This is an early improvisation and bit of text that I made when I was first getting into tuning systems.
Drum and bass / gamelan Album: Golden Hour (2010) Track: Islands
Fun hip hop ish beat in 13-tone equal temperament aka 13edo which squeezes one extra note into the octave then makes all the notes equal size. One cool thing about 13-tet is, if you play a whole-tone scale, it will miss the octave completely and won't repeat until you reach 2 octaves, using up all 13 notes in the process! You can hear this about half way through the track.
A track from Golden Hour, my 2010 album. This composition was written in 22-tone equal temperament. It's a fantastic microtonal tuning which I have fallen in love with. The scale I played is a dissonant tuning, but the use of percussion instruments hides that fact, and shows a lot of tonal colour.
5/4 drum and bass / Carlos Alpha scale Album: Golden Hour (2010)
Breakbeat electronic / just intonation Album: Golden Hour (2010)
Microtonal music from 'Golden Hour' - some straight-ahead drum and bass in the equal pentatonic mode of 15-tet. It's a very fun microtonal scale to play. There's a passage of diatonic 15-tet and one glissando, but there are many things yet to explore in this musical tuning.
Dubstep wubs in the Bohlen-Pierce scale. An alien tuning for an alien genre. Experimental microtonal music from my 2010 album "Golden Hour".
Smooth and melodic drum n bass using just intonation tuning. I have no idea what the intervals are... this time I used a "JI-11" preset which was on my synth.
Short and sweet microtonal music in the Bohlen-Pierce scale - this funky drummer sampling microtonal track was fun to write. The weird mood of this song is due to the Bohlen-Pierce scale which divides the perfect twelfth into 13 equal parts. It's a scale that doesn't contain octaves. That's an alien concept for most music, but it's ripe for musical exploration.
Drum'n'bass / rock tune performed in a scale that I accidentally discovered. Actually the scale doesn't have much use, it is way more out-of-tune than 12-tet - but it was a fun challenge to try to make listenable music out of it. I'm happy with the result, so bad news for just intonation fans! Looks like musicians don't really need perfect tuning after all.
Microtonal melodies and time signature changes are all good fun. This track is from my 2010 album Golden Hour.
Atmospheric drum and bass / 22 tone equal temperament Album: Golden Hour (2010) I heard this 8 note subset of 22edo used by City of the Asleep and made Ganymede in the same scale. The scale degrees are: (1) 3 5 7 10 12 14 16 18 20 (1).
Microtonal hip hop instrumental in Wendy Carlos' Beta tuning. This tuning divides the just perfect fifth into 11 equal parts. This gives 18.809 pitches per octave. It's a non-octave scale and also a stretched variant of 19-tone equal temperament.
All praise the amen break, sliced once again for this drum and bass track. I used a just intonation microtonal scale that is based on the intervals 7/4 and 7/6, and combinations of these. We are in xenharmonic territory here, as most Western music doesn't make use of these septimal intervals. Drum and bass mixed with trance with some experimental weirdness thrown in for good measure.
This is the final track from my 2010 album Golden Hour. It uses a just intonation scale I created myself. This is one of my earlier pieces of microtonal music, and it's very chill. The bass improv in the second half of the track is in Carlos Super Just scale, which is a just intonation version of 12-tet. A track for the late night imo.
Human Astronomy EP is free to download at https://sevish.bandcamp.com/album/hum... -- 5 more dance-influenced tracks with the powerful harmonies, melodies and moods of microtonality. Released via split-notes Microtonal Netlabel. "Human Astronomy" is the first track on the EP. This is perhaps more melodic and uplifting than most of my work. Wendy Carlos' Beta scale was used, which is essentially a stretched form of 19-tone equal temperament. I like Beta's heart and warmth, used here to fill up the vertical soundspace with stacked chords.
Liquid drum and bass using microtonal scales. In this case, the music is written in the Blackwood decatonic mode of 20-tone equal temperament. This is a scale that contains 10 notes, but those 10 notes pack in a whopping 5 major and 5 minor chords. Any note can be the root notes of a consonant triad, and any note can easily be set up as the tonic while modulating. It's a face melting experience to write in this tuning so you should definitely do it now. Or just listen to Enterprise. The middle section has tuned percussion that play a Shepard-tone esque musical progression. It continues to descend seemingly forever without reaching a tonal center. This is only possible because of the Blackwood decatonic scale!
Ambrosia is a breakbeat track using a microtonal scale called 22-tone equal temperament (22-EDO). My fave scale. Human Astronomy is a mini-album dedicated to London (I moved away to Leicester at the time of release). Ambrosia has harp-like piano tinklings and some crunchy beats. It's a good example of the new tonalities possible in microtonal music.
From Human Astronomy. Four different microtonal scales are used - polytonal microtonal. 12-tet mixed with 22-tet mixed with Carlos Beta mixed with an 11-limit nonoctave JI MOS scale. A beastly combination which is not "out of tune" but "in tune differently".
A short piece of atmospheric, ambient music written in the microtonal scale "Beta" found by Wendy Carlos, set to clips from a public domain film about Nikola Tesla. Dreaming Enhasa is from my 2010 EP 'Human Astronomy'. The whole EP uses microtonal scales that allow for new moods, melodies and harmonies.
Track 1 from Subversio by Jacky Ligon, Tony Dubshot and Sevish -- http://www.dubbhism.com/2011/12/out-n... This drum and bass tune uses a just intonation scale with stretched octaves. Jacky made the scale, and Sevish made the song!
Microtonal with a beat / 19edo + just intonation Album: Rhythm and Xen (2015)
I was going for a fast and frenetic 808 style. It just so happens that the tuning is 22edo, which has some interesting harmonies and intervals. Ahh forget all that theory nonsense, it's just music and I hope you enjoy it.
Sleep Deprived Cooked Alive is a drum & bass tune using 14-tone equal temperament. Yeah just take the normal Western tuning system, add 2 extra notes in there, then make them all equal size. It has some interesting properties as it is formed of 2 interlocking scales of 7 equal sized notes with a "neutral" feel, i.e. they are neither major nor minor. This track uses a lot of seventh chords in the harmony at times, and even things like tritone substitution, which work well in 14-edo but sound definitely warped.
Mysterious breakcore 22-tone equal temperament, 5/4. From my album Rhythm and Xen.
Music for levi-biking around the Sea of Tranquillity, while checking out the magenta lights of the lunar cityscape. Why not take some pictures and telegram them to your friends on the Neptune Colony 8? Moonopolis is a chill electronic track using 15-tone equal temperament, a very yummy microtonal tuning.
