Whynotmicrotonality
IMPORTED REVISION FROM WIKISPACES
This is an imported revision from Wikispaces. The revision metadata is included below for reference:
- This revision was by author clumma and made on 2012-12-17 04:26:09 UTC.
- The original revision id was 392880554.
- The revision comment was:
The revision contents are below, presented both in the original Wikispaces Wikitext format, and in HTML exactly as Wikispaces rendered it.
Original Wikitext content:
=Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality= These are the confessions of an ex-microtonalist, someone who spent years in the field, recorded and released several critically-acclaimed albums (which are no longer available, except perhaps in hidden recesses of the internet), absorbed as much of the theory as he possibly could, and ultimately decided it was all for naught. As his final contribution to the community, he gave the following reasons for why he ultimately found microtonality not to be worthwhile, in the hopes that it might provide a much-needed counterpoint to the community's unbridled enthusiasm, and that it might counter some of extravagant and unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of going microtonal. ==1. Tuning doesn't make as much difference as you'd think== When I first got into microtonality, I thought I was going to lead a revolution. I thought I had discovered something that threw a monkey-wrench into all of Western music theory, something that would open up stark new possibilities and lead to the re-invention of music as we know it. But then I tried to share my discovery with my fellow musicians, and was shocked to discover that none agreed with me. And they agreed even less when they actually heard the music that resulted from these new tunings. Those who could hear a difference generally found it to be a negative difference. Most of the people who responded favorably at all were those who lacked in musical training and couldn't really hear the difference at all. Even within the community of microtonalists, it is exceedingly rare to find someone who can identify a tuning by ear, even after years of exposure, or even distinguish between tunings after having the field narrowed down. This has been roundly acknowledged. With a bit of ear-training, pretty much any musician can learn to identify the basic chord-types of 12-TET, but it seems that only those with absolute pitch can learn, even with extensive training and exposure, to even occasionally distinguish which of the low ETs a piece of music is in. In other words, the difference between different chords in 12-TET is of vastly more auditory significance than the difference between different ETs. If anyone tells you that ETs all have distinct moods and personalities that are totally unlike anything found in 12-TET, this person has drank the kool-aid and is completely out of touch with the experience of all non-specialist listeners. The reality is that the intonational differences are exceedingly subtle, even when they (numerically) appear large, unless you are one of the lucky few to have exceedingly sensitive ears--i.e., if you're the sort to whom 12-TET always sounds out-of-tune. Even then, odds are you will only be able to tell when a sonority is close to JI or not--don't expect to differentiate 14-ET from 15-ET, nor 19-ET from 22-ET. ==2. Changing tunings will not change who you are== We have all grown up being exposed to music, and that exposure has shaped our relationship to music, our perception of music, and our compositional approaches. Changing tunings does not suddenly do away with the years of experience that have shaped you. You will not automatically find new compositional approaches in a new tuning; rather, you will most likely find ways to shoe-horn your favorite gestures and tricks into the new tuning's vocabulary, much like African-American musicians did when they were lost access to their traditional instruments and had to make due with Western instruments. You can take the composer out of 12-TET, but you can't really take the 12-TET out of the composer. Microtonalists will dispute this, but that is because they are not able to hear their music the way outsiders hear it anymore. Becoming hyper-aware of intonational nuances doesn't mean you've magically created a new musical language that is obvious to everyone else. It more likely means you've just lost your awareness of the influences that have shaped you. The only hope is for people who weren't already 12-TET musicians or composers prior to getting into microtonality. These people--people like Gene Ward Smith--speak microtonality natively, and their music reflects it. But that doesn't leave them in better shape; like "native" speakers of Esperanto or other constructed languages, there are very few people in the world who can understand them. ==3. The "community"== "Microtonality" is not a genre of music, but unfortunately it gets treated like one. The community of microtonalists on the internet is an extremely disparate mix of people from all musical and cultural backgrounds, and the only common thread between them is an interest in alternate tunings. This might sound great, but it has some really awful sides to it, as not everyone is willing to be tolerant of other people's ideas and prejudices. Many personalities within the