User:Tristanbay

I'm Tristan Bay, an electronic musician in Portland, Oregon who started getting into microtonality seriously in 2021. I'm not really an expert in anything musical, but often know more or less what I'm doing.

While I find interest in just intonation, especially things like adaptive JI, I also like the idea of using EDOs in practice. In my opinion, equally dividing the octave by the simplest ratio greater than a unison strikes a nice balance between simplicity and versatility in practice. Here are my favorite EDOs above 12 and why I like them in particular.

31edo kalimba made by me

My classical Kite guitar (Cordoba C5)

My soprano Harmony ukulele with a 3D printed 17edo fretboard

In summer 2023, I made a 31edo kalimba. Around the same time, Kite Giedraitis and I made an even larger 41edo kalimba with a Kite guitar inspired key layout. Speaking of Kite guitar, I also have one of those. I actually have pretty much no formal guitar training and hadn't gotten into guitar seriously (still kind of haven't since I'm in school and I don't know of anyone teaching Kite guitar professionally) but I do play it and practice sometimes.

I'm also working on an isomorphic MIDI keyboard that uses force-sensitive resistors to detect velocity and aftertouch.

I'm also interested in making microtonal software and other microtonal hardware (I'm majoring in computer science at school so hopefully I'll get good at writing code and building programs sometime in the not-too-distant future).

It's still a work-in-progress, but my website is tristanbay.com. There are links to my other pages/social media at the top of the home page.

Here are some of my other creations, discoveries, and contributions relating to xen:

• Names of things:
  • Musical Intervals:
    • 4459/4455, the tristanisma
    • [86 -44 -7⟩, the heptacot comma
    • 4004001/4004000, the odyssey comma
    • 448630/447051, the junebug comma
    • 140625/140608, the catasma
    • 1126313291381095/1125899906842624, the gariatom
    • 13640319/13631488, the neguschisma
    • 160083/160000, the seascape comma (a.k.a. the undecimal hemifourths comma)
    • 2460375/2458624, the breeze comma (a.k.a. the sesquiquartisma)
    • 5120/5103, the aberschisma (a.k.a. the hemifamity comma or 5/7-kleisma)
    • 784/783, the spoogalactic comma (a.k.a. the biminorisma)
    • 1\78005, the normal atom
  • Temperaments:
    • Heptacot, in the full 5-limit, tempering out the heptacot comma
    • Purpleheart, in the 2.3.7 subgroup, tempering out 2187/2048
• Scales:
  • Tricycle
  • A 7-limit well temperament I came up with
  • A 41-note scale inspired by the classic 22 shrutis in Hindi music theory
• Concepts:
  • Ultra Combination Product Sets
  • Odd Prime Sum Limits (OPSLs)
• Other stuff:
  • A note name system that uses 12 nominals (letters) instead of 7
  • Myritone, a tuning file format designed to be a successor to the Scala format
  • Some short microtonal-related scripts written in C