My new electronic music album using microtonal scales. Free your ears from the tyranny of Western standard tuning! Microtonal music is more than just "quartertones" and even many academy trained musicians don't realise this fact. Case in point... this track is in 23-tet, not 24-tet. Each note is slightly bigger than a quartertone such that 23 would make an octave. ;)
11-edo is a really odd scale... How alien does it sound to you? It's definitely an acquired taste. For one thing, the melody can be surprisingly similar in shape to standard Western tuning. But on the other hand the harmony is totally different. The chords in this piece utilise the 11th harmonic. It sounds like a fourth but it's a quarter-tone sharp. In the end all I want is for this piece to mess with and reconfigure your brain... It sounds super normal to me now.
This track actually samples one of my older tracks (do you know which one?) and flips it into a chilled hip-hop tempo tune. There is no systemic approach to microtonality here. The pad in the background is just intonation, and other elements were free-pitched or used a microtonal equal temperament. The Rhythm and Xen download includes liner notes with more information about each track.
The first part of the piece is 11-limit just intonation (JI) and the second half is 7-limit JI. The first part was actually based on an improvisation... The second half was played and sequenced perhaps a year later while resting in a hotel in Hong Kong. From Rhythm and Xen by Sevish.
it's tuned to 11-edo but it reminds me of just intonation. From Rhythm and Xen.
Microtonal music using 53-tone equal temperament. If you like beautiful melodies and bittersweet emotions then Orwell[9] is a musical temperament to try. I hope this piece captures some of that. It's a mix of downtempo chillout beats and drum & bass. Droplet was produced using Ableton Live, using VST software instruments such as Xen-Arts IVOR and FMTS 2 which support microtonal/xenharmonic music.. The tuning was created using Scala based on information from the Xenharmonic Wiki (a great resource if you're learning microtonal music). Melodic downtempo / drum and bass from Rhythm and Xen by Sevish.
This piece is tuned to 23-tone equal temperament. Some atmospheric drum & bass from Sevish's 2015 album Rhythm and Xen.
This track uses a 9 note subset of 313edo. It was suggested to me by Gene Ward Smith around 2014. Apparently 313edo is an optimal tuning for the madagascar temperament. Though for madagascar you would normally need many more than 9 notes - say 19 or more. But by taking the scale out to just 9 notes you can get barbados temperament. 313edo is a pretty good tuning for that, but not optimal. These two temperaments seem to be named after islands for some reason. The scale steps are: 53 12 53 12 53 12 53 12 53 Adjacent intervals are all whole tones (Large) or quarter tones (small) in this pattern: LsLsLsLsL. This is sometimes called 5L4s Melodic electronic music from Rhythm and Xen by Sevish.
This piece is an improvisation in the Bohlen-Pierce scale. It's a really cool scale which doesn't contain any octaves, but it does contain perfect twelfths. The instrument is an AXiS-49, by C-Thru Music (who recently went out of business). The markings on the AXiS-49 don't correspond to the Bohlen-Pierce scale, so I just try to ignore them. This video is cut from a larger video which was streamed live earlier today. Sorry about the quality, my poor laptop couldn't handle it. The sound designs in this piece were hastily programmed during the live stream, but in case you wondered: the accompanying pad is u-he's ACE synth and the lead is Xen-Arts' IVOR synth.
Just for fun, here's a piece I wrote quite a few years ago. Yeah yeah, it's not 100% authentic, but you get the idea. :) Just intonation is a kind of musical tuning which uses rational numbers for the intervals of the scale. Some people say this tuning has a mathematical purity, some would even go as far as to say that it has DNA healing properties but I wouldn't be inclined to agree. In this case, I've used a 13-note just scale to make microtonal chiptune music in a drum'n'bass style. It's boss music for an alternative music theory.
The 22-tone equal tempered system is, without a doubt, my favourite tuning system for solo piano music. This piano improvisation was recorded about 6 or 7 years ago. Despite the many mistakes it has a quality that I like. It was recorded in two takes - one take for the chord and melody, then another take to overdub those low, punctuating notes. If I'm ever able to find the original MIDI recording then I would love to render it in higher quality.
A drum'n'bass journey from Sean Archibald aka Sevish. This piece was on day:dot EP released by Faturenet Recordings. At almost 10 minutes long it was one of my longest tracks. It's also one of my happiest and most melodic tracks - I am inspired in general by Omni Trio who writes very melodic drum & bass, and for this piece I focussed more on melody than texture. Longer Than String is not microtonal/xenharmonic - I went back to 12-tone equal temperament in order to remember music's past. :)
Imagine if you died 10 years before the release of Chrono Cross, and as a result a parallel universe was created where Chrono Cross was released on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive instead of the Sony Playstation... This is what the theme "Fields of Time" would sound like on the Sega Mega Drive. It's the overworld theme for the Home world in Chrono Cross. This piece is based on the main title music from Chrono Trigger on the SNES. I think I've completed Chrono Trigger at least 20 times, and I'm currently on my second playthrough of Chrono Cross. For this cover I tried to keep with the tropical vibeyness of Chrono Cross instead of the more orchestral sound of Chrono Trigger. This cover was arranged using Ableton Live 9.5 and FMDRIVE. I bought FMDRIVE a few weeks back and I love it - though I wish they would add support for microtonal scales. ;) Soundfonts can bite me, but FMDRIVE sounds pretty good.
Chill microtonal chord progression / 22edo The tempo and velocity are controlled by a drunk walk using the drunk object (e.g. from Pure Data, Max/MSP or Max 4 Live). This piece uses the Xen-Arts IVOR and FMTS2 synths, with Drunk Arpeggiator (old lost version) running in Max 4 Live.
This drum & bass tune is written in a 14-note microtonal temperament. Next Xen is a compilation album that unshackles music from a 200 year old ball and chain. Western music theory says that there are 12 equal notes, and for some reason it's a taboo to break out of this. But what if you want to hear 13? Or even 100 notes, all of different sizes? Such music would be called microtonal, xenharmonic, or just "xen."
From the album '23'. After the Subversio album, this is the second release on Dubbhism Deluxe bringing together the sounds of Jacky Ligon (Xen-Arts), Sevish (split-notes) and Tony Dubshot (Dubbhism). This EP is about a tuning, known as 23 EDO. We call this style Xenharmonic Bass Music. All pieces are written using the same tuning, and once again the FMTS synthesizer, a VSTi developed by Jacky Ligon of Xen-Arts, was used to design many of the sounds on this EP.