community are larger-than-life--how could they not be, when microtonality is usually the province of the "rugged individualist"? Flame-wars are woefully common, and don't think you can avoid them by being reasonable. It is often the most intelligent and rational people who get dragged into them. I've seen myself and many of my colleagues reduced to spiteful vitriolic tantrums thanks to what in another community would have been a perfectly civil debate. People get placed on moderation and outright banned with disturbing frequency. The number of people who have been banned from microtonal forums, or fled them due to harassment, is easily large enough to form a community all on their own. I have never seen this kind of behavior in other esoteric niche communities. The microtonal community can really bring out the worst in people. But perhaps the worst aspect of the community is the way it can come to eclipse your relationship to the community of "regular" musicians. The endless rabbit-holes of theory, the constant debates, the endless stream of new information to keep up with--the more energy you put into the microtonal community, the more it sucks you in. And what you get out of it seems inversely proportional to what you put in. The best microtonal musicians--the ones with the most commercial success--are those who keep a very healthy distance between themselves and the community. It's just a simple fact, and a survey of the community will confirm it. My experience has been that the longer I stay in the community and the deeper I delve into it, the less I'm able to just "play music" with regular musicians. Microtonality can become a wall between you and the rest of the musical world. And that is a terrible loss. ==4. The music== The bar is set pretty low, qualitatively speaking, for microtonal music. Not that there aren't great composers and performers! There certainly are, but the fact of the matter is the microtonal community is desperate for music, and will laud output of any quality. The worst music I've ever written is my microtonal music, yet it is also the most acclaimed. This has led, over the years, to a laziness on my part, and it makes perfect sense: when you can fart out a little track in 20 minutes, put it on SoundCloud, and get 20 people on facebook telling you how awesome it is, it's hard to be motivated to really put your heart and soul into something. The community rewards all musical output equally, it really does, and NO ONE will tell you that you suck. It just doesn't happen. As brutal as the debates can be, no one in the community is willing to be brutally HONEST about the quality of your music. But the reality is, most of it sucks. Most of MY music sucked, compared to what I wrote in 12-TET, and people loved it. And I became a worse composer because of it. ==5. The costs and limitations== You hear a lot of enthusiastic jibber-jabber about how microtonality can "liberate" you from the tyranny of 12-TET. Well, part of that liberation is being "liberated" from access to a wide variety of instruments and other musical equipment. Once you go micro, you are consigning yourself to using only custom-made or retunable instruments, which represent only a small fraction of what's available at your average music store. You may find that most of the instruments you already own are suddenly completely useless to you as a microtonalist. Get ready to $pend $pend $pend! Or, do what most do, and resign yourself to using cheesy-sounding freely-available synths. The majority of microtonal music out there is made with sub-standard production values, just because that's what's available. As a microtonal guitarist, my guitars cost double what a 12-TET guitar costs, because I had to pay for custom fretboards for all of them. This usually meant buying cheap guitars made with cheap pickups and cheap woods...so ultimately, I paid MORE for a lower-quality instrument. Lots of people opt to do their own fretwork because of this, but this usually results in poor-quality fretwork, because fretwork is hard and really needs special training. Most of the people who build their own instruments just don't end up building very high-quality instruments, and the music that results tends to reflect that. And remember, time and money you spend on making an instrument compatible with your chosen tuning is time and money NOT spent on, y'know, studio equipment, amps, effects, production value, etc. ==6. 12-TET is actually and objectively the best ET (for many musical circumstances)== If you consider the 19-odd-limit as the upper cutoff for chord consonance (which is, by most accounts, as high as most people want to go), 12-TET is pretty tough to beat. You get harmonics 2, 3, 5, 9, 15, 17, and 19--only 7, 11, and 13 are missing, though it's arguable that even 7 (and its attendant ratios) is on the radar, being only about 30 cents off from Just. If you want to add any of the missing harmonics without sacrificing those already present, it's not until you get to 24-ET that this is possible. You also get many of the best 5-limit temperaments--meantone, srutal, augmented, diminished, injera, schismatic, passion, and ripple. The harmonic relationships are simple--three 5/4's, four 6/5's, six 9/8's, and twelve 3/2's each get you back to your starting note, so you don't have any long chains of