Sevish Music

Greater Good is a song from ZIA's epic space-rock-opera album Drum 'n' Space. It uses the Bohlen-Pierce scale, a microtonal scale with no octaves as it splits the perfect twelfth into 13 equal steps.

An experiment - what if Droplet was not microtonal at all? Do you think this 12edo version of ‘Droplet’ feels different to the original? Can you tell the difference? Did you find the difference subtle or drastic? Which version do you prefer? If you were already familiar with the original, do you hear this as a mistuned version of the original’s Orwell[9] in 53edo, or does your perception easily 'snap in' to the familiar 12-tone equal temperament tuning? Do you think the copyright detection algorithm will flag this up or not?

The music is tuned to members 7-13 of the harmonic series (it repeats at the 14th harmonic).

Operator uses a microtonal tuning containing intervals from 13-limit just intonation. This particular 12 note scale has its own vibe and imparts that on to the song. My fave track from Brendan's album Neutral Paradise was actually 'Paradise' - but I knew I would have a lot of fun remixing Operator and I'm happy Brendan let me do that. The difficulty was having so many ideas for the remix and trying to bring them together in to one place. I suppose that's why this one became 7 minutes long.

Nerdy stuff: There are some 7th and 11th harmonics, subminor thirds, quarter tones and all that good xenharmonic stuff to listen out for. I feel happy writing in 22edo because it supports a lot of the musical tricks I want to use – patterns that aren't possible in other systems such as 12-tone equal temperament. The new possibilities often surprise me. I wonder if others can hear some certain twentytwoishness when they listen to 22edo music. Hands down tuning of all time I used ZynAddSubFX for the synths and Bitwig Studio as my DAW running on KDE Neon. Blissed-out downtempo / 22edo Closing track of my 'Horixens' album

Two tunings on this one... the synth melodies half way through play a subset of 23edo with pure octaves. Everything else throughout uses 23edo with stretched octaves (1214 cents). I think stretching helps the harmony but it's still way out there. I made this on my Linux music production machine using ZynAddSubFX and samplv1 synths. From the new album Horixens

This is what it would sound like if you took the harmonic series itself and used it as a musical tuning. That means, the first interval is an octave (2/1), then it's a fifth (3/2), then a fourth (4/3), then a major third (5/4) and so on. I mainly used the low members of the series because the really high up ones start to get very close together. Normally using the harmonic series as a tuning in this way would be slightly boring because there is no harmonic movement - everything relates back to the lowest note 1/1. So at one or two points throughout this piece I use the pitch bend to move the entire pitch set by a whole tone (9/8). It's a hacky way to do harmonic movement, but in microtonal music EVERYTHING is hacky. This track is from my old Windows/Ableton based workflow using Xen-Arts VST synths. From the new album Horixens

Here's a bit of drum and bass in a weird time signature. It uses a specific microtonal tuning in just intonation. The tuning (Scale Workshop link below) has a perfect fourth, perfect fifth, octave, a couple 7-limit intervals plus a couple 13-limit intervals thrown in. In the album liner notes I mistakenly said that it starts off with the 7-limit intervals and then later the 13-limit intervals come in. Actually it's the other way around - you'll hear 13-limit from the start and 7-limit comes in a while later. Man... the video encoding really chewed up the visuals! Anyway I really love how it looks when you're riding past a tree orchard and the regular placement of trees causes unexpected visual patterns. This video is something like that but with featureless white orbs. Enjoy! From the album Horixens

This is shorter than the original because I had to cut out the ambient parts (they had been bounced down to audio so I couldn't retune those bits). Also there was a missed opportunity to do "Gleam but it's in 12edo and 4/4" but I think that would be too much for anybody to handle.

I wrote this tune in 31edo (31 tone equal temperament). Yes you read that correctly, it's 31, not 313. Still a great tuning though. The first part uses some more adventurous resources that you won't find in 12edo such as 2:3:5:7:9 and subminor 13 chords. The rest of it is a breakbeat track in 6/4 time and more familiar tonality. Throughout I'm using only a 19 tone subset of the 31 notes, meantone[19]. This track is from my old Windows/Ableton based workflow using u-he ACE. Most u-he synths now support Linux and also microtonal tunings (.tun files) so I can actually continue to use u-he ACE on my new Linux based music rig. I am writing an article about making microtonal music on Linux and you'll see that on my blog in the future. From the new album Horixens

Come on a Journey is the opening track to my album Horixens. It's a prog-ish, cinematic breakbeat track in a microtonal scale. Sounds messed up but if that's the kind of music you wanted to hear today, that's the kind of music I make. This is tuned to a non-octave-repeating segment of the harmonic series. Specifically harmonics 16-24. This tuning repeats at the perfect fifth. It's not to say that the tuning contains NO octaves, because there are certainly octaves here (e.g. the octave between 9/8 and 9/4). Octaves are far more scarce in this tuning so you cannot take any pitch class and transpose it up or down by an indefinite number of octaves. But you can transpose indefinitely by perfect fifths, because this tuning repeats at the perfect fifth! What this means is considerable limitation on voicings and compositional choices in general. It also sort of means that higher ranges of the tuning feel like they're in a different key to lower ranges.

The tuning here is the Marveldene, which is a tempering of many scales. This track would probably translate into 12edo really easily. But there's more tonal resource available in Marveldene that I haven't tapped into. More details and examples are on the xenharmonic wiki. Can I just say that I appreciate the recent interest in my music. Everybody who left a message, who grabbed or streamed the latest album, who played my weird sounds when they were on aux duty - you're all helping me write the next chapter. Balancing work and hobbies is tough but I'm cooking up the next batch of Sevish tracks. A microtonal music tutorial is also in the works.

A track in island[9], or semaphore[9], or madagascar[9] or whatever it's called. It's the same tuning as I used on 'Desert Island Rain' and 'Never Coming Home'. 313edo is used here as the tuning of this 9-note scale but you could alternatively use smaller EDOs such as 19edo or 24edo. Each has a subtly different feel to it - I'm thinking of posting a comparison in the future but am working on other things at the moment. From the album Horixens

What is your strategy for head nodding to beats in odd time signatures? Do you nod your head in regular time (e.g. every 1/4th or 3/8th note) so that you're on-the-beat during some bars and offbeat during others? Or do you nod in an irregular way, trying to catch the emphasised beats (e.g. 3/8 + 3/8 + 3/8 + 2/8)? Or something else entirely? Same question goes out to all those foot tappers and finger snappers. (Btw please don't nod your head on every 1/8th note, that can't be good for you) This track is for the most part diatonic and not xenharmonic. 31edo has some really sweet sounding thirds so if you want to write something that will be familiar to Westerners this microtonal tuning is one to try. You can of course do some really wacky tonal things with it too.