Never Coming Home (Remix) is track 1 from Sevish's EP MK-SUPERDUPER. It's a drum and bass remix of an unreleased microtonal ambient/textural piece in 313-EDO Madagasgar[9]. MK-SUPERDUPER is named after the secret bass society who wanted to illuminate the world with new musical colours and liberate us from the 12-tone system and 432 Hz nutters. All the leaked details are in the liner notes which are included with the album download. This is not just a "theory"!!!!!1
This is the title-track of the EP. It's a jazzy drum and bass tune using a microtonal tuning called 22-EDO (22-tone equal temperament). There are some atmospheric elements, some straight-ahead bass stuff, 808 perc and sampled melodica, so it's a mixed bag. The chord sequence is based on the same sequence as my ambient piece 'The Sky Are Sick' ( • Sevish - The Sky ... ) MK-SUPERDUPER is named after the secret bass society who wanted to illuminate the world with new musical colours and liberate us from the 12-tone system and 432 Hz nutters. All the leaked details are in the liner notes which are included with the album download. This is not just a "theory"!!!!!1
A Sega Genesis remix of the Shenmue I Slot House music. One of the catchiest and cheesiest hidden gems on the whole soundtrack. My dream: to replay Shenmue I and II on my PC, maybe with updated and improved controls... The choice of Japanese/English dubs would be a treat too! :)
The Before Time is a jazzy drum'n'bass tune with a little techno influence, written in Wendy Carlos' microtonal Alpha tuning. Alpha splits the perfect fifth into 9 equal parts. This means that the perfect fifth is totally pure but the octave is very badly tuned. In other words, this scale has no octaves! In Alpha tuning, the individual harmonies may sound recognisable, but melody gets warped and harmonic progression sounds quite strange. For this track, I worked with harmony based on stacked alternating major and minor thirds. Alpha supports this kind of harmony very well.
Introduction from Exposure EP. This was my final release before I started using microtonal scales exclusively in my work. Do you think it was a good idea to head into microtones? Or should I have continued along the path I was heading with this EP?
Samples taken from 'Steal This Film'. I'm interested in the topic of intellectual property and still hope that the duration of copyright can be greatly reduced. Exposure EP was released under a creative commons license in 2009 and most of my old works are also under creative commons licenses. This changed from 2015 when I started releasing new music for purchase only, and I've found these works have been uploaded to torrent websites. But I think it's great that folks have found a way to enjoy the music for free. Pirate away, people. As for those people who bought my sounds, I'm super grateful for the support and will put it towards some instrument purchases next year.
The scale is a hexatonic, just intonation, non-octave tuning that has a few incidental octaves. As I recall, the tuning was a preset tuning pulled out of a synth, and was labelled as "hexany". That must be a mistake because hexanies usually repeat at the octave, but this one clearly has a non-octave repeating scale. Anyway, as a non-octave scale you can expect some cloudy tonality and that connects the bass, chords, and soaring melody in a vague way.
My Girl Is Blue was written before I started composing microtonal music. It's warm and jazzy with some chopped jungle breaks. Check out my newer stuff if you like this one. Piano drum and bass from Exposure EP.
Atmospheric drum and bass - 'Mashroon' uses the Bohlen-Pierce scale, which contains no octaves at all. It repeats at the perfect twelfth instead (aka the tritave), and divides it into 13 notes. Here I've used the equal tempered version of Bohlen-Pierce which divides the twelfth into 13 equal notes. This tuning approximates many odd-numbered harmonics very well, while missing most of the even-numbered harmonics completely. For me, Bohlen-Pierce music sounds like restful tension. Or to put it another way, it is consonant but not resolved. It's great for atmospheric sounds or eerie Halloween music. But it can also excel at "normal" or even cheerful music, which I will demonstrate with a track on an upcoming album next year. Anyway for now I hope you'll enjoy the dark atmospheres in this drum and bass choon, 'Mashroon'.
Orbital is uses a microtonal (well, macrotonal) scale called the Bohlen-Pierce scale. If you ask a lot of people, they will probably say that Bohlen-Pierce music sounds surreal and alien. I would tend to agree, except that the Bohlen-Pierce scale can play familiar major/minor chords too. BP does force you to use wide open voicings but they actually sound very nice. For example if you want to make a major chord in BP, there's no major third or perfect fifth but there is a major tenth and perfect twelfth. My approach for this track "Orbital" was to use a lot of block maj7 chords at various positions. Since the Bohlen-Pierce scale doesn't contain any octaves, these chords don't connect with each other in familiar ways at all. The effect is that you can feel familiar and comfortable at any one moment without knowing quite where the music will lead to.
Ask Yourself uses an unknown tuning that was shared by someone on one of the online xen groups, which was titled SEMAPHORE but seems to have nothing to do with semaphore temperament. My approach was to use my ears, starting by identifying some chords that worked, sequencing those, and then playing melodies over the top of that. Kinda unrelated, but I sometimes perform short, textural, improvised pieces just for fun. I usually forget about these experiments and rediscover the recordings at a later time. In this track, I sampled a past experiment that was performed in Scott Dakota’s supermariner tuning. This microtonal tuning creates a kind of synchronised beating that reveals itself best when used in long-form drone or ambient works. In this case, the beat is too busy and you can’t hear the beating effect, but I still found that supermariner makes an interesting contrast against "semaphore".
I grew up playing video games. I still play them today, but when I was a kid my favourite system was the Sega Mega Drive. One thing that always brings me back to those simple times is hearing the sound of the Mega Drive’s FM synth. It has a characteristic grating and bright sound that I just love. I bought a VST instrument called FMDrive which quite faithfully reproduces the sound of the original Mega Drive sound chip. The only problem was that it couldn’t be microtuned. I wrote a couple of emails to the developer, Aly James, and he sent me a custom build of his synth with support for microtonal equal-tempered scales. The first thing I did was make this track in 10-EDO. It’s my first time using 10-EDO. I tried to focus on using it like a warped diatonic scale instead of two interlocking 5-EDO scales, but you can hear both approaches used.