intervals to keep track of or navigate. This often means that instruments designed for 12-TET are easier to learn and play than instruments designed for other tunings; in the case of the guitar this is particularly true, as it is quite a bit more difficult, at least conceptually, for most players to master competitive ETs (19, 22, 31, etc.) with the same fluency and command they have in 12-ET. Furthermore, the harmonic improvements afforded by ETs like 19, 22, and 31 in the 5-limit are actually quite modest, and rarely of noticeable significance in the idioms of popular music. In classical idioms, it's already common-practice (at least among horns, winds, and strings) to intone 12-TET closer to adaptive JI, so a more accurate ET is moot. Really, it is only in the realms of keyboard or synthesized classical music that the harmonic improvements can be appreciated enough to make it worth the trouble. But even then, many musicians who have undergone extensive ear training will actually find the "purer" intervals of 19, 22, and 31 to sound out-of-tune. It is not uncommon for listeners to find (near-)beatless harmonies to sound "cold" and "static", and these listeners won't appreciate the sounds of the more accurate ETs. Thus, if your goal is to write music that the majority of listeners find pleasing, you simply cannot do better than 12-TET. The best you can hope of microtonal music is that it sounds *no worse* to the majority of listeners. Only those who don't give a damn about what most people think of their music might expect to find anything worthwhile in microtonality. ==In conclusion== I don't expect to deter any enthusiasts or change the minds of current community members. But the negative aspects of microtonality are real, and need to be acknowledged. People entering the field need to be aware of them, and need to think good and hard about whether the rabbit-hole is actually appealing enough to justify the sacrifices that will be made. ---- =Critical reaction to the foregoing by Carl Lumma= //"Tuning doesn't make as much difference as you'd think"// ...If you start with unreasonable expectations. Such as the expectation that refining one's control of intonation will "automatically" reveal "new compositional approaches" or allow one to "lead a revolution". //"If anyone tells you that ETs all have distinct moods and personalities that are totally unlike anything found in 12-TET, this person has drank the kool-aid..."// This would follow from evidence that people can't distinguish ETs, not from the evidence claimed, which is that people can't **identify** ETs. Many music fans can't identify scales or functional progressions in 12-ET, either. Is this an argument that all music could be I-V-I in 12-ET and it would make no difference? //"The best microtonal musicians--the ones with the most commercial success--are those who keep a very healthy distance between themselves and the community."// Music isn't for talking. Plenty of musicians visit microtonal forums to share recordings -- what else? Theory works with talking, but theory isn't music and there's only so much of two subjects a person can master. But several artists have extensively applied regular mapping theory, including City of the Asleep, Kraig Grady, and Marcus Hobbs. And serious theorists like Graham Breed have produced very [[http://x31eq.com/music/dingsheng.mp3|listenable tracks]]. It's generally acknowledged that anyone hoping to achieve commercial success with music in today's climate is facing an uphill battle, and that this goes double for anyone walking off the beaten path. //"...the fact of the matter is the microtonal community is desperate for music, and will laud output of any quality."// True, but I think it has more to do with maintaining congeniality in a community of people with very different musical backgrounds than with desperately encouraging composers to use microtonal tunings. //"12-TET is actually and objectively the best ET"// Also probably true but it is not **so much better** than alternatives as to warrant **exclusive use**. =See also= [[Why micotonality]], [[Whynotnotmicrotonality]], [[Damnrightmicrotonality]]
Original HTML content:
<html><head><title>whynotmicrotonality</title></head><body><!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:0:<h1> --><h1 id="toc0"><a name="Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:0 -->Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality</h1> <br /> These are the confessions of an ex-microtonalist, someone who spent years in the field, recorded and released several critically-acclaimed albums (which are no longer available, except perhaps in hidden recesses of the internet), absorbed as much of the theory as he possibly could, and ultimately decided it was all for naught. As his final contribution to the community, he gave the following reasons for why he ultimately found microtonality not to be worthwhile, in the hopes that it might provide a much-needed counterpoint to the community's unbridled enthusiasm, and that it might counter some of extravagant and unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of going microtonal.