Collection of EDO impressions: Difference between revisions

|This is my personal favourite.  Composite hypopent, awesome thirds and sixths and a decent fourth and fifth.  Kind of leaves somethign to be desired with sevenths and seconds/ninths.  Can play well within the western music idiom, and has plenty of tonal options outside of that, but doesn't really offer any of the cool maqam-esque tones of 17edo or any of the weird spacey tones of 14edo.  I really think this should be the intermediate step between "standard tuning" (whatever you consider that to be) and "xenharmonic tuning" (whatever you consider that to be).  This really sits between those two ideas for me.

|The smallest EDO with a really nice meantone fifth. I consider this the smallest EDO to use if you want to make pop music into microtonal music.

|First EDO with a meantone diatonic scale (5L2s proper), but not only meantone! [[Negri]] is awesome, [[godzilla]] is awesome, [[sensi]] is awesome, and [[keemun]] and [[magic]] are both quite interesting. Excellent EDO to promote to newcomers because it works beautifully with standard meantone notation and familiar meantone harmony is possible, but again, it's so much more than meantone. Xenharmonic scales and comma pumps abound.

|needs to be in there for the above reason about enharmonic-sized EDOs in general, but also because learning to differentiate things like #4's and b5's is easy and attainable and a good "first step." I hear A# and Bb as different notes in 19-EDO now - the first fits into things like E lydian, the second fits into things like E diminished, etc. Then you can experiment with melodic diesis movements

|This is where almost everyone outside of the xenharmonic community sends their minds when you mention "microtonal music."  It's used in traditional maqam music.  I've personally used it myself a bit, but, in my opinion, what gets added to 12edo is fairly limited.  It opens up a couple of new worlds of a few consonant intervals that play really well with familiar ones, and also some really skunky dissonant ones that drive the neighbours crazy.  But it's definitely not what I recommend for beginning a journey into alternative tuning.

|12EDO, but fancy.

|Very worthwhile, and underrated because of its long history of "microtonal" (rather than "xenharmonic") use. Really nails the 2.3.11 subgroup, and has all the familiar meantone harmony (and diatonic scale) of 12edo. The basis of much low-level maqam music theory (maqamat are often presented as quarter tones).

|allows you to take a sound you all intuitively know (the blues) and make it "real" and "tangible" and manipulate it to see what comes of it

|Composite hypopent.  This has some really cool possibilities and some pretty good consonant intervals, but doesn't seem (in my experience) to get too much love from xenharmonic composers.  Dave Trombly has done some text-to-music stuff with it that shows how even randomly-generated notes and intervals sound quite musical, but other than that, I haven't really come across any in-depth projects exploring it.  My own noodling around with it makes me think that it'd be pretty easy to use.  Maybe there are better options for many specific approaches, though.

|The step-sibling of the meantone series. Its twice of 13EDO though, so the closest approximation of 5/4 is still trash. 14/11 is cool, though, so lets use that.

|The forgotten meantone EDO, and the first true [[flattone]] EDO. Flattone is amazing because 8/7 and 7/6 are swapped from their roles in 7-limit meantone temperament, and because [[Flattone12|flattone[12]]] is much easier to hear as unequal than meantone[12]. Also has [[injera]] and [[cynder]]/[[mothra]].

|has meantone but the intonation is bad. However, the minor sixths are really good 13/8's. Also, the half steps are 138 cents, which is pretty big - but they still function as leading tones and all that. This behavior is exacerbated in 33-EDO. Good for messing with your head and also revealing the diatonic scale in a different intonational context.