Kite Giedraitis
Kite Giedraitis, also known as Tall Kite, is a musician, author, theorist, instrument builder and software developer.
Popular tracks: Evening Rondo, I Hear Numbers
He has invented the Kite Guitar, which makes a 41-edo guitar about as playable as 19-edo or 22-edo.
He has written alt-tuner, unique from other microtonal software in several ways:
It allows dynamic retuning via midi input from the musician, in the form of keyswitches and/or foot pedals. This in turn allows the "holy grail" of retuning: adaptive just intonation.
It features a color-coded lattice and a graph of all intervals up to an octave, both of which respond instantly to tuning changes.
With others such as Robert Walker and Ozan Yarman, he has developed a new tuning method that uses very high keyswitches (midi notes 122-127) to "smuggle" tuning information through DAWs that won't transmit sysex messages. This method has been used to retune Kontakt instruments to allow complete retuning freedom -- any note can take on any pitch in the 10-octave midi range, and can even glide to any pitch while sounding, all using only one instrument instance, one midi channel, and one DAW track.
He has written the EDOstrobetuner, a free strobe tuner for microtonal guitars.
He has developed several notation systems, not only typable and staff notation but also spoken and sung notation:
His color notation represents each prime via 1 or 2 colors (2 = clear, 3 = wa, 5 = yo for 5-over and gu for 5-under, 7 = zo and ru, etc.). Combined with standard diatonic notation, any ratio can be expressed as a color plus a degree, e.g. "zo third" for 7/6. There is a rigorous one-to-one correspondence between ratios and color notation, making it ideal for JI. But it can also be applied to temperaments and EDOs, since ratios are often used to refer to intervals in such tunings.
Ups and downs notation can notate every EDO with only 2 new accidentals. The standard seven letters and the standard sharp and flat is used to represent the chain of fifths. For EDOs in which 7 fifths octave-reduce to one EDOstep (12edo, 19edo, etc.) this is sufficient. For other EDOs, the up symbol "^" and the down symbol "v" represent raising and lowering the pitch by one EDOstep.
Along with Praveen Venkataramana, he has developed the concept of a pergen, which categorizes rank-2 and rank-3 temperaments. The pergen article also exhaustively covers how to notate them.
Unlike Sagittal, Johnston, HEWM and Sabat, Kite's color notation, ups/downs notation and pergen notation include relative notation. This makes naming not only intervals but also chords possible. Kite has listed hundreds of JI chords and EDO chords with their names.
See also
External links
- TallKite.com (Kite's microtonal software, writings and music)
- KiteGuitar.com
- FoolsInParadise.com (Kite's marimba/mbira band)
- PortlandMarimba.com (group classes in African marimba)