I started a mid-tempo jungle tune a long time ago (before 2010 I think) and never finished it. When I listened back to it I knew in my heart that there was something special in there. Since I lost the original session files the only choice was to recreate it from scratch - and then see it through to completion. The result is this track Same Old. Two tunings were used, the harmonic series segment 8-16 and the subharmonic series segment 10-5. That subharmonic segment is a pentatonic scale that I love very much - one of its notes has a distinctly bluesy intonation. As for the 8-16 harmonic series segment, it sounds pure and super familiar. All of the notes except for the 11th, 13th and 7th harmonic are well represented in normie music. The chords that you hear are all 8:10:12:15 - that means they are all maj7 chords in just intonation. Each note from the harmonic series segment is the root of a 8:10:12:15 chord.
I have written more music in 22-EDO than I have written music in any other tuning system. It seems to make the music so much more colourful, and I think that's what keeps me coming back. There are a lot of new intervals to explore, but even the familiar intervals sound unusually lively in this system. For the melodies here, I used a 'by ear' approach. I didn't try to fit things into a single mode of the tuning system. Same for the chord progression which repeats throughout. Deep house / 22edo From my album Harmony Hacker
Gleam has a fast quintuplet groove and uses 22-tone equal temperament as its tuning. I love how a familiar pop or rnb chord progression can become very wonky when played in a tuning like 22edo. Microtonal electronic music from Sevish's album Harmony Hacker
Earlier this year somebody was using a leaf blower down my street, which I noticed had a strong 7th harmonic. And there I was all of a sudden, with 'The Well-Tuned Piano' stuck in my head! Midnight Cascade uses the same microtonal tuning used in La Monte Young's 'The Well-Tuned Piano'. While much music uses tunings based on factors 3 and 5, this wonderful tuning is based on 3 and 7. The result is pleasantly jangly, with a strong JI overtone buzz and a variety of interval sizes which create a unique grain for melodies. Emotional drum and bass / microtonal music From Sevish's album Harmony Hacker
Named after a beach in Cornwall where I took my holidays as a kid, where the low tide would reveal soft sands that seemed to escape into the horizon. Two tunings were used. You’ll hear TOP Blackwood[10] throughout most of the piece. The ending section uses the 1 3 7 9 11 dekany. A dekany is a combination product set tuning dreamed up by Erv Wilson. Blackwood[10] is one of my favourite tonal structures, as it contains 5 major chords and 5 minor chords distributed evenly and symmetrically, with no need for a diminished chord like you would find on the 7th degree of the major scale. You might have heard me use this scale in 'Enterprise' and 'So Thankful'. I would recommend Blackwood[10] as a scale for beginner microtonalists to explore as it's easy to navigate, not too many notes, sounds fantastic and has a good balance between familiar/xenharmonic.
Blackwood decatonic - one of those legendary microtonal scales. And it's a great example of a tuning that has some familiar chords that connect in unfamiliar (massively un-diatonic) ways. While you listen to So Thankful, listen out for a series of 6 chords that descend. You'll hear this series repeatedly throughout the song. These six chords alternate (minor major minor major etc.) in a way that the Western 12-tone equal tempered scale can't achieve. Give it a try and see what happens. What I like most about microtonal music is that it can be very familiar and pleasant but also novel and unexpected (in an awesome way). Of course, you can also use microtonality to create massive dissonance, way more harsh sounding than any 12-tet music, but where's the fun in that?!! Microtonal scales offer countless doorways to exciting and new original sounds - WE (the musicians of the world) should be exploring these new ideas without ever forgetting the importance of moving butts.
Greater Good is a song from ZIA's epic space-rock-opera album Drum 'n' Space. It uses the Bohlen-Pierce scale, a microtonal scale with no octaves as it splits the perfect twelfth into 13 equal steps.
An experiment - what if Droplet was not microtonal at all? Do you think this 12edo version of ‘Droplet’ feels different to the original? Can you tell the difference? Did you find the difference subtle or drastic? Which version do you prefer? If you were already familiar with the original, do you hear this as a mistuned version of the original’s Orwell[9] in 53edo, or does your perception easily 'snap in' to the familiar 12-tone equal temperament tuning? Do you think the copyright detection algorithm will flag this up or not?
The music is tuned to members 7-13 of the harmonic series (it repeats at the 14th harmonic).
Operator uses a microtonal tuning containing intervals from 13-limit just intonation. This particular 12 note scale has its own vibe and imparts that on to the song. My fave track from Brendan's album Neutral Paradise was actually 'Paradise' - but I knew I would have a lot of fun remixing Operator and I'm happy Brendan let me do that. The difficulty was having so many ideas for the remix and trying to bring them together in to one place. I suppose that's why this one became 7 minutes long.
Nerdy stuff: There are some 7th and 11th harmonics, subminor thirds, quarter tones and all that good xenharmonic stuff to listen out for. I feel happy writing in 22edo because it supports a lot of the musical tricks I want to use – patterns that aren't possible in other systems such as 12-tone equal temperament. The new possibilities often surprise me. I wonder if others can hear some certain twentytwoishness when they listen to 22edo music. Hands down tuning of all time I used ZynAddSubFX for the synths and Bitwig Studio as my DAW running on KDE Neon. Blissed-out downtempo / 22edo Closing track of my 'Horixens' album
Two tunings on this one... the synth melodies half way through play a subset of 23edo with pure octaves. Everything else throughout uses 23edo with stretched octaves (1214 cents). I think stretching helps the harmony but it's still way out there. I made this on my Linux music production machine using ZynAddSubFX and samplv1 synths. From the new album Horixens
This is what it would sound like if you took the harmonic series itself and used it as a musical tuning. That means, the first interval is an octave (2/1), then it's a fifth (3/2), then a fourth (4/3), then a major third (5/4) and so on. I mainly used the low members of the series because the really high up ones start to get very close together. Normally using the harmonic series as a tuning in this way would be slightly boring because there is no harmonic movement - everything relates back to the lowest note 1/1. So at one or two points throughout this piece I use the pitch bend to move the entire pitch set by a whole tone (9/8). It's a hacky way to do harmonic movement, but in microtonal music EVERYTHING is hacky. This track is from my old Windows/Ableton based workflow using Xen-Arts VST synths. From the new album Horixens
Here's a bit of drum and bass in a weird time signature. It uses a specific microtonal tuning in just intonation. The tuning (Scale Workshop link below) has a perfect fourth, perfect fifth, octave, a couple 7-limit intervals plus a couple 13-limit intervals thrown in. In the album liner notes I mistakenly said that it starts off with the 7-limit intervals and then later the 13-limit intervals come in. Actually it's the other way around - you'll hear 13-limit from the start and 7-limit comes in a while later. Man... the video encoding really chewed up the visuals! Anyway I really love how it looks when you're riding past a tree orchard and the regular placement of trees causes unexpected visual patterns. This video is something like that but with featureless white orbs. Enjoy! From the album Horixens
This is shorter than the original because I had to cut out the ambient parts (they had been bounced down to audio so I couldn't retune those bits). Also there was a missed opportunity to do "Gleam but it's in 12edo and 4/4" but I think that would be too much for anybody to handle.
