes to note + pitch bend?
VST does not deal in 12TET. VST2 delivers MIDI data to a plugin, which most plugins (not all) will interpret in 12TET. But the plugin may offer its own mechanism to change the mapping between MIDI note numbers and frequencies, or it might use the MIDI Tuning Standard to do so.
The only role for a DAW in this comes if the DAW labels MIDI data with note names. If you're not using 12TET, these labels will likely be wrong. But since MIDI itself doesn't inherently use 12TET, just 128 notes numbered from 0 to 127, any DAW can still be used to work in non-12TET tunings and scales.
I read through the MIDI 1.0 spec last night, and I was very surprised to see it said nothing about default note number to pitch mappings, other than that 60 is middle C. The only time frequencies seem to come up is for the (optionally implemented) messages to retune individual notes! (I'm not sure I have a copy of the whole thing, so I could be wrong.)
From what you say, it seems like the VST2 spec sets a standard scale to fill in this gap, which is interesting. It certainly would help with interoperability.
Anyway, I learned something from the clarifications arising from each of you correcting each other :-) (Though it's probably not worth continuing discussing whether there's any difference at all between "deals in 12-TET" and "uses 12-TET only as a reference" since you both seem to mean the same thing by these by now.)
MIDI doesn't explicitly mandate 12-TET, but attempting to do anything more complicated than a mild re-tuning of a 12 note-per-octave scale usually results in a poor user experience. For instance, it's no longer plug-and-play because the instrument and the synthesizer need to agree on a what each note means, and there isn't a way to communicate that. (Well, technically there is: the Midi tuning standard, but it's rarely implemented.) There's also the problem of the number of notes: 128 often isn't enough.
A standard workaround if you want to do microtonal MIDI is the one note per channel trick: each simultaneously-sounding voice is on its own channel, which can be independently pitch-bent.
For instance, if you want to play a note 10 cents above middle C, you pick a MIDI channel you're not using right now, send a pitch bend command to raise it by 10 cents, then send a note-on for note 60.
This gives you 16-voice polyphony (because MIDI has 16 channels). The downsides are that this only works on multitimbral synths (i.e. it works with most "romplers" but very few analog synths), and you need a convenient way to set all the channels parameters the same.
The one note per channel trick can also enable individual note volume swells by using channel volume. One note per channel has been standardized recently in MIDI as MPE.
There's also MIDI 2.0 now, which has per-note pitch bend among other features. Time will tell if it actually gets widely adopted, and whether synths actually implement the full spec or if they leave out features that only a small minority of their users care about.
I've mostly used Pure Data patches or a C program I wrote that interfaces with Jack. I like Johnston's notation for extended just intonation, and the C program lets you press buttons on your MIDI controller to alter notes by the various commas/accidentals. Eventually I'd like to have a sequencer for it...
His idea was actually pretty cool: you start out with an F, C, and G major chord tuned just like in the ratios a couple comments up, which gives you an entire C major scale, and then there are a handful of accidentals. The syntonic comma (+) is what turns A into the fifth above D rather than a third above F, # applied to the top note of a major third turns it into a minor third (defined by the division of a major triad into a major and minor third), 7 applied to a Bb lowers it to coincide with the 7th harmonic of C, 11 applied to an F slightly raises it to be the 11th harmonic of C, and so on. Each accidental also has an inverse operation. With just these accidentals above, the system is able to uniquely represent every ratio whose prime factorization contains numbers up to 11.
Unfortunately MIDI is not so good for non-12-EDO. Some instruments support SYSEX messages with per-note-number alterations. There's also a program out there, forgot the name, which takes a MIDI channel and splits it across multiple channels to apply independent pitch bends per note when there's polyphony. I hope MIDI 2 will help...
I don't know much about real DAWs, though there are some Adam Neely videos exploring microtonality and alternative tuning systems where he pulls up some plugin -- maybe that will help you find something.
Having seen a video of Jacob Collier's projects, it seems like he might do microtonality using only pitch correction. I think if you're familiar with your commas -- there aren't many after all -- you just learn how many cents you need.
Edit: I thought to look up Sevish, a microtonal musician who seems to actually care about making good music, and he has some resources on his site: https://sevish.com/music-resources/
> There's also a program out there, forgot the name, which takes a MIDI channel and splits it across multiple channels to apply independent pitch bends per note when there's polyphony. I hope MIDI 2 will help...
I ask because I'm an electronic musician working in a DAW (Ableton mostly) and am trying to find the best workflow to start exploring these concepts. Ideally, there would be an interface for switching between tuning systems that's as easy as drawing in a time-signature change, but micro-tuning seems to be a low priority for most DAWs. The only one I know to even begin integrating alternate tuning systems is Logic, and those settings are tucked away deep in the preferences.
Does anyone here have a resource for starting to familiarize oneself with how to integrate alternate tunings into their composition? The simpler the better, I suppose. As soon as one sets their foot into the world of alternate tunings you're usually flooded with 40+ tunings. As someone who's worked in Equal Temperament their whole life I would like to pick ONE system and really drill down on it until I get a grip on how to integrate these tunings into programs that are built for ET.