Whynotmicrotonality
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=Why NOT Microtonality: The Confessions of a Recovering Microtonalist= My name is Igliashon Jones, and I am a microtonalist. I have been in recovery since the 11th of December, 2012. I would like to think of myself as an ex-microtonalist, but microtonality (like any addiction) is not something you can really quit. I've done everything I can think to try to legitimately quit it--taking down all my microtonal music from the web, editing my name out of this wiki, quitting the online forums at Facebook and Yahoo, selling my microtonal instruments, deleting all my writings and theory documents off my computer, even writing lots of really angry anti-microtonal rants and burning bridges with people I once considered colleagues. But it's still with me, and it probably always will be. As much as I now wish I could purge it from my brain, I suspect I will never escape the temptation to sneak some microtones into my music, or analyze my compositions in terms of ratios, temperaments, and moment-of-symmetry scales. //But why?// Why would someone spend 7 years of his life and thousands of dollars of his money on something just to walk away from it in the end? It seems as insane to me as it probably does to anyone. Nevertheless, I have my reasons, and I'm listing them here both to help others understand what I went through, and to (hopefully) help keep them from repeating my mistakes. ==1. Microtonality never "clicked" for me== I've seen at least a few people make the distinct claim that strange new tunings require a period of adjustment before they start to sound "natural". While I did find it to be the case that the sound of new tunings can become less bothersome with repeated exposure, no amount of immersion in microtonal tunings ever "cured me" of my 12-TET perceptual categories. No matter how foreign the harmonies or how unlike the diatonic scale, no amount of time ever got me to stop hearing things as just variations on the musical categories I grew up with. It was a constant and futile struggle on my part to keep these 12-TET categories from informing my music, and I finally just got sick of it. I'm not saying it's impossible to naturalize yourself in microtonal tunings, but it's almost certainly impossible **for me.** And that means it might be impossible for others, too. There are no guarantees that anyone can replicate someone else's experience. No amount of immersion or ear-training is guaranteed to give you a new set of internal musical categories that don't fit with 12-TET. If you find yourself feeling like tuning satori is perpetually "just another week away", you might be like me. Don't be afraid to admit it. ==2. I never found the "right" tuning== Much like the quest to erase my 12-TET categories, the quest for the perfect tuning also ultimately proved futile. Many have accused me of giving up too soon, that if I just try one of their favorite tunings, I'd finally be satisfied. But there comes a time to cut your losses. I invested about $10,000 in new instruments for new tunings over the 7 years I was an active microtonalist, and while I recouped a fraction of that by selling as many of my instruments as I could, it still ended up being quite the loss. And really, I tried guitars fretted to the "best" representatives of every area of the tuning spectrum--Jon Catler's 12-tone Ultra Plus, which adds 13-limit JI capabilities to 12-TET; 31-ET, 22-ET, and 19-ET, representing the "highly-recommended very accurate and consonant" equal temperaments; 15-ET, 16-ET, and 17-ET, representing the "not much larger than 12-ET, but still having some decent harmony" equal temperaments; and 13-ET, 18-ET, 20-ET, and 23-ET, representing the "totally far-out weird and dissonant" equal temperaments. I also tried composing electronically in many other ETs--14, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29--as well as various JI scales. I also made a point of deeply immersing myself in a few of these tunings, writing many songs in them (and occasionally, whole albums), hoping that I'd find something I missed on my more superficial examinations. While I found myself quite capable of using the tunings to make pleasant music, what I //didn't// find was a compelling reason to keep working with them. Every tuning had some fatal flaw for me. The tunings with nice harmony--31, 22, and 19-ET, as well as the 12-tone Ultra Plus--always seemed to be some combination of too unwieldy to perform in with proficiency, too complex to comprehend structurally and exploit compositionally, or just lacking in suitably-simple or melodically-compelling scale structures to support their nice harmonies. The simpler tunings of 15, 16, and 17-ET were easier to command, but I found that either their harmonic resources were limiting, or their scales and chords "unnatural-sounding"--the best results I got were when I got them to sound close to 12-TET, which seemed silly. And the dissonant ones--believe me, I was probably their chief advocate for a long time; I wrote in great depth about the reasons dissonance should not be feared, how beating can be soothing, and finally I figured out that all of them have the ability to produce near-Just harmony by treating them as subgroup temperaments. But ultimately I had to concede that they were just...gimmicky. A bunch of one-trick ponies, and not very distinct from each other. I felt I could accomplish the same musical effects by simply using some pitch-warping signal processing on 12-TET. So, it seemed, no matter what tuning I tried, I always found some fatal flaw in it that led me to abandon it in search of a better one. I'm not