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Comment by bsedlm | Hacker News Reader

I choose to read this as a ever more pressing need to explore music beyond 12-tet. and not just in a niche microtonal fashion.

computers can take us there but not so long as MIDI is the standard. the 'problem' (which is really more of an opportunity to improve and go beyond) is not MIDI but the conceptual theoretical framework of the 12-notes keyboard underlying all 'western' traditions.

but don't get me wrong, it's no coincidence that this 12 notes system is so widespread, it really is very well made. anything that attempts to take music beyond it needs to be even better, which ain't easy as it's quite something already.

in summary, computer technology has so far just made cheaper and easier to do the same things that were already possible. no new things have been tried yet regarding the choice of notes to use.

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I'm actually a big fan of this idea, and am slowly doing work to get my DAW (Ardour) more capable of supporting non-12TET and non-western tunings.

However, putting on my devil's advocate hat for a moment, this leans heavily on the idea that humanity didn't already explore non-12T music already, which is a difficult argument to make.

It is false that the 12T model originated on keyboards.

Finally, it also fails to note the reason why we have 12TET. Western music is relatively unique among world music cultures in the dominant role that harmony plays (contrast with the highly evolved classical musical forms from India, which are incredibly rhythmically and melodically sophisticated but lack almost any notion of harmony (let alone harmonic movement) at all).

If you want to make music that is rich harmonically, it is likely that at some point you will want to be able to modulate between similar relationships (call them "scales" if you like) but starting from different initial tones. Doing this without it all going horribly wrong requires ET.

ET arose from the need to play music in all 12 keys on a moment's notice without any one of those keys sounding like the obvious dump stat. It's a compromise to play a song that is strictly diatonic in a single key in ET.

Right, but thats precisely the tradeoff that composing with significant harmonic motion requires.

If you're going to do purely melodic, or purely modal, work, then sure, you don't need it and you could argue that it's even "harmful".

Two artists who have been doing fascinating work around microtonal music are King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (check out the album Flying Microtonal Banana) and Jacob Collier (insane musician, perfect pitch, extremely worth checking out).

Sounds like a topic that would make an interesting blog post. If you do expand on the subject please share it!

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