Historically Tempered Soundfonts

[raweber]

I was in a discussion recently with a friend about equal temperament and he wondered what other temperaments sound like. Is anyone aware of a soundfont for a keyboard instrument that is in a non-equal temperament, such as pythagorean?

Thanks.

[BertKoor]

Not that I'm aware of... But you could make one yourself with a soundfont editor like FMJSoft AWave Studio, but it takes some work.

But you'd have to make it for the key in which you're going to play, otherwise it will sound off.

Another option is find a synth that does micro-tuning (for e.g. Arabic scales) and find some .tun files.

[AKJ]

load it into vsampler or kontakt and use microtuning.

[raweber]

But you'd have to make it for the key in which you're going to play, otherwise it will sound off.

Actually, the plan is to play the same piece in two different keys to demonstrate why we use equal temperament.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to any fancy samplers right now, so maybe I'll have to go the microtuning route in Viena or something like that.

[BertKoor]

Oh wait, another idea. TobyBear has a MicroTuner plugin in his MidiBag:
http://www.tobybear.de/p_midibag.html

MicroTuner is yet another revolutionary plugin: It adds microtuning capabilities to every VSTi and external synthesizer module, as long as the target synth supports receiving pitchbend on all MIDI channels.

I am not talking about changing a note some cents up or down in pitch, no, you can completely redefine the whole tuning scale, allowing you to set an arbitrary frequency separately for each MIDI note! And it gets even better, it already has a loader built in (with drag and drop GUI) that can load the widely used Scala, VAZ
and Anamark tuning files directly!

And that led me to Scala: http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/scala/

Scala is a powerful software tool for experimentation with musical tunings, such as just intonation scales, equal and historical temperaments, microtonal and macrotonal scales, and non-Western scales. It supports scale creation, editing, comparison, analysis, storage, tuning of electronic instruments, and MIDI file generation and tuning conversion. All this is integrated into a single application with a wide variety of mathematical routines and scale creation methods. Scala is ideal for the exploration of tunings and becoming familiar with the concepts involved. In addition, a very large library of scales is freely available for Scala and can be used for analysis or music creation.