saying that all other tunings are worthless, just that they are not inherently valuable (let alone superior) for all musicians. Some might find that, actually, there is a tuning that fits them like a glove and isn't 12-TET. But it's just as likely that some won't. Tunings are tools--if you don't use the right one for the job, that's foolishness. Yeah, you might think your cordless multifunction electric drill is a marvel of engineering, but if all you need to do is pound nails, you're better off with a hammer. ==3. My obsession was unhealthy== Did I mention I lived and breathed microtonality nearly every day for the better part of 7 years? Well, I did. I spent 95% of my free time either online in the forums or writing music. Hell, here I am, still at it now, even though I'm supposed to be in recovery! I just could NOT turn it off. Worse, I used it to build a wall between myself and the "regular" music world. I even turned down some great musical opportunities because they would have required me to play guitar in 12-TET! I was so committed to "the movement" that I lost sight of what mattered, which is making music. Worse, I often found myself picking battles with my colleagues. The microtonal community is the only social group in which I've ever made enemies...and I have made some //bitter// enemies indeed. For some reason, a side of myself that I really didn't like came out with greater and greater frequency the longer I participated in the online community. I found myself frequently unable to let trivial matters slide. I came to see myself as an expert, privy to an unmatched understanding. Mentally I came to hold most of my peers in contempt, in the community and in "real life". I was angry all the time, and started to treat the community as my personal outlet...probably because I had sealed myself off from all other outlets. This, perhaps more than anything, is what finally broke me and forced me into recovery. Even if I //had// found the perfect tuning and gotten it to "click" for myself, it wouldn't have been worth the obsession. I don't think everyone is prone to developing this level of obsessiveness, but microtonality is an easy subject to obsess over. There is just so much that one can absorb, discuss, and debate with music in general, let alone with microtonality (which is a whole theoretical universe unto itself). If you think you might be getting obsessive, the cure is to play more 12-TET music and remind yourself that music is music, no matter what the tuning. I stopped doing that at some point, and it was my downfall. ==4. The quality of my music was suffering== When I write in 12-TET, I feel a profound sense of artistic responsibility to write music that comes from a deep emotional place, expresses something worthwhile about my experience, and uses melody, harmony, rhythm, and sound design in compelling and innovative ways. When I write microtonal music, for some reason I don't feel that same artistic responsibility. Instead, I feel a responsibility to utilize and demonstrate various theoretical ideas (which are in limitless supply for the microtonalist), and I tend to only make token gestures toward my usual quality standards. And it seems to be getting worse with time. I can't really blame the tunings or the theorists for this; it's really a by-product of my unhealthy obsession, but nevertheless it's a problem and I don't know how else to solve it but to go back to writing in 12-TET. Of course, there are other factors behind my music declining in quality--every tuning I've used, save for 10-ET, was harder to work with than 12-TET; my output was excessive and therefore rushed, due to my obsession; and because I made the //tuning// a central focus, I deliberately limited the palette of sounds I would allow myself to draw on. But the bottom line is, despite the fact that I often subconsciously made these tunings sound //like// 12-TET, I just couldn't get myself to //treat them// like 12-TET, i.e. as just another aspect of my toolset for self-expression, and that more than anything else is why I had to take down my music--it didn't meet my standards. Not that I want to point any fingers, but I suspect I'm not the only one in the community for whom microtonal composing introduces similar difficulties. To return to the tool analogy, if microtonal tunings are impeding the creative process, they're not serving the purpose that tunings are supposed to serve. Even if a tuning //sounds good// (in an acoustic/psychoacoustic sense), if it's not helping //you// to write the music you want to write, it's not a better tuning //for you.// Even tunings that theoretically meet your desires better than 12-TET can end up being worse if they impair your ability to play or compose. This was the hardest lesson for me to learn. ==5. I just really like 12-TET== 12-TET-bashing used to be a lot more common in the community than it seems to be these days, which is an encouraging sign, but for a long time I was as vehement an anti-12 crusader as anyone. I used to decry 12-TET as being hackneyed, cliched, boring, stifling, washed-up, limiting, and superficial. That was stupid. 