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:2:<h2> --><h2 id="toc1"><a name="Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality-1. Tuning doesn't make as much difference as you'd think"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:2 -->1. Tuning doesn't make as much difference as you'd think</h2> <br /> When I first got into microtonality, I thought I was going to lead a revolution. I thought I had discovered something that threw a monkey-wrench into all of Western music theory, something that would open up stark new possibilities and lead to the re-invention of music as we know it. But then I tried to share my discovery with my fellow musicians, and was shocked to discover that none agreed with me. And they agreed even less when they actually heard the music that resulted from these new tunings. Those who could hear a difference generally found it to be a negative difference. Most of the people who responded favorably at all were those who lacked in musical training and couldn't really hear the difference at all.<br /> <br /> Even within the community of microtonalists, it is exceedingly rare to find someone who can identify a tuning by ear, even after years of exposure, or even distinguish between tunings after having the field narrowed down. This has been roundly acknowledged. With a bit of ear-training, pretty much any musician can learn to identify the basic chord-types of 12-TET, but it seems that only those with absolute pitch can learn, even with extensive training and exposure, to even occasionally distinguish which of the low ETs a piece of music is in. In other words, the difference between different chords in 12-TET is of vastly more auditory significance than the difference between different ETs. If anyone tells you that ETs all have distinct moods and personalities that are totally unlike anything found in 12-TET, this person has drank the kool-aid and is completely out of touch with the experience of all non-specialist listeners. The reality is that the intonational differences are exceedingly subtle, even when they (numerically) appear large, unless you are one of the lucky few to have exceedingly sensitive ears--i.e., if you're the sort to whom 12-TET always sounds out-of-tune. Even then, odds are you will only be able to tell when a sonority is close to JI or not--don't expect to differentiate 14-ET from 15-ET, nor 19-ET from 22-ET.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:4:<h2> --><h2 id="toc2"><a name="Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality-2. Changing tunings will not change who you are"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:4 -->2. Changing tunings will not change who you are</h2> <br /> We have all grown up being exposed to music, and that exposure has shaped our relationship to music, our perception of music, and our compositional approaches. Changing tunings does not suddenly do away with the years of experience that have shaped you. You will not automatically find new compositional approaches in a new tuning; rather, you will most likely find ways to shoe-horn your favorite gestures and tricks into the new tuning's vocabulary, much like African-American musicians did when they were lost access to their traditional instruments and had to make due with Western instruments. You can take the composer out of 12-TET, but you can't really take the 12-TET out of the composer. Microtonalists will dispute this, but that is because they are not able to hear their music the way outsiders hear it anymore. Becoming hyper-aware of intonational nuances doesn't mean you've magically created a new musical language that is obvious to everyone else. It more likely means you've just lost your awareness of the influences that have shaped you.<br /> <br /> The only hope is for people who weren't already 12-TET musicians or composers prior to getting into microtonality. These people--people like Gene Ward Smith--speak microtonality natively, and their music reflects it. But that doesn't leave them in better shape; like "native" speakers of Esperanto or other constructed languages, there are very few people in the world who can understand them.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:6:<h2> --><h2 id="toc3"><a name="Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality-3. The "community""></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:6 -->3. The "community"</h2> <br /> "Microtonality" is not a genre of music, but unfortunately it gets treated like one. The community of microtonalists on the internet is an extremely disparate mix of people from all musical and cultural backgrounds, and the only common thread between them is an interest in alternate tunings. This might sound great, but it has some really awful sides to it, as not everyone is willing to be tolerant of other people's ideas and prejudices. Many personalities within the community are larger-than-life--how could they not be, when microtonality is usually the province of the "rugged individualist"? Flame-wars are woefully common, and don't think you can avoid them by being reasonable. It is often the most intelligent and rational people who get dragged into them. I've seen myself and many of my colleagues reduced to spiteful vitriolic tantrums thanks to what in another community would have been a perfectly civil debate. People get placed on moderation and outright banned with disturbing frequency. The number of people who have been banned from microtonal forums, or fled them due to harassment, is easily large enough to form a community all on their own. I have never seen this kind of behavior in other esoteric niche communities. The microtonal community can really bring out the worst in people.