Xenharmonic music is music that uses a

tuning system 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 Tun ...

that is unlike the

12-tone equal temperament 12 equal temperament (12-ET) is the musical system that divides the octave into 12 parts, all of which are Equal temperament, equally tempered (equally spaced) on a logarithmic scale, with a ratio equal to the Twelfth root of two, 12th root of 2 ...

scale. It was named by

Ivor Darreg Ivor Darreg (May 5, 1917 – February 12, 1994) was an American composer and leading proponent of microtonal or " xenharmonic" music. He also created a series of experimental musical instruments. Biography Darreg, a contemporary of Harry Partc ...

, from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

'' xenos'' (

ξένος) meaning both ''foreign'' and ''hospitable''. He stated that it was "intended to include

just intonation In music, just intonation or pure intonation is a musical tuning, tuning system in which the space between notes' frequency, frequencies (called interval (music), intervals) is a natural number, whole number ratio, ratio. Intervals spaced in thi ...

and such temperaments as the 5-, 7-, and 11-tone, along with the higher-numbered really-

microtonal Microtonality is the use in music of microtones — intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of twelve equal interv ...

systems as far as one wishes to go." John Chalmers, author of ''Divisions of the Tetrachord'', wrote, "The converse of this definition is that music which can be performed in 12-tone equal temperament without significant loss of its identity is not truly ''microtonal''." Thus xenharmonic music may be distinguished from twelve-tone equal temperament, as well as use of intonation and equal temperaments, by the use of unfamiliar intervals, harmonies, and

timbre In music, timbre (), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes sounds according to their source, such as choir voices and musical instrument ...

s. Theorists other than Chalmers consider xenharmonic and non-xenharmonic to be subjective. Edward Foote, in his program notes for ''6 degrees of tonality'', refers to the differences in his response to the tunings he uses, such as Kirnberger and DeMorgan, from "shocking," to "too subtle to immediately notice," saying that " mperaments are new territory for 20th-century ears. The first-time listener may find it shocking to hear the harmony change 'color' during modulations or too subtle to immediately notice."

Diatonic xenharmonic music

Music also can share much of the familiar territory of twelve-tone music yet also contain xenharmonic features. For example, Easley Blackwood, author of ''The Structure of Recognizable Diatonic Tunings'' (1985), wrote many etudes in equal temperament systems ranging from 12 to 24 tones. These etudes bring out connections and resemblances to twelve-tone music as well as various xenharmonic characteristics, reflected in '' Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media''. About his 16-tone etude, Blackwood wrote: Darreg explains: "I devised the term 'xenharmonic' to refer to everything that does not sound like 12-tone equal temperament."

Tunings, instruments, and composers

Music using scales or tuning other than 12-tone equal temperament can be classified as xenharmonic music. This includes other equal divisions of the octave and scales based on extended just intonation. Tunings derived from the partials or overtones of physical objects with an

inharmonic In music, inharmonicity is the degree to which the frequencies of overtones (also known as partials or partial tones) depart from whole multiples of the fundamental frequency ( harmonic series). Acoustically, a note perceived to have a sin ...

spectrum or

overtone series The harmonic series (also overtone series) is the sequence of harmonics, musical tones, or pure tones whose frequency is an integer multiple of a ''fundamental frequency''. Pitched musical instruments are often based on an acoustic resonator s ...

such as rods, prongs, plates, discs, spheroids and rocks occasionally are the basis of xenharmonic exploration.

William Colvig William (Bill) Colvig (March 13, 1917 – March 1, 2000) was an electrician and amateur musician who was the partner for 33 years of composer Lou Harrison, whom he met in San Francisco in 1967. Colvig helped construct the American gamelan used in ...

, who worked with the composer

Lou Harrison Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer, music critic, music theorist, painter, and creator of unique musical instruments. Harrison initially wrote in a dissonant, ultramodernist style similar to his for ...

created the ''tubulong'', a set of xenharmonic tubes.

Electronic music Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music ...

composed with arbitrarily chosen xenharmonic scales was explored on the album ''Radionics Radio: An Album of Musical Radionic Thought Frequencies'' (2016) by British composer Daniel Wilson, who composed with frequency-runs submitted by users of a

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

that replicated radionics-based electronic soundmaking equipment used by Oxford's De La Warr Laboratories in the late 1940s.

Elaine Walker (composer) Elaine Walker is a composer, electronic musician, mathematician, and author born in 1969. She wrote a physics/philosophy book, “Matter Over Mind: Cosmos, Chaos, and Curiosity” (2016). She specializes in microtonal music, including founding ZIA ...

is an electronic musician who writes xenharmonic music by building new types of music keyboards. The

Non-Pythagorean scale Robert Peter Schneider (born March 9, 1971) is an American musician and mathematician. He is the lead singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer of rock/pop band the Apples in Stereo and has produced and performed on albums by Neutral Milk Ho ...

utilized by

Robert Schneider Robert Peter Schneider (born March 9, 1971) is an American musician and mathematician. He is the lead singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer of rock/pop band the Apples in Stereo and has produced and performed on albums by Neutral Milk ...

The Apples in Stereo The Apples in Stereo are an American indie rock band associated with The Elephant 6 Recording Company, Elephant 6 Collective. The band is largely the project of lead vocalist/guitarist/producer Robert Schneider, who writes the majority of the ba ...

, based on a sequence of

logarithms In mathematics, the logarithm of a number is the exponent by which another fixed value, the base, must be raised to produce that number. For example, the logarithm of to base is , because is to the rd power: . More generally, if , the ...

, may be considered xenharmonic, as well as

Annie Gosfield Annie Gosfield (born September 11, 1960, in Philadelphia) is a New-York-based composer who works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and perf ...

's purposefully "out of tune" sampler-based music using non systematic tunings and the work of other composers including

Elodie Lauten Elodie Lauten (October 20, 1950 – June 3, 2014) was a French-born American composer described as postminimalist or a microtonalist. Biography Born in Paris, France as Genevieve Schecroun, and educated in Paris at the Lycée Claude Monet, th ...

Wendy Carlos Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos; November 14, 1939) is an American musician and composer known for electronic music and film scores. Born and raised in Rhode Island, Carlos studied physics and music at Brown University before moving to New Y ...

, and

Paul Erlich Paul Erlich (born 1972) is a guitarist and music theorist living near Boston, Massachusetts. He is known for his seminal role in developing the theory of regular temperaments, including being the first to define pajara temperament Accessed 2013- ...

References

External links

Microtonality - Web

Homepage for William SetharesThe Xenharmonic Wiki
formerly at

Wikispaces Wikispaces was a wiki hosting service based in San Francisco, California. Launched by Tangient LLC in March 2005, Wikispaces was purchased by Tes Global (formerly TSL Education) on March 9, 2014. It competed with PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia, and ...

Xenharmonic Alliance
* Barbieri, Patrizio

(2008) Latina, Il Levante Libreria Editrice
Blackwood Microtonal Compositions Easley Blackwood & Jeffrey Kust, on iTunes
Includes ''Fanfare in 19-EDO''. Also includes the ''16 notes Andantino'' as the first of the twelve etudes in that collection.
microtonal piano work of Noah Jordan
{{Microtonal music Microtonality

Diatonic xenharmonic music

Tunings, instruments, and composers

See also

References

Further reading

External links