12-TET is an excellent tuning, and all the microtonal theory more or less agrees. For some people it may not be the //best//, and there are probably arguments to be made that it should share some space with a few other good tunings. But for me, it really is the holy grail. It's easy to navigate because it divides into more equal parts than any other ET less than double its size--12 has factors of 2, 3, 4, and 6. The fact that it also has very acceptable 5-limit harmony and can at least imply 7- and 9-limit harmony (to say nothing of its good representations of identities of 15, 17, and 19, which add to its harmonic versatility) is extremely remarkable, bordering on miraculous. It also supports more of the best 5-limit temperaments than its nearest competitors of 15, 19, and 22: meantone, schismatic, srutal, diminished, augmented, ripple, and passion. It's incredible, truly incredible, that such a simple equal temperament could be so good. (As you can see, my study of microtonality has taken me all the way out the other side, and actually deepened my appreciation for 12-TET, rather than diminishing it). Of course, arguably the best feature of 12-TET is that it's practically universal, at least in the Western world. I don't need any special equipment or techniques to use it, and I can play in it with any other musician I want to, without having to lecture them on theory. The 12-TET "community" is huge, and that means people can organize themselves within it according to musical style...and can also spend their time figuring out how to make music in it, rather than spending so much of it just trying to map out the space. Now that I'm comfortable admitting all the great things about 12-TET, I really can't justify pursuing other tunings with any amount of seriousness. 12-TET is where the theory led me, so I no longer have use for the theory. So, I encourage all people newly entering the field of microtonality to really take a long, hard look at 12 and try to figure out what they honestly don't like about it, and what they actually hope to get out of any alternatives. And I encourage anyone who's been in the field for a long time to take a long, hard look at what they've //done// with microtonality, and assess whether it's really succeeded in giving them what they want, in a way that 12-TET couldn't have. There's a possibility that you might find--as I have--that no, actually, microtonality hasn't been serving you. Don't be scared to admit it, because it is absolutely possible!
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<html><head><title>whynotmicrotonality</title></head><body><!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:0:<h1> --><h1 id="toc0"><a name="Why NOT Microtonality: The Confessions of a Recovering Microtonalist"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:0 -->Why NOT Microtonality: The Confessions of a Recovering Microtonalist</h1> <br /> My name is Igliashon Jones, and I am a microtonalist. I have been in recovery since the 11th of December, 2012. I would like to think of myself as an ex-microtonalist, but microtonality (like any addiction) is not something you can really quit. I've done everything I can think to try to legitimately quit it--taking down all my microtonal music from the web, editing my name out of this wiki, quitting the online forums at Facebook and Yahoo, selling my microtonal instruments, deleting all my writings and theory documents off my computer, even writing lots of really angry anti-microtonal rants and burning bridges with people I once considered colleagues. But it's still with me, and it probably always will be. As much as I now wish I could purge it from my brain, I suspect I will never escape the temptation to sneak some microtones into my music, or analyze my compositions in terms of ratios, temperaments, and moment-of-symmetry scales. <br /> <br /> <em>But why?</em> Why would someone spend 7 years of his life and thousands of dollars of his money on something just to walk away from it in the end? It seems as insane to me as it probably does to anyone. Nevertheless, I have my reasons, and I'm listing them here both to help others understand what I went through, and to (hopefully) help keep them from repeating my mistakes.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:2:<h2> --><h2 id="toc1"><a name="Why NOT Microtonality: The Confessions of a Recovering Microtonalist-1. Microtonality never "clicked" for me"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:2 -->1. Microtonality never "clicked" for me</h2> <br /> I've seen at least a few people make the distinct claim that strange new tunings require a period of adjustment before they start to sound "natural". While I did find it to be the case that the sound of new tunings can become less bothersome with repeated exposure, no amount of immersion in microtonal tunings ever "cured me" of my 12-TET perceptual categories. No matter how foreign the harmonies or how unlike the diatonic scale, no amount of time ever got me to stop hearing things as just variations on the musical categories I grew up with. It was a constant and futile struggle on my part to keep these 12-TET categories from informing my music, and I finally just got sick of it.<br /> <br /> I'm not saying it's impossible to naturalize yourself in microtonal tunings, but it's almost certainly impossible <strong>for me.</strong> And that means it might be impossible for others, too. There are no guarantees that anyone can replicate someone else's experience. No amount of immersion or ear-training is guaranteed to give you a new set of internal musical categories that don't fit with 12-TET. If you find yourself feeling like tuning satori is perpetually "just another week away", you might be like me. Don't be afraid to admit it.