I wrote this tune in 31edo (31 tone equal temperament). Yes you read that correctly, it's 31, not 313. Still a great tuning though. The first part uses some more adventurous resources that you won't find in 12edo such as 2:3:5:7:9 and subminor 13 chords. The rest of it is a breakbeat track in 6/4 time and more familiar tonality. Throughout I'm using only a 19 tone subset of the 31 notes, meantone[19]. This track is from my old Windows/Ableton based workflow using u-he ACE. Most u-he synths now support Linux and also microtonal tunings (.tun files) so I can actually continue to use u-he ACE on my new Linux based music rig. I am writing an article about making microtonal music on Linux and you'll see that on my blog in the future. From the new album Horixens
Come on a Journey is the opening track to my album Horixens. It's a prog-ish, cinematic breakbeat track in a microtonal scale. Sounds messed up but if that's the kind of music you wanted to hear today, that's the kind of music I make. This is tuned to a non-octave-repeating segment of the harmonic series. Specifically harmonics 16-24. This tuning repeats at the perfect fifth. It's not to say that the tuning contains NO octaves, because there are certainly octaves here (e.g. the octave between 9/8 and 9/4). Octaves are far more scarce in this tuning so you cannot take any pitch class and transpose it up or down by an indefinite number of octaves. But you can transpose indefinitely by perfect fifths, because this tuning repeats at the perfect fifth! What this means is considerable limitation on voicings and compositional choices in general. It also sort of means that higher ranges of the tuning feel like they're in a different key to lower ranges.
The tuning here is the Marveldene, which is a tempering of many scales. This track would probably translate into 12edo really easily. But there's more tonal resource available in Marveldene that I haven't tapped into. More details and examples are on the xenharmonic wiki. Can I just say that I appreciate the recent interest in my music. Everybody who left a message, who grabbed or streamed the latest album, who played my weird sounds when they were on aux duty - you're all helping me write the next chapter. Balancing work and hobbies is tough but I'm cooking up the next batch of Sevish tracks. A microtonal music tutorial is also in the works.
A track in island[9], or semaphore[9], or madagascar[9] or whatever it's called. It's the same tuning as I used on 'Desert Island Rain' and 'Never Coming Home'. 313edo is used here as the tuning of this 9-note scale but you could alternatively use smaller EDOs such as 19edo or 24edo. Each has a subtly different feel to it - I'm thinking of posting a comparison in the future but am working on other things at the moment. From the album Horixens
What is your strategy for head nodding to beats in odd time signatures? Do you nod your head in regular time (e.g. every 1/4th or 3/8th note) so that you're on-the-beat during some bars and offbeat during others? Or do you nod in an irregular way, trying to catch the emphasised beats (e.g. 3/8 + 3/8 + 3/8 + 2/8)? Or something else entirely? Same question goes out to all those foot tappers and finger snappers. (Btw please don't nod your head on every 1/8th note, that can't be good for you) This track is for the most part diatonic and not xenharmonic. 31edo has some really sweet sounding thirds so if you want to write something that will be familiar to Westerners this microtonal tuning is one to try. You can of course do some really wacky tonal things with it too.
is tuning is mavila temperament taken out to just 7 notes. With 7 notes it works well on a kalimba. My kalimba remained tuned to mavila for years actually. It's in 7edo at the moment but I kinda miss the way it was before. Mavila is a microtonal musical temperament with very flat fifths. If you stack 4 of these fifths on top of each other, you'll get a minor third instead of a major third. As you continue generating more pitches by stacking fifths, you'll eventually get an "anti-diatonic" scale where all the major chords become minor chords and vice versa.
An oldschool Sevish track using a tetrachordal scale where each successive interval is a superparticular ratio. A tetrachord is a scale segment containing 4 notes and spanning a perfect fourth. A tetrachordal scale can be formed from two tetrachords. The two tetrachords are separated by an interval of 9/8 (a major second). In this case, I have used the intervals [10/9, 11/10, 12/11] for both tetrachords. Do you notice a pattern with each of the used intervals: 9/8, 10/9, 11/10, 12/11?
The opening track from Sean But Not Heard (it's pronounced seen but not heard). First 11 seconds are straight up 12edo but the rest is in 9 equal divisions of the fifth aka Wendy Carlos' Alpha scale. The tuning lacks octaves so it makes you think hard when writing and it also sounds very spicy (lavendery, perhaps). For what it's worth, lavender is my favourite flower and one of my favourite smells too. The award for worst camera work goes to me. A few years ago I went to some nearby lavender fields and was just messing around with my wife's DSLR. I decided to use some of that wonky footage in this new video.
Sorry no Scale Workshop link because I can't remember exactly what tuning was here. It isn't an edo, so I guess it could have been TOP? Anyway it's some tuning of mavila temperament taken out to 9 notes. The kalimba is tuned to a pentatonic subset. The flute at the end is some randomly-tuned tourist whistle that my buddy bought for me in Cambodia. Video footage was recorded at Beachy Head on the south coast of England. Chilled out and atmospheric microtonal music from the Sevish vaults.
Check out the wacky melody near the end, which I made by hitting a cup of tea with the side of a teaspoon. I recorded this without a metronome using a portable recorder in my kitchen, then I imported it into Ableton and time warped the audio to get it exactly on beat. Because pitch and playback rate are correlated, the note-by-note changes to the playback rate introduce changes to the pitch of each note. This resulted in a lucky little melody with lots of chance microtonal pitches in there. It's not in 17edo, but I liked how it stood out from the rest of the track, so I kept it in.
Detached and Distant is microtonal music tuned to 14 tone equal temperament. The track is from my 2012 album 'Sean but not Heard' and it's one of the tracks I'm quite fond of. I'm curious what new listeners here will think about this one.
The tunings used here are 17edo and just intonation. Mostly 17edo though. I think only the bells are tuned to JI - a 22 note tuning based on the 1.3.7.9.11.15 eikosany.