<br /> <br /> But perhaps the worst aspect of the community is the way it can come to eclipse your relationship to the community of "regular" musicians. The endless rabbit-holes of theory, the constant debates, the endless stream of new information to keep up with--the more energy you put into the microtonal community, the more it sucks you in. And what you get out of it seems inversely proportional to what you put in. The best microtonal musicians--the ones with the most commercial success--are those who keep a very healthy distance between themselves and the community. It's just a simple fact, and a survey of the community will confirm it.<br /> <br /> My experience has been that the longer I stay in the community and the deeper I delve into it, the less I'm able to just "play music" with regular musicians. Microtonality can become a wall between you and the rest of the musical world. And that is a terrible loss.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:8:<h2> --><h2 id="toc4"><a name="Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality-4. The music"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:8 -->4. The music</h2> <br /> The bar is set pretty low, qualitatively speaking, for microtonal music. Not that there aren't great composers and performers! There certainly are, but the fact of the matter is the microtonal community is desperate for music, and will laud output of any quality. The worst music I've ever written is my microtonal music, yet it is also the most acclaimed. This has led, over the years, to a laziness on my part, and it makes perfect sense: when you can fart out a little track in 20 minutes, put it on SoundCloud, and get 20 people on facebook telling you how awesome it is, it's hard to be motivated to really put your heart and soul into something. The community rewards all musical output equally, it really does, and NO ONE will tell you that you suck. It just doesn't happen. As brutal as the debates can be, no one in the community is willing to be brutally HONEST about the quality of your music. But the reality is, most of it sucks. Most of MY music sucked, compared to what I wrote in 12-TET, and people loved it. And I became a worse composer because of it.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:10:<h2> --><h2 id="toc5"><a name="Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality-5. The costs and limitations"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:10 -->5. The costs and limitations</h2> <br /> You hear a lot of enthusiastic jibber-jabber about how microtonality can "liberate" you from the tyranny of 12-TET. Well, part of that liberation is being "liberated" from access to a wide variety of instruments and other musical equipment. Once you go micro, you are consigning yourself to using only custom-made or retunable instruments, which represent only a small fraction of what's available at your average music store. You may find that most of the instruments you already own are suddenly completely useless to you as a microtonalist. Get ready to $pend $pend $pend! Or, do what most do, and resign yourself to using cheesy-sounding freely-available synths. The majority of microtonal music out there is made with sub-standard production values, just because that's what's available.<br /> <br /> As a microtonal guitarist, my guitars cost double what a 12-TET guitar costs, because I had to pay for custom fretboards for all of them. This usually meant buying cheap guitars made with cheap pickups and cheap woods...so ultimately, I paid MORE for a lower-quality instrument. Lots of people opt to do their own fretwork because of this, but this usually results in poor-quality fretwork, because fretwork is hard and really needs special training. Most of the people who build their own instruments just don't end up building very high-quality instruments, and the music that results tends to reflect that. And remember, time and money you spend on making an instrument compatible with your chosen tuning is time and money NOT spent on, y'know, studio equipment, amps, effects, production value, etc.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:12:<h2> --><h2 id="toc6"><a name="Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality-6. 12-TET is actually and objectively the best ET (for many musical circumstances)"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:12 -->6. 12-TET is actually and objectively the best ET (for many musical circumstances)</h2> <br /> If you consider the 19-odd-limit as the upper cutoff for chord consonance (which is, by most accounts, as high as most people want to go), 12-TET is pretty tough to beat. You get harmonics 2, 3, 5, 9, 15, 17, and 19--only 7, 11, and 13 are missing, though it's arguable that even 7 (and its attendant ratios) is on the radar, being only about 30 cents off from Just. If you want to add any of the missing harmonics without sacrificing those already present, it's not until you get to 24-ET that this is possible.