Just intonation vs Equal Temperament

[Erkenfresh]

Many of you probably already know this but it's fairly new to me. I'm starting to experiment with just intonation instead of the default equal temperament. It definitely seems like an interesting thing to try, and due to Urs's genius, we can load microtuning into all our U-He synths. I made a little tutorial on how to get started with it.

An interesting advanced music theory topic is "just intonation". It's a different way of arranging the notes of your scale so that the ratios of the frequencies are whole numbers. Most of our modern software synths support microtuning which will allow you to harness this awesome power in our music. Wanna learn more?

[redplum]

I recently experimented with this. In fact, there are many different ''just" tunings, optimized for various situations. With most of them, playing the same chord at different places on the keyboard results in it sounding very good, or very bad, depending on where the root is.

In the days before equal temperament was invented, some keyboard based instruments were built with extra keys per octave to accommodate the needs of a given chord. For organs, extra sets of pipes were provided, having the slightly different frequencies.

I am in awe of the skills needed to play such instruments.

It's easy to make your own scales. Open some of the *.tun files that Zebra uses (using a text editor like Notepad) to see the format; it's very straightforward.

[Erkenfresh]

Yeah I used a program called Scala to create some .tun files. I don't think I have a great grasp on it yet, but it's definitely interesting to play with. Man, that's a lot of extra keys there. How could anyone figure that out?

[Arrested Developer]

well, yes, just intonation.
To some musicians it's religion.
Bach indeed was very fond of the tempered tunings.
He liked "sharp" thirds (in tempered tuning they are sharper than in "just" intonation).

Problem with just intonation is that they provide very "harmonic" results, but often you want the drama.
So, one fixed intonation never meets all the needs.
Chords that are meant to be peaceful (and bring the whole thing to a rest) benefit a lot of just intonation.
Chords that should represent a tension sound better with not-just-intonation.
(in the late romantic period specially string players used to intonate leading notes really high, you can hear this on some vintage recordings.

I personally use to finetune the intonation manually (via pitch wheel values), where it's of special importance.
And i've learnt that it has absolutely no sense to dispute about this topic with people who are devoted to just intonation.
Cause - as mentioned - it's like religion to them.

[btw]

Might be fun to try multing a midi part on two instrument tracks, each with the same patch loaded but one instance with just intonation and the other with equal temperament... split your part's chords between the two tracks based on chord quality.

[Howard]

I think the silliest religion about tuning these days is "A 432".

[Arrested Developer]

@Howard,
to take this as a dogma, for sure is silly. But in fact there are instruments (strings, organs) that sound ways better if tuned according to the reference tone of their time.
Higher tunings get different formants and they may suit specific styles while giving a "wrong color" to others...
I personally think that some strings (violins, celli, and double bass; not viole) can have a wonderful timbre when tuned lower. But i try to stay in 440, just changing the reference note.
did a cue with a double bass in its highest register while tuned a fourth (!) lower. The sound was just marvellous, like a cello that was never built.

[Sendy]

I think the silliest religion about tuning these days is "A 432".

I agree. A 433 is a much more sensible choice.

A 432... Pfft!

[Erkenfresh]

I'm not totally sure I buy it yet myself. I have to complete a full track and render it with/without the microtuning enabled before I can make a judgement call. Is it super important that all your notes are whole numbers of Hertz? Sure, it makes the math simpler but since the second is an arbitrary unit of time (sorry folks, it really is), then it shouldn't matter much. There's also an idea of picking a tempo which will cause an even number of cycles to come through on each beat. But again, this interesting phenomenon quickly crumbles when you add unison to your patch.

I'm a sucker for math, it's one of my favorite subjects. Math and music really do go hand in hand. I'll just have to see if the results matter in practice.

As for A=432 Hz, I notice it does tend to make a track sound more somber at least with the little testing I did with it. That's simply the depression of the notes down about 20 cents or so. Without just doing an A/B comparison, I'm not sure it would even be all that noticeable.