Spuffled Gnorclacks is a drum and bass track in 17edo from Sean but not Heard (2012)
Microtonal scales are essential to my music. These scales have different aesthetic effects and moods. Mixing microtonal harmony with beats is something that I can't seem to get bored of. Starfish is a track in 22edo (22 equal divisions of the octave) that switches seamlessly between 10/4 and 4/4.
Xenharmonic bass music ~ from Sevish's album Bubble [2021]
This one didn't come out as wretched as I had predicted, but I'm posting it here for anybody who is interested to check out a version of Sevish - Longwayaway People retuned to 12 tone equal temperament. The melodies are mostly preserved because the step size of 11edo is so close to 12edo, however there are some moments in the bell part that the melody sounds a bit different. I believe that's because the scale here is an 11 note subset of 12edo, where one interval is a whole tone and the rest are semitones. When making this retuned version, I tried placing that whole tone in different locations of the scale then eventually settled on this one that I felt best preserved the melody.
What if there were no wholetones or semitones, only 7 equal notes? Fuschiamarine! From Sevish's album Bubble.
An atmospheric short piece from Sevish's recent album Bubble. 22 equal divisions of the octave (22edo/22tet). Bitwig Studio + ZynAddSubFX Visual animation is a cross-section of a Menger sponge. Mandelbulber
Take a microtonal song and try to play it in 12edo (standard musical tuning in the West). The original was in a just intonation scale built using only harmonic overtones. In my opinion the biggest difference in this 12edo version is not how the melody is affected, but how there is now a subtle chorusing sound on the synth instruments because the inaccuracy of equal tempered tuning creates a rich beating within the overtones of overlapping notes.
Wacky instrumental beat by Sevish. Kalimba and sampler instruments all tuned to a fixed just intonation scale (Centaur, Kraig Grady's 12 note just scale on C=264Hz) Of course got a lot of vibrato going for the wavy too. I like how the middle section came out.
Here's how it sounds when you take a microtonal track and try to fit it into the chromatic scale of 12edo. o_O
The scale used here is an approximation of 22edo using select harmonics between 128-256. All intervals are therefore some number over 128 and the scale is near-equal. In a sense all notes in the scales are related to some very low fundamental frequency. This 'justifies' the sound of the tuning somewhat but also allows for free modulation like you would expect from an equal scale. The idea to experiment with this kind of tuning came from the short story A Bit O' Blarney by George Secor. But these days the idea is being popularised by Zhea Erose and various members of the Xenharmonic Alliance Discord. From 0:58 the 4 chord progression modulates up by a minor 3rd (6\22) each repetition. In 12edo, this progression would return to its original key after 4 modulations, but in quasi-22edo (and 22edo) you end up in a key a semitone higher than where you started. That's because the minor 3rd is tuned wider, so the difference starts to really accumulate as you stack the same interval repeated.
Almighty Fractal uses a tetrachordal scale (same as 'The Entity Unmasked', see Scale Workshop link below). It is mostly one improvised take with overdubs. A nice property of small 'modal' sounding scales is that you can just jam and improvise easily. I intend to explore this approach more in some of my future music. Lofi ambient from my album Bubble
A chill beat with a subtle microtonal flavour from Sevish's 2021 album Bubble.
An early DEMO version of Dream Up that I thought would be interesting to share. Faster tempo. Brighter tuning. Different sound designs. Less finesse overall. The tuning is 140., 200., 310., 400., 540., 640., 700., 833., 900., 1040., 1100., 1200.
From Sean but not Heard (2012). Can't remember the tuning, something golden ratio related. Not the phi tuning I blogged about years back.
9/4 beat using the harmonic series as a tuning system. From my 2012 album Sean But Not Heard
Electronic music in just intonation. Trapped in a Cycle was originally for the 2 Minute Masterpieces compilation album on the Faturenet netlabel. That label is no longer active but while it existed it was fun and the folks involved were cool to hang out with. Can't remember when this tune was made, probably around 2011.
It might sound weird to some of you but around 2012-2013 I got curious about writing music in 12 tone equal temperament again. It's not that I got bored of microtonal tuning systems, it's that 12edo presented an interesting challenge in reverse - what would it be like to work within its limitations when I've already got my head so deep into the microtonal world? So I made day:dot EP with 3 tracks in 12 tone equal temperament. Asha is one of those tracks. Since then I've had no interest in returning to 12 stuff. Sometimes I'm in the mood for meantone or diatonic sounds but I tend to use alternative tunings for that like 31edo. By this point the tunings are pretty much essential.
New Sevish album Formless Shadows coming September 17th 2021 — it's a quite cinematic album with a variety of moods on it. You can listen on streaming and Bandcamp. This is the first time I've been able to release two albums in the same year. But you'll find Formless Shadows quite a different listen to January's Bubble. I just really had the urge to make music like this so here it is. As I write this I'm already making plans for future projects that go in a totally different direction. So big thanks to everybody who listens and supports my music making!
I Won't Forget is a piece for kalimba tuned in just intonation with a septimal minor flavour.
An ambient meditation - Hexdeep is the track 1 on my new album Formless Shadows. The tuning for 'Hexdeep' is 1.3.7.9 hexany. It has only 6 notes. Some of the intervals include 1/3-tone, subminor third, supermajor third. Lots of septimal flavours, just intonation smoothness. The piece is quite long so it gives enough time to get used to feel of the tuning. I composed this music by improvising one layer and then overdubbing more improvised layers on top. Then I spent a good while editing the MIDI parts to sculpt the complete piece from those performances.
Garden of Light from my ambient album Formless Shadows. The scale is 5ed2; a pentatonic where every step is of exactly equal size. What makes a good scale for people trying alternative tunings for the first time? I sometimes recommend 5ed2 as a first scale to try. It sounds very different to 12ed2 so it's obvious when you've got it working. It also doesn't have any wrong-sounding combinations so you can jam and mash on it and it can still sound alright. Though you may outgrow it quickly, there are 'many' other tunings to explore after that!
From my ambient album Formless Shadows, Big Numb is a piece of music in 22ed2. I made Big Numb in 2020 and the original plan was for it to feature on Bubble. But as Bubble took shape I realised that this track would have ruined the pacing of that album (which already had a 10 minute ambient finisher - Almighty Fractal). So I carried Big Numb over to the Formless Shadows project - an ambient album that I wanted to do for years. Here I think it works a lot better.
Short ambient piece in just intonation from Sevish's album Formless Shadows. If you were wondering what a 540 degree field of view looks like, this one is for you.