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:4:<h2> --><h2 id="toc2"><a name="Why NOT Microtonality: The Confessions of a Recovering Microtonalist-2. I never found the "right" tuning"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:4 -->2. I never found the "right" tuning</h2> <br /> Much like the quest to erase my 12-TET categories, the quest for the perfect tuning also ultimately proved futile. Many have accused me of giving up too soon, that if I just try one of their favorite tunings, I'd finally be satisfied. But there comes a time to cut your losses. I invested about $10,000 in new instruments for new tunings over the 7 years I was an active microtonalist, and while I recouped a fraction of that by selling as many of my instruments as I could, it still ended up being quite the loss. And really, I tried guitars fretted to the "best" representatives of every area of the tuning spectrum--Jon Catler's 12-tone Ultra Plus, which adds 13-limit JI capabilities to 12-TET; 31-ET, 22-ET, and 19-ET, representing the "highly-recommended very accurate and consonant" equal temperaments; 15-ET, 16-ET, and 17-ET, representing the "not much larger than 12-ET, but still having some decent harmony" equal temperaments; and 13-ET, 18-ET, 20-ET, and 23-ET, representing the "totally far-out weird and dissonant" equal temperaments. I also tried composing electronically in many other ETs--14, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29--as well as various JI scales. I also made a point of deeply immersing myself in a few of these tunings, writing many songs in them (and occasionally, whole albums), hoping that I'd find something I missed on my more superficial examinations. <br /> <br /> While I found myself quite capable of using the tunings to make pleasant music, what I <em>didn't</em> find was a compelling reason to keep working with them. Every tuning had some fatal flaw for me. The tunings with nice harmony--31, 22, and 19-ET, as well as the 12-tone Ultra Plus--always seemed to be some combination of too unwieldy to perform in with proficiency, too complex to comprehend structurally and exploit compositionally, or just lacking in suitably-simple or melodically-compelling scale structures to support their nice harmonies. The simpler tunings of 15, 16, and 17-ET were easier to command, but I found that either their harmonic resources were limiting, or their scales and chords "unnatural-sounding"--the best results I got were when I got them to sound close to 12-TET, which seemed silly. And the dissonant ones--believe me, I was probably their chief advocate for a long time; I wrote in great depth about the reasons dissonance should not be feared, how beating can be soothing, and finally I figured out that all of them have the ability to produce near-Just harmony by treating them as subgroup temperaments. But ultimately I had to concede that they were just...gimmicky. A bunch of one-trick ponies, and not very distinct from each other. I felt I could accomplish the same musical effects by simply using some pitch-warping signal processing on 12-TET. So, it seemed, no matter what tuning I tried, I always found some fatal flaw in it that led me to abandon it in search of a better one.<br /> <br /> I'm not saying that all other tunings are worthless, just that they are not inherently valuable (let alone superior) for all musicians. Some might find that, actually, there is a tuning that fits them like a glove and isn't 12-TET. But it's just as likely that some won't. Tunings are tools--if you don't use the right one for the job, that's foolishness. Yeah, you might think your cordless multifunction electric drill is a marvel of engineering, but if all you need to do is pound nails, you're better off with a hammer.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:6:<h2> --><h2 id="toc3"><a name="Why NOT Microtonality: The Confessions of a Recovering Microtonalist-3. My obsession was unhealthy"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:6 -->3. My obsession was unhealthy</h2> <br /> Did I mention I lived and breathed microtonality nearly every day for the better part of 7 years? Well, I did. I spent 95% of my free time either online in the forums or writing music. Hell, here I am, still at it now, even though I'm supposed to be in recovery! I just could NOT turn it off. Worse, I used it to build a wall between myself and the "regular" music world. I even turned down some great musical opportunities because they would have required me to play guitar in 12-TET! I was so committed to "the movement" that I lost sight of what mattered, which is making music. <br /> <br /> Worse, I often found myself picking battles with my colleagues. The microtonal community is the only social group in which I've ever made enemies...and I have made some <em>bitter</em> enemies indeed. For some reason, a side of myself that I really didn't like came out with greater and greater frequency the longer I participated in the online community. I found myself frequently unable to let trivial matters slide. I came to see myself as an expert, privy to an unmatched understanding. Mentally I came to hold most of my peers in contempt, in the community and in "real life". I was angry all the time, and started to treat the community as my personal outlet...probably because I had sealed myself off from all other outlets. This, perhaps more than anything, is what finally broke me and forced me into recovery. Even if I <em>had</em> found the perfect tuning and gotten it to "click" for myself, it wouldn't have been worth the obsession.<br /> <br /> I don't think everyone is prone to developing this level of obsessiveness, but microtonality is an easy subject to obsess over. There is just so much that one can absorb, discuss, and debate with music in general, let alone with microtonality (which is a whole theoretical universe unto itself). If you think you might be getting obsessive, the cure is to play more 12-TET music and remind yourself that music is music, no matter what the tuning. I stopped doing that at some point, and it was my downfall.