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What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation
(JI) today falls under the umbrella of microtonal music, because it involves playing "between the notes" of the 12-tone scale we're used to. As I type microtonal, my spellchecker decorates it with a sad squiggle, confirming I've drifted (again) into a topic that's not even in its dictionary.
The example above is representative of crystal growth, and shows another interesting aspect of this technique: it gives you a direct measure of which tones are central to the chord, and which ones are more peripheral. These small intervals are commas, and they make composition in JI difficult, because we don't hear the harmonic relationship that defines them, instead, they appear to us as out-of tune versions of the same tone. William A. Sethares' Adaptive Tuning should be mentioned as a technique that can offer consonance and variety similar to freestyle JI, even while composing in a simpler system.
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