<br /> <br /> You also get many of the best 5-limit temperaments--meantone, srutal, augmented, diminished, injera, schismatic, passion, and ripple. The harmonic relationships are simple--three 5/4's, four 6/5's, six 9/8's, and twelve 3/2's each get you back to your starting note, so you don't have any long chains of intervals to keep track of or navigate. This often means that instruments designed for 12-TET are easier to learn and play than instruments designed for other tunings; in the case of the guitar this is particularly true, as it is quite a bit more difficult, at least conceptually, for most players to master competitive ETs (19, 22, 31, etc.) with the same fluency and command they have in 12-ET.<br /> <br /> Furthermore, the harmonic improvements afforded by ETs like 19, 22, and 31 in the 5-limit are actually quite modest, and rarely of noticeable significance in the idioms of popular music. In classical idioms, it's already common-practice (at least among horns, winds, and strings) to intone 12-TET closer to adaptive JI, so a more accurate ET is moot. Really, it is only in the realms of keyboard or synthesized classical music that the harmonic improvements can be appreciated enough to make it worth the trouble. But even then, many musicians who have undergone extensive ear training will actually find the "purer" intervals of 19, 22, and 31 to sound out-of-tune. It is not uncommon for listeners to find (near-)beatless harmonies to sound "cold" and "static", and these listeners won't appreciate the sounds of the more accurate ETs.<br /> <br /> Thus, if your goal is to write music that the majority of listeners find pleasing, you simply cannot do better than 12-TET. The best you can hope of microtonal music is that it sounds *no worse* to the majority of listeners. Only those who don't give a damn about what most people think of their music might expect to find anything worthwhile in microtonality.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:14:<h2> --><h2 id="toc7"><a name="Why You Shouldn't Get Into Microtonality-In conclusion"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:14 -->In conclusion</h2> <br /> I don't expect to deter any enthusiasts or change the minds of current community members. But the negative aspects of microtonality are real, and need to be acknowledged. People entering the field need to be aware of them, and need to think good and hard about whether the rabbit-hole is actually appealing enough to justify the sacrifices that will be made.<br /> <br /> <hr /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:16:<h1> --><h1 id="toc8"><a name="Critical reaction to the foregoing by Carl Lumma"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:16 -->Critical reaction to the foregoing by Carl Lumma</h1> <br /> <em>"Tuning doesn't make as much difference as you'd think"</em><br /> <br /> ...If you start with unreasonable expectations. Such as the expectation that refining one's control of intonation will "automatically" reveal "new compositional approaches" or allow one to "lead a revolution".<br /> <br /> <em>"If anyone tells you that ETs all have distinct moods and personalities that are totally unlike anything found in 12-TET, this person has drank the kool-aid..."</em><br /> <br /> This would follow from evidence that people can't distinguish ETs, not from the evidence claimed, which is that people can't <strong>identify</strong> ETs. Many music fans can't identify scales or functional progressions in 12-ET, either. Is this an argument that all music could be I-V-I in 12-ET and it would make no difference?<br /> <br /> <em>"The best microtonal musicians--the ones with the most commercial success--are those who keep a very healthy distance between themselves and the community."</em><br /> <br /> Music isn't for talking. Plenty of musicians visit microtonal forums to share recordings -- what else? Theory works with talking, but theory isn't music and there's only so much of two subjects a person can master. But several artists have extensively applied regular mapping theory, including City of the Asleep, Kraig Grady, and Marcus Hobbs. And serious theorists like Graham Breed have produced very <a class="wiki_link_ext" href="http://x31eq.com/music/dingsheng.mp3" rel="nofollow">listenable tracks</a>.<br /> <br /> It's generally acknowledged that anyone hoping to achieve commercial success with music in today's climate is facing an uphill battle, and that this goes double for anyone walking off the beaten path.<br /> <br /> <em>"...the fact of the matter is the microtonal community is desperate for music, and will laud output of any quality."</em><br /> <br /> True, but I think it has more to do with maintaining congeniality in a community of people with very different musical backgrounds than with desperately encouraging composers to use microtonal tunings.<br /> <br /> <em>"12-TET is actually and objectively the best ET"</em><br /> <br /> Also probably true but it is not <strong>so much better</strong> than alternatives as to warrant <strong>exclusive use</strong>.<br /> <br /> <!-- ws:start:WikiTextHeadingRule:18:<h1> --><h1 id="toc9"><a name="See also"></a><!-- ws:end:WikiTextHeadingRule:18 -->See also</h1> <a class="wiki_link" href="/Why%20micotonality">Why micotonality</a>, <a class="wiki_link" href="/Whynotnotmicrotonality">Whynotnotmicrotonality</a>, <a class="wiki_link" href="/Damnrightmicrotonality">Damnrightmicrotonality</a></body></html>