List of approaches to musical tuning

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Musical tuning can be approached in many different ways. Here are some of the currently-established theories and approaches.

Xen concepts for beginners provides a solid foundation to start from in exploring this assortment of tunings.

Defined approaches

Subjective processes

The following approaches describe the subjective exploration process or its representations rather than its objective, audible result:

  • Contextual Xenharmonics: The exploration of why things sound the way they do to some and not others.
  • Empirical: A form of hands-on field research as opposed to a form of acoustical or scale engineering, where tunings are specifically derived from listening and playing experiments carried out in the pitch continuum.
  • Pretty Pictures that represent scales in one way or another.
  • Musical notation: Pretty pictures for the purpose of writing music down.
  • The notion of a Scalesmith who builds scales, with various methods, perhaps for single occasions.
    • Mathematically based scales
    • Acoustically-based scales (resonant frequencies of performance space, for example)
    • Scale transformation and stretching
    • Counter-intuitive, random, arbitrary scales

See also