Thundersnow by Sevish from Formless Shadows. This scale glacial[7] is quite an odd feel. If you're familiar with the whole tone scale you might hear glacial[7] as a modified version of that. The whole tones are somewhat narrow at around 185 cents, such that when you stack 6 whole tones atop each other, you're left with enough space at the top to fit a semitone. In melody, that semitone can function quite usefully as a leading tone to establish a tonal center while still having wholetoney feelings between the other 6 notes. Aside from the comparisons to the whole tone scale, glacial feels xenharmonic to me, giving me impressions of desolation and dreaminess. I've used POTE tuning here which means the 2/1 (octave) is tuned pure while all the other intervals are compromised by some kind of optimal tempering. 13ed2 would also be a fine way to tune glacial[7].
Never Coming Home from Formless Shadows. The original ambient version, not the drum and bass remix! So this track was recorded during my time in Beijing. The 'home' in the track title isn't a reference to my home country, instead it's about a dream where I accidentally teleported myself so far away from Earth that all I could see were stars and galaxies with no indication of which way was home. At that moment I felt some regret but also an acceptance that I was never coming home.
A musical improvisation using a golden ratio tuning and golden ratio related timbres. The tuning system I've used here repeats at acoustic phi (~833 cents or ~1.618) and the inner intervals are found by successively dividing the largest interval into golden proportions (i.e. dividing by logarithmic phi). The resulting scale is about as golden as you can get. This tuning approach is something that I wrote about in my 2017 article "The Golden Ratio as a musical interval" and in this 2021 recording I've finally used it. https://sevish.com/2017/golden-ratio-... An alternative tuning approach could be a rank-2 scale where the period is phi and the generator is (phi^phi)/phi or ~514 cents. Such a scale would be Moment of Symmetry (MOS) at 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 notes. Look familiar? Those are Fibonacci numbers! Of course it's not a coincidence. This scale is golden all the way down. I hope that interested readers try building this scale for themselves and sharing any discoveries.
Sevish and benyamind's collaboration "Ancient Love" is a cinematic fantasy jungle soundscape with deep electronic pulses and cosmic xenharmonic harmonies. A true hybrid production which fuses the soul and style of both artists. With two minds, two DAWs and many many online sessions, we spent a long time making sure it was right.
This ambient track was written during my time in Beijing. It was done alongside Never Coming Home. These two tracks share some similarities, including the tuning. Disorient has two field recordings, one is the beach at Qingdao, Shandong Province. The other is outside my apartment block in Chongwenmen, Beijing.
AKA Gleam but it's in 4/4 (and 22ed2). Just a simple loop that repeats 3 times but I hope you will enjoy anyway.
Morphable has a mix of styles going on, jungle, techno, house, others. And a mix of tunings, some equal and some rational intonation. I enjoy making sounds like these - now feels like a good time to do a classic Sevish-ish sounding album before getting deep into some future experimental cycle. My approach to 26ed2 in Yeah Groove was to have all 26 notes available and not think in terms of subsets. It's similar to how I work in 22ed2 now. Some other tricks from 22ed2 are also available in 26ed2, such as having those 4:5:6:7:9:11 chords. Of course there are some differences too.
Smooth jungle / just intonation Album: Morphable by Sevish (5th August 2022) Track: Everyone
Microtonal techno / 11-tone equal temperament The Mad Mile is track 1 from my new album Morphable. Named after a one mile stretch of a local main road which briefly goes up to the national speed limit. A favourite spot for the local boy racers. I wanted this track to capture that kind of intensity. The bassline here is the first thing I've recorded off my Korg Monologue. The chords are 4:7:9:11 in parallel harmony. Yes that bridge really does use scale LLsLLLs in 11ed2.
Chill electronic from the album Morphable. Tuning is 11/10, 6/5, 27/20, 3/2 99 here means the soft ice cream cone with a chocolate flake in it. Eating one of these at the beach, in rain or shine, is plenty nostalgic for me.
Drum and bass / 22 tone equal temperament Album: Morphable
Launchin and morphin in 53 tone equal temperament. Most of the 53 notes were used here, I think. No particular subset was used so all 53 were available on the piano roll. I tried to use plenty of descending 1\53 steps in the voice leading. Since there are only 128 MIDI notes it was tricky for any one instrument to range much beyond 2 octaves. I simply tuned the bass 2 octaves down and the lead 1 octave up, then kept each instrument within its range.
Bohlen-Pierce bass music Obviously a little ZIA inspired. Weirdly this is a track I started during the Bubble creative cycle, but I never got it over the line and I thought the pacing of the track didn't serve that album well. But I finished it during the Morphable cycle and think it fits in nicely. The tuning here is 13ed3 with some octave transpositions in the bass. I don't think I need to say much about this approach as it's been mentioned a lot in the past. The 13ed3 plus octaves thing is my preferred approach to BP. But one of these days I'm tempted to try a track in the lambda scale of BP without any modulation or octave transpositions. Just might be fun.
Tritavium from the album Morphable by Sevish 9/8, 5/4, 11/8, 3/2, 5/3, 7/4, 2/1, 9/4, 5/2, 11/4, 3/1
Microtonal eurobeat / I don't even care / 22-tone equal temperament https://sevish.bandcamp.com/album/mor... Just having fun with this one! Hope you like a bit of cheese. I double dare you to play it when you're on aux duty. Ahhhh Some people were asking why Gleam (Loungin Remix) isn't on streaming services. Well it's coming November on Spotify/Apple/etc. If you're following me there you wouldn't be able to miss it. Been working on some new sounds recently, tunings I've never used before. My intention right now isn't to save it all for an album. Instead I want to try and get new stuff out more frequently. Appreciate any feedback while I try new things.
Acid disco / 22ed2 LsssLsssss Zero Nothings is all I have to give
3D geometric visuals + drum and bass I became obsessed by 6/4 for a few months and this track came from that time. The track turned out over 8 minutes, hope you enjoy them. Oh and there is something else Tuning is POTE slendric[11]
The music is some happy garage I made for the Big Sway album. If you enjoy the sounds you'll find listening links below. The Ko-fi membership gets you some bonus tracks to download. The Discord is a comfy place with some music fans in it. Be brave and play my tunes while on aux duty!
Become amused with this 11-on-the-floor house music from the new album Big Sway!
0:00 Zero Nothings 3:32 Pwns 7:05 Who Knows 11:29 Door Into Fantasy 16:54 Backtrace 22:37 Bare Layers 25:57 There Is Something Else 34:16 Oscid 42:26 End
Seems that many of my albums have "that one FM track". Well, this is that one FM track on Big Sway. All synths are done with Dexed (Yamaha DX7 compatible softsynth).
squelchy bass xen
xen jungle bliss / just intonation
Some trance I did a few months back for my album Big Sway.
