As an instrument of arabic/turkish/persian music, the qanun has, of course, microtonal cababilities built in, in the form of "mandals" (turkish) or "orabs" (arabic) - small levers that can change the pitch of a string slightly and can be raised or lowered quickly by the performer while the instrument is being played.

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Here is an example how this is done (player is Julien Jalaleddine Weiss).

Since the qanun, even with mandals, is essentially a fixed-pitch instrument, a choice of the available pitches has to be made, so the qanun is a case for unequal temperaments for maqams. The art of tuning lies in the positioning of the mandals.

Turkish kanuns are traditionally tuned in (a subset of) 72edo .

Ozan Yarman's proposition for a maqam tuning in his dissertation(79-tone MOS subset of 159edo) was also realized on a qanun.

A number of qanun tunings were designed by Julien Jalaleddine Weiss. See tuning systems for qanun, or Stefan Pohlit's dissertation.

Homemade qanun ("canon") by Chris Vaisvil