Robert Walker

Improvisations and compositions exploring tunings from the conventional to the wild, historical, modern, world, or exotic.

My Fractal Tune Smithy program can be used to improvise in these tunings from a music (midi type) keyboard, or compose in them.

You can play in them from your computer keyboard too, using the character keys to play notes.

To try out the program yourself, download it from:

http://tunesmithy.co.uk/

Press release:
http://tunesmithy.co.uk/press_mus.htm

As an improviser, you just select a tuning from a drop list and play in it immediately.

You can also compose in these tunings directly, if you are a composer. The idea is to redirect the notes played in your sequencer or notation software to FTS for retuning. Then when you click the play button of your sequencer, you will hear the notes played in your selected tuning. I usually add a note to the score to show what the tuning is for future reference so that one knows what tuning to use when one plays the score again in the future. The redirection of the notes is done using a free program called Midi Yoke.

You can do that for any twelve tone scale or course (compose directly in historical twelve tone temperaments such as quarter comma meantone or Werkmeister III etc ...). Howerver, you can do it for any other system too and compose in gamelan tunings, the just intonation twelve tone suitable for modern Indian music, and so on.

A normal score is designed to work with scales with twelve notes to an octave - but you can use it to compose music in other systems too by treating it as a kind of scordatura score. The idea there is to use the normal notation but change the tuning so that the pitches it plays get changed. Such a score can also be played directly by a player of keyboard or other fixed pitch instruments who reads from it just like a normal score - this works if their instrument is suitably tuned (e.g. a midi keyboard played through a retuning program like FTS - or a suitably tuned acoustic instrument such as maybe a harp or zither) - so I call it a scordatura keyboard score.

The area of historical tunings and tunings for world music, and modern microtonal systems is an area of very active exploration and experimentation to find some of the material on these tunings, follow the links on the tunesmithy download page.