The promised remix of Door Into Fantasy. I gotta go now, will be back in a few months with new tracks. Next time I'll even tell you what the tunings are.
This tutorial shows sound frequency modulation sound design using FMTS 2. This synth is developed by Xen-Arts and allows you to play microtonal scales, so I wanted to show a basic workflow that will give you some familiar FM synth sounds. At the end of the video you should be able to able to make an FM bass sound that wouldn't feel out of place on a Yamaha TX81Z, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game, or AdLib sound card. Of course, FMTS 2 is much more powerful than that, and the workflow shown in this video can become the starting point for something much more interesting. Xen-Arts produce many VST instruments which allow you to play microtonal music. So far all of these VSTs are free, so there's no harm to get em all.
This tutorial shows you how to export microtonal scales using Scala tuning software. You can use your exported scale files to tune up various synths that support these files. Three important types of tuning file are Scala tuning files (.scl/.kbm), AnaMark tuning files (.tun), and MIDI tuning standard tuning dumps (.mid sequence with sysex data). You can produce all of these tuning files using the free software Scala. Of course there are other standards in use, and Scala supports a lot of those too. Three commands you'll learn in this tutorial are: set synth 112 -- sets up for exporting .tun files set synth 107 -- sets up for exporting MIDI tuning dumps show synthesizer -- shows a list of support synths Scala can tune practically any kind of microtonal scale you want. Traditional tunings, equal temperaments, just intonation, empirical scales, moment of symmetry, combination product sets, they're all possible. Then you can retune various synths using the method shown here.
Now&Xen is a podcast for casual chat about microtonal music, tunings and music theory. It’s hosted by Stephen Weigel and Sevish with occasional guests. Listen on your podcast app or on the website.
Scale Workshop allows you to design microtonal scales and play them in your web browser. Export your scales for use with VST instruments. Convert Scala files and AnaMark Tun files to various tuning formats. Background music: Sevish - In The Zoon (23-edo) This has been a labour of love for almost 2 years - I hope that many people will find it useful! If you want to share any work you've created with Scale Workshop then I'd love to hear about it. Now that Scale Workshop is in a stable state, I am going to focus my attention back on composing new music and hosting the Now&Xen microtonal podcast.
Here's how to use microtonal scales to make your computer music wavy and wonderful. This xenharmonic tutorial should work in any DAW because I'm demonstrating the plugin method here. Microtonal music is a deep topic, and this video is just a starting point. If you know of alternative approaches then please share them in the comments to help out others! Note: while this video shows the Zyn-Fusion synth, these days I would recommend Surge XT as a free software synth with amazing microtonal support. If you're looking for a powerful synth for ANY tuning, start with Surge XT!
How does the tuning of a piece of music affect how it feels? If I take the same piece of music and re-tune it in different ways, we can make a comparison, right? So listen to this and judge for yourself.
Some folks say that microtonal music sounds 'spicy.' Well 12edo is spicy too - you just get de-sensitized to its taste after over-exposure. But there is a way to experience 12edo again, to get a fresh sense of its character! You take a microtonal track that you're really familiar with, re-tune it to 12edo and listen through. I found that all tunings have a mood of their own, just like Ivor Darreg said. You choose a particular tuning to infuse its mood into your composition. I hope this video is a working demonstration of that effect.
'Unreality' in three tunings, 17edo, 7edo and 12edo. Each tuning sounds different to the original just intonation used on this track. The final 12edo section uses a different mode to the earlier 12edo sections. There are some wrongly tuned notes starting 4:02, ignore those!
Bubble will be released to Bandcamp and streaming services on January 1st. This premiere is your one chance to hear the album before its official release! All tracks were written in 2019/2020, everything microtonal (22edo, 7edo and JI).
Here I explain that one section in Starfish where it keeps getting faster but somehow returns back to its original tempo. The way I did this was quite easy and could be done in almost any DAW. If you want to hear some music that slows down to reach a faster, more upbeat section, type "langgam jawa" into youtube and you can find hundreds of examples. I've heard Autechre and Aphex Twin tunes that use Risset rhythms also.
A mix of microtonal bass music from the split-notes catalogue. - Tony Dubshot - Psionics - knowsur - OUCHI - Elaine Walker - ZIA - Skate Space - Jacky Ligon - Only Once - müesk - Mnemosyne - Sevish - Ganymede - Fature - Salamander - Skueue - Benthi - Tony Dubshot - Beta Stability - Tony Dubshot - Ancient Dub
Ibreak down an electronic drum part and explain some of the processes and choices that happened. Sometimes I get asked how I do my drums and this track was a simple example that should hopefully answer those questions. Just this week I started a Ko-fi for anybody who wants another way to support the music things I do. Subscribing there will give you access to more behind-the-scenes content as I continue to chip away at music projects in the background.
Let's listen together! Morphable is the new album of microtonal electronic music by Sevish, releasing on August 5th 2022. This listening party will happen August 6th (Saturday) to give more people the chance to join. Have a jolly nice time in live chat, and please consider subscribing and sharing to help me spread these sounds.
I show you how to do custom microtonal piano rolls in Bitwig Studio because let's be honest who else is going to show you this stuff? If you're working with music scales that have more or less than 12 notes, especially large scales, you might need the piano roll to visually reflect what's going on in your scale. You can make it happen in just a few minutes using layered editing mode and MIDI clips.
Korg Monologue microtonal ambient performance This is a melodic deep exploration of the 2)5 dekany with factors 1-3-5-7-9. The dekany contains five different 6-note subsets called hexanies. In this piece of music, each section uses a different hexany. You might hear that each hexany has its own clear and distinct colour. A 1:3:5:7:9 drone plays throughout to accompany the melodies. The fascinating thing is, the resulting dekany doesn't contain 1/1, therefore the melodies never use 1/1 from the drone and therefore don't quite "come home"; they always float on top in a harmonious way. The Korg Monologue is a monophonic analogue synthesiser which allows for custom "microtonal" tunings. I set up one tuning for each of the five hexanies, and then assigned those tunings to a series of saved patches. To perform the piece and its modulating through hexanies, I simply needed to perform my way through this series of pre-prepared patches. Each scale is linearly mapped to the keyboard.
High-energy electronic mind candy!
This is how you start a track from scratch.