Be sure to enable the subtitles because he puts a lot of notes on the video. The descript also has a little essay about different common tuning arrangements.
That's utterly fascinating, I've never heard microtonal music before outside of older traditions like chanting. Some observations:
1) When microtones are used in the melody improvisation, it sounds totally natural because we're used to it with string bending in guitar. It's surprising yet satisfying to hear the same done on a piano
2) When microtones are occasionally used to make a chord "bluer", it's also very natural and satisfying as another flavor of dissonance, which totally fits with the kind of dissonant jazz we're already used to with piano
3) But when microtones are used for most/all the notes of the chord, such as the root... at least to my ears it sounds horrible, like the piano just went out of tune for that chord. Which makes me wonder if you could get used to it or not?
For #3, a lot of it IS jarring and often it is supposed to be... although in jazz there are no wrong notes, just bad resolutions (jacob collier). Oftentimes in microtone you will find a passage that sounds horrible at first but makes sense at the end, hopefully.
I think that you can definitely get used to it. It is a little weird to hear non-typical notes, especially if you have done any kind of pitch training, but at the end of the day it isn't the notes themselves that matter but their positions relative to each other in a chord or passage.
The youtuber I linked also has a bunch of Lumatone performances which is an instrument with a hex grid layout where you can change the pitch of a chord by shifting your hands up or down on the grid while maintaining the same hand shape. That approach makes some really good microtone music whereas a lot of straight piano layout players end up getting stuck in "ambient space noise" modes.
For your last point, if you just continued to adapt 12tet music into other systems I think it would continue to sound strange? Not totally sure, you'd get used to it to some extent but I think it would always sound noticeably off esp if you were familiar with the piece in 12tet like we are with this one.
But there are entire music traditions using other tuning systems and they sound "normal" to the people who grew up with them. Notably the 24tet used in arabic music but there are literally dozens of others around the world.
How are the extra notes entered? The keyboard looks regular, is there some note modification going on, or are the extra notes actually added as dedicated keys?
He's using software. The keyboard he is playing isn't the sound you're hearing. In the description he says he's using pianoteq. He also explains the process of changing from 12 tones in the description.
Cool to see Sevish on the front page of HN. He was inspiring to me on my microtonal journey. I started with Harry Partch and Ben Johnston’s compositions and writings.
If anyone’s interested, I’ve been working on a plugin for automatic adaptive pure intonation, which can make things like microtonal modulations relatively easy to do! Hoping to release publicly before the end of the year.
The best current resource is the Kyle Gann book, "The Arithmetic of Listening". It's fantastic, by a world authority on the topic. https://www.kylegann.com/Gannbooks.html
Also for anyone interested in just intonation based microtonality, I did a video demo of a tool I made using my open source Scheme for Max extension to Max here:
Also Altin Gun and Gaye Su Akyol, both Turkish artists that use a hybrid of standard guitars and baglamas, and operate mostly in 12TET but employ lots of embellishments from Turkish makams.
Flying microtonal banana, KG, and LW are fun (24TET with a few missing quarter tones), but I'm really hoping their next foray is 19TET or 31TET, which both approximate 12TET well enough but also have some neat intervals.
This is just a list of Sevish’s tools (the Scale Workshop is really useful for things like building scales for use in Max, _way_ easier to work with than Scala). Thank you for sharing the MTS-ESP Suite, though! I love the idea of a single piece of software that can handle tuning across plugins and MIDI devices.
Great album with microtones which are used commonly in classical Indian music:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sounds_of_India
The first track starts out: “Ragas are precise melody forms. A raga is not a mere scale nor is it a mode. Each Raga has it’s own ascending and descending movement. And those subtle touches and uses of micro tones and stresses on particular notes like this…”
I make microtonal (usually 41 tones per octave) music using a Lumatone keyboard and the Pianoteq synth plugin. Microtonality in Pianoteq is surprisingly easy, given how difficult MIDI makes microtonality. If you divide the octave into 41 pieces, you only get about three octaves per MIDI channel. Pianoteq allows you to use a sweet hack whereby raising the channel value by one raises the octave by one.
Of course, editing those midi notes after they've been recorded is still quite a chore.
Those who find the typical sound of microtonal music too much of a dissonance right off the bat: give a listen to Neurogenesis[0] by Robert Rich and you might appreciate the subtle enthralling patterns.
I once took a year of oud lessons, and the nuances in microtonality really blew me away.
There were all sorts of things in the aural traditions, like scale X having a fractionally sharper 3rd ascending than scale Y, but with both notated in the same way.
But a lot of the larger subdivisions (i.e. quarter tone sharp/flat notes) were surprisingly natural to learn, and no different to semitones (from a listening/playing perspective) after a while.
Joel Kivelä's manaCompiler is one intriguing looking software, based on his previous Dhalang Microtonal Groovebox. This just got a major update a couple of days ago.
For more examples of awesome microtonal music, check out all the artists that contribute to STAFFcirc compos on Soundcloud. Many of them feature tons of microtonal music, including Sevish too!
Another microtonal master was Ben Johnston. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhZd4Tea2cM is his string quartet arrangement of Amazing Grace. It starts with just intonation and then... goes...
I think most of their stuff sounds pretty silly, usually – like someone's mucking around with knobs in Ableton over a decent drum loop: https://sevish.bandcamp.com/track/tritavium
I've been a big fan for a couple years. Initially it was really weird to me. Now it's not! I've gotten more used to microtonality, for one thing, and for another I think he's toned down the really xenharmonic aspects of his music. When his latest album comes up on Spotify the harmonies don't sound particularly strange to me, just a little smoother than what you would get out of 12 Edo.
Bitwig has a built in device that can do any 12-note tuning or equal division of the octave tuning (with tweakable octave I think). That said it cannot really do other tunings. But these two types of tuning are the most common, and I guess with the new Note Grid device it should in theory be possible to do pretty much any tuning.
Edit: it looks like sevish has multiple notes tuned the same in order to get less than 12 notes per octave, so that's also possible.
Be sure to enable the subtitles because he puts a lot of notes on the video. The descript also has a little essay about different common tuning arrangements.