User:Zhenlige/Earth171
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This page is part of a worldbuilding project. It describes musical tuning concepts from a fictional alternate world, rather than the real world.
It may contain references to people, cultures, or places that do not actually exist, or events that did not actually happen. This does not mean that it can’t be used to make real music—it still could be; it just means this article shouldn’t be used as a factual source about real history or traditions, or as a source of terminology and principle compatible with real established common practices and conventions. |
NOTICE: Unless otherwise stated, all texts below this bolded paragraph describes a fictional world that shares the history of the real world until 2025. It may not reflect the development of the real world since 2026.
The standard tuning is 171edo.
History
12edo was the standard tuning back in the early 21st century. In 2027, a group of microtonalists made a series of videos and articles introducing microtonal music theory. A few months later, they became popular online. More and more people, including musicians, were becoming interested in alternate tunings besides 12edo.
In 2030s, after hundreds of years composing mostly in 12edo, with AI speeding up composition, it became difficult to write new 12edo music. Therefore, many composers thought of microtonal music almost at the same time. Microtonal melody and harmony, especially 7-limit harmony, became common in popular music.
However, there was not a widely-accepted system that describes the new intervals well enough back then. Cent values appear to be more physical than musical, since they say little about whether an interval is consonant, and JI ratios are sometimes unflexible for describing the continuous set of possible pitches. The musicians decided to choose a large EDO that approximates simple JI intervals well as the new standard tuning. Different EDOs were proposed, namely 53, 72, 99, 130, 140, 159, 171, 224, 270 and 311. Finally 171edo was chosen because it has very accurate 7-limit and its step size is close to melodic JND.
In 2050, a new standard of digital music based on 171edo was released.