Quirks

This is a meta page about microtonalists. Some or all of the arguments presented herein may be hearsay. Any resemblance to actual people would be purely coincidental and perhaps even enlightening.

What follows is a list of "performative themes" or "personality quirks" to tentatively associate with acute interest in microtonal composition. Centered in but not limited to experiences in the West in the 21st Century, this is a list about people, observed to be somehow relevant to those people's interest in xenharmonic music, but not in ways that xenharmonic vocabulary has begun to accommodate yet. They are definitely not exclusive to "us microtonalists", but focusing on our expression of these larger cultural tendencies

Anyone is urged to make any changes or clarifications they see as necessary or important, including re-wordings, expansions, and re-orderings.

• Attention to detail.
• Strong sensitivity to when some range of possibilities is technically incomplete. Touchy about certain things, totally cool about most others. Accepting, though not always aware of, one's own hot buttons.
• Some forced synesthesia - desiring to connect sensations our brains don't themselves yet connect but we think are more closely related than common language would have us believe.
• Homelessness, nomadism, or the sensation of never feeling at home. Inertia, resistance to travel - the feeling that if I go somewhere I have to take my whole universe with me ;)
• The sense that one's best allies may be only imaginary, but even they are worth fighting for and listening to.
• Rich "online life", rich "offline life", and an unfrustrating yet curiously widening gap between the two (hint: it's capitalism!)
• Heightened awareness of the significance of whole numbers (not numerology, but a deepened sense of connecting number to experience)…
• … and historicity (questions of historical record) after the time of being "microtonalized".
• A widened range of simultaneous success and failure - one's healthiness in part of one's life becomes grounds for self-tolerance and self-acceptance around vices, quirks, or medical conditions that would otherwise predominate.
• A hunger to "colonize", or in more politically advanced cases, a strong, musical interest to carry on conversations with others not like you.