Microtonal Tuning Explorer

A tuning system decides exactly which pitches your notes play. Almost all music today uses 12-tone equal temperament: the octave is divided into twelve identical semitones, so every key sounds the same and nothing is perfectly in tune. Before the 18th century, keyboards used just intonation, meantone and well temperaments, where some intervals ring perfectly pure and every key has its own character.

Many musical traditions never used twelve notes at all. Arabic maqam uses neutral, three-quarter-tone intervals; Javanese gamelan uses five-note slendro and seven-note pelog; Turkish makam theory divides the whole tone into nine commas. Contemporary composers explore equal divisions such as 19, 22 or 31 notes per octave, and scales like Bohlen-Pierce that repeat at the twelfth instead of the octave.

This explorer lets you hear those differences directly. Turn on the drone, hold a third or a fifth and listen: a pure 5/4 third is still, while the equal-tempered one beats. Each note is listed with its cents above the root, its frequency and how far it is from the nearest piano note, so you can see exactly what you hear.

When you have a tuning you like, export it as .ascl for Ableton Live 12 or as a plain .scl for synths that read Scala files, or open it directly in TuttiDAW: the tuning becomes the project’s tuning system and the piano roll shows the new notes.