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:8:<h2> --><h2 id="toc4"><a name="Why NOT Microtonality: The Confessions of a Recovering Microtonalist-4. The quality of my music was suffering"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:8 -->4. The quality of my music was suffering</h2> <br /> When I write in 12-TET, I feel a profound sense of artistic responsibility to write music that comes from a deep emotional place, expresses something worthwhile about my experience, and uses melody, harmony, rhythm, and sound design in compelling and innovative ways. When I write microtonal music, for some reason I don't feel that same artistic responsibility. Instead, I feel a responsibility to utilize and demonstrate various theoretical ideas<br /> (which are in limitless supply for the microtonalist), and I tend to only make token gestures toward my usual quality standards. And it seems to be getting worse with time.<br /> <br /> I can't really blame the tunings or the theorists for this; it's really a by-product of my unhealthy obsession, but nevertheless it's a problem and I don't know how else to solve it but to go back to writing in 12-TET. Of course, there are other factors behind my music declining in quality--every tuning I've used, save for 10-ET, was harder to work with than 12-TET; my output was excessive and therefore rushed, due to my obsession; and because I made the <em>tuning</em> a central focus, I deliberately limited the palette of sounds I would allow myself to draw on. But the bottom line is, despite the fact that I often subconsciously made these tunings sound <em>like</em> 12-TET, I just couldn't get myself to <em>treat them</em> like 12-TET, i.e. as just another aspect of my toolset for self-expression, and that more than anything else is why I had to take down my music--it didn't meet my standards. <br /> <br /> Not that I want to point any fingers, but I suspect I'm not the only one in the community for whom microtonal composing introduces similar difficulties. To return to the tool analogy, if microtonal tunings are impeding the creative process, they're not serving the purpose that tunings are supposed to serve. Even if a tuning <em>sounds good</em> (in an acoustic/psychoacoustic sense), if it's not helping <em>you</em> to write the music you want to write, it's not a better tuning <em>for you.</em> Even tunings that theoretically meet your desires better than 12-TET can end up being worse if they impair your ability to play or compose. This was the hardest lesson for me to learn.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:10:<h2> --><h2 id="toc5"><a name="Why NOT Microtonality: The Confessions of a Recovering Microtonalist-5. I just really like 12-TET"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:10 -->5. I just really like 12-TET</h2> <br /> 12-TET-bashing used to be a lot more common in the community than it seems to be these days, which is an encouraging sign, but for a long time I was as vehement an anti-12 crusader as anyone. I used to decry 12-TET as being hackneyed, cliched, boring, stifling, washed-up, limiting, and superficial. That was stupid. 12-TET is an excellent tuning, and all the microtonal theory more or less agrees. For some people it may not be the <em>best</em>, and there are probably arguments to be made that it should share some space with a few other good tunings. But for me, it really is the holy grail. It's easy to navigate because it divides into more equal parts than any other ET less than double its size--12 has factors of 2, 3, 4, and 6. The fact that it also has very acceptable 5-limit harmony and can at least imply 7- and 9-limit harmony (to say nothing of its good representations of identities of 15, 17, and 19, which add to its harmonic versatility) is extremely remarkable, bordering on miraculous. It also supports more of the best 5-limit temperaments than its nearest competitors of 15, 19, and 22: meantone, schismatic, srutal, diminished, augmented, ripple, and passion. It's incredible, truly incredible, that such a simple equal temperament could be so good. (As you can see, my study of microtonality has taken me all the way out the other side, and actually deepened my appreciation for 12-TET, rather than diminishing it).<br /> <br /> Of course, arguably the best feature of 12-TET is that it's practically universal, at least in the Western world. I don't need any special equipment or techniques to use it, and I can play in it with any other musician I want to, without having to lecture them on theory. The 12-TET "community" is huge, and that means people can organize themselves within it according to musical style...and can also spend their time figuring out how to make music in it, rather than spending so much of it just trying to map out the space.<br /> <br /> Now that I'm comfortable admitting all the great things about 12-TET, I really can't justify pursuing other tunings with any amount of seriousness. 12-TET is where the theory led me, so I no longer have use for the theory. So, I encourage all people newly entering the field of microtonality to really take a long, hard look at 12 and try to figure out what they honestly don't like about it, and what they actually hope to get out of any alternatives. And I encourage anyone who's been in the field for a long time to take a long, hard look at what they've <em>done</em> with microtonality, and assess whether it's really succeeded in giving them what they want, in a way that 12-TET couldn't have. There's a possibility that you might find--as I have--that no, actually, microtonality hasn't been serving you. Don't be scared to admit it, because it is absolutely possible!</body></html>