Heinz P. Bohlen (26 June 1935 – 2 February 2016)Heinz Bohlen
, ''Bohlen-Pierce-Conference.org''. was a microwave electronics and

communications engineer Telecommunications Engineering is a subfield of electrical engineering which seeks to design and devise systems of communication at a distance. The work ranges from basic circuit design to strategic mass developments. A telecommunication enginee ...

. He designed and described numerous non-

octave In music, an octave ( la, octavus: eighth) or perfect octave (sometimes called the diapason) is the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been refer ...

musical scales (alternative

musical tuning In music, there are two common meanings for tuning: * Tuning practice, the act of tuning an instrument or voice. * Tuning systems, the various systems of pitches used to tune an instrument, and their theoretical bases. Tuning practice Tuni ...

s and

temperaments In psychology, temperament broadly refers to consistent individual differences in behavior that are biologically based and are relatively independent of learning, system of values and attitudes. Some researchers point to association of temperam ...

), many based on combination tones, including the

Bohlen–Pierce scale The Bohlen–Pierce scale (BP scale) is a musical tuning and scale, first described in the 1970s, that offers an alternative to the octave-repeating scales typical in Western and other musics, specifically the equal-tempered diatonic scale. T ...

in 1972 (independently discovered by John R. Pierce in 1984, also a microwave electronics and communications engineer, six years later and Kees van Prooijen in 1978),the inventors of the bohlen-pierce scale
", ''ZiaSpace.com''. the A12 scale, and the

833 cents scale The 833 cents scale is a musical tuning and scale proposed by Heinz Bohlen based on combination tones, an interval of 833.09 cents, and, coincidentally, the Fibonacci sequence.Bohlen, Heinz (last updated 2012).An 833 Cents Scale: An experime ...

. Bohlen began to question and investigate tunings in the early 1970s when a friend and graduate student at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater asked him to begin recording concerts at the school. Bohlen asked students why all their music used twelve-tone equal temperament, including the octave, and, dissatisfied with the answers, began to investigate alternate tunings.

Sources

German electrical engineers Musical tuning 1935 births Engineers from Krefeld 2016 deaths